GEORGETOWN, Guyana - The announcement of a changing of the guard in Havana – albeit not for another five years – has been somewhat overshadowed by all the fuss over the death of President Hugo Chávez and the election of Pope Francis. But the identification of a successor to Fidel and Raúl Castro in Cuba, although relatively lacking in drama, is still momentous news.
It will be recalled that on February 24, Miguel Díaz-Canel was named First Vice-president of Cuba’s Council of State, making him President Raúl Castro’s number two and the man most likely to succeed him when he steps down in 2018. In the context of, first, Fidel ruling from 1959 to 2006 and, since then, Raúl, when illness forced Fidel to pass the baton of power to his younger brother, it was a significant moment in the history of revolutionary, Castro-ite Cuba. Raúl called it a moment of “historic transcendence.”