President Raúl Castro turns 80 – but Cuba plans low-key affair

No plans to officially mark president's 80th birthday amid growing concern over Cuba's ageing leadership

• 
  

• Rory Carroll, Latin American correspondent
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 2 June 2011 18.40 BST
• 
  


President Raúl Castro, right, with brother Fidel in April. When Raúl turns 80 Cuba's three most important political figures will be octogenarians. Photograph: Javier Galeano/AP

Raúl Castro turns 80 on Friday, but Cuba is playing down the president's birthday amid concern over the island's ageing leadership.

No official celebrations have been announced in the apparent hope of letting the event slide by, rather than refocus attention on the elderly figures who run the government and Communist party.

The deputy president, José Ramón Machado Ventura, is 80, and Fidel Castro, who is retired but retains influence, is 84, meaning the three most important political figures are octogenarians. The government's official No3, vice-president Ramiro Valdés, 79, will soon join the club.

At a Communist party congress in April, Raúl called the absence of younger leaders "really embarrassing" and lamented that fresh talent had not been groomed to take over. He promised to "rejuvenate" senior positions, and said the party would consider limiting leaders, including himself, to a maximum of two five-year terms.

But instead of promoting new faces at the congress, Castro chose Machado and Valdés as his deputies. The appointments, said analysts, betrayed a failure of nerve as Cuba struggles to liberalise a moribund, centrally planned economy.

"Their challenge is to bring in a younger generation, but instead Raúl picked someone even older than him as his chief deputy," Ann Louise Bardach, a Cuba expert and author of Without Fidel, told Associated Press. "It just shows how unconfident they are. They missed an opportunity."

The band of young guerrillas which seized power in 1959 has remained largely hermetic in power and often looked with suspicion on rising newcomers. In 2009 mooted successors such as Carlos Lage, a then 57-year-old vice-president, and Felipe Pérez Roque, the 43-year-old foreign minister, were respectively demoted and fired.

Raúl is now a month older than Fidel was when a serious intestinal illness forced him to step down in 2006. "And [Fidel] was always much healthier than Raúl as a young man … and now Raúl is 80," said Bardach.

Nevertheless, the president appears in good shape. This week he accompanied Brazil's former president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, on a tour of Cuba and joked with reporters about his birthday. "How do I look?" he asked.

"How many old men of 60 are there who aren't in my shape?"

Sphere: Related Content