Cuba’s ruling Communist Party has elected President Miguel Diaz-Canel to succeed Raul Castro as party first secretary, the most powerful position in the country.
On the final day of its congress on Monday The succession marks the end of six decades of rule by brothers Fidel and Raul Castro, who led Cuba’s leftist 1959 revolution.
The move is also a transition to a younger generation that worked its way up the party ranks rather than forging itself through guerilla warfare.
Diaz-Canel, who already succeeded Castro as president in 2018, had been widely expected to be nominated first party secretary too and is not expected to move Cuba away from a one-party socialist system.
Hundreds of party delegates gathered for the party’s most important meeting that takes place every five years to review policy and elect new leadership, in Havana.
Castro said at the last party congress in 2016 it would be the last presided over by the so-called historic generation of those who fought in the Sierra Maestra to overthrow the U.S.-backed government of Fulgencio Batista.
The new policy setting Political Bureau will not include Jose Ramon Machado Ventura and Ramiro Valdes, two other famous proponents of that generation.
The party has not yet announced who will replaced Machado Ventura, a communist ideologue, as deputy party leader.
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