A Castro will no longer be the leader of Cuba ― for the first time in almost 60 years.
Raúl Castro is expected to step down as Cuba’s president this week, a role he’s filled since his late brother Fidel’s resignation in 2008. The 86-year-old has been grooming his vice president, 57-year-old Miguel Diaz-Canel, to take his place. Castro has said, however, that he intends to remain as head of the Communist Party.
On Wednesday, the Cuban General Assembly nominated Diaz-Canel, an engineer and former education minister, as the sole candidate to succeed Castro as president. The nomination will be voted on later Wednesday and formally announced Thursday, Reuters reports. Diaz-Canel is expected to be approved with almost total unanimity.
“To have someone without the family name or the same aura of revolutionary is a historic shift,” Geoff Thale of the Washington Office of Latin America told ABC News of the impending vote.
If elected, the new president will inherit a country in the throes of change and mired in financial troubles. Observers have questioned whether Diaz-Canel will be up to the challenge to continue the social and economic reforms initiated during his predecessor’s tenure, particularly without the clout of the Castro name. Some have wondered if he may even backtrack on some reforms.
“People in Cuba really haven’t processed yet what it means to have a government without Raúl or Fidel leading it,” Yassel Padron Kunakbaeva, a 27-year-old Marxist blogger, told The Associated Press this week. “We’re entering unknown territory.”