Miguel Díaz-Canel


Miguel Mario Díaz-Canel Bermúdez is a Cuban politician serving as the President of Cuba since 10 October 2019. He was previously President of the Council of State of Cuba from 2018 to 2019 and First Vice President from 2013 to 2018. He has been a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of Cuba since 2003, and he served as Minister of Higher Education from 2009 to 2012; he was promoted to the post of Vice President of the Council of Ministers in 2012. A year later, on 24 February 2013, he was elected as First Vice President of the Council of State.
He was selected to succeed Raúl Castro as the candidate for President of the Council of State and the Council of Ministers on 18 April 2018 and was sworn into office the following day after nationwide polling. His two predecessors in the role were brothers, by blood, and notably his succession from Raúl Castro represents a clearly non-dynastic form of succession for the Communist Party as well as the Republic of Cuba. Díaz-Canel is therefore the first president to not be a Castro family member since Osvaldo Dorticós in 1976 and the first leader of the government who is not a Castro since José Miró Cardona in 1959. Miguel Díaz-Canel is likely to succeed Raúl Castro as First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba, the most powerful position of Cuba, in 2021.

Early life

Díaz-Canel was born on 20 April 1960 in Placetas, Villa Clara, to Aída Bermúdez, a schoolteacher, and Miguel Díaz-Canel, a mechanical plant worker in Santa Clara. Of direct paternal Spanish descent; his great-grandfather Ramón Díaz-Canel left Castropol, Asturias for Havana in the late 19th century.
He graduated from Central University of Las Villas in 1982 as an electronics engineer and thereupon joined the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces. Beginning in April 1985, he taught at his alma mater. In 1987, he completed an international mission in Nicaragua as First Secretary of the Young Communist League of Villa Clara.

Political career

In 1993, Díaz-Canel started work with the Communist Party of Cuba and a year later was elected First Secretary of the Provincial Party Committee of Villa Clara Province. He gained a reputation for competence in this post, during which time he also championed LGBT rights at a time when many in the province frowned upon homosexuality. In 2003, he was elected to the same position in Holguín Province. In the same year, he was co-opted as a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of Cuba.
Díaz-Canel was appointed Minister of Higher Education in May 2009, a position that he held until 22 March 2012, when he became Vice President of the Council of Ministers. In 2013 he additionally became First Vice President of the Council of State.

President of Cuba

As First Vice President of the Council of State, Díaz-Canel acted as deputy to the President, Raúl Castro. In 2018, the 86-year-old Castro stepped down from the presidency, though he retained the most powerful position of First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba and the commander-in-chief of the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces. On 18 April 2018, Díaz-Canel was selected as the only candidate to succeed Castro as president. He was confirmed by a vote of the National Assembly on 19 April and sworn in on the same day. He is a party technocrat who was little-known to the public before becoming president. Policy experts expected that he would pursue cautious reform of his predecessors' communist economic policies, while preserving the country's social structure. He is the first president born after the 1959 Cuban Revolution and the first since 1976 not to be a member of the Castro family.
He received Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro just two days after his inauguration. He met with Maduro again in May 2018 in Caracas, during first official foreign visit as head of state. In his first multinational political trip since becoming President, Díaz-Canel traveled in November 2018 to visit all of Cuba's Eurasian allies. Diplomatic meetings were held in Russia, North Korea, China, Vietnam, and Laos. Brief stopovers in the United Kingdom and France also included meetings with British parliamentarians and French leaders. In March 2019, Díaz-Canel and his wife hosted Charles, Prince of Wales and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall in Havana as the first British royals to visit the island.
In October 2019, Diaz-Canel became the official "President of the Republic of Cuba", an office that was recreated that February after a series of constitutional reforms being approved in a constitutional referendum. This office replaced the one he had held since April of the previous year, which was the President of the Council of State, which was previously the head of state of Cuba. The position of President of the Council of State became a less important position and is now carried out by Esteban Lazo Hernández in his authority as the President of the National Assembly of People's Power. Diaz-Canel's reforms among other things, added the creation of a two consecutive five-year term limit for the presidency and banned discrimination based on gender, race, sexual orientation/gender identity and/or disability.

State visits

As First Vice-President

As President of Cuba

Awards

, First Class.

Personal life

Díaz-Canel has two children with his first wife, Martha. He currently resides with his second wife, Lis Cuesta.