Cuba’s Communist Party bent its own rules this week to promote an old-guard general to the organization’s top decision-making bodies, the latest in a number of recent changes reflecting the challenges of an aging military leadership’s grip on power.
Army corps general Ramon Espinosa, 83, the first vice minister of the Cuban armed forces, became a member of the Communist Party Politburo and its Central Committee during a Party meeting on Tuesday. His designation goes against the Party’s own rules modified in its latest Congress last year to ban officials 60 years and older from holding a seat at the Central Committee and those over 70 from becoming a member of the Politburo.
The secretary of the Central Committee, Roberto Morales Ojeda, asked members to select Espinosa despite the age limits, citing “his long record of service as a military commander inside and outside of Cuba” and “his fidelity to the leaders of the Revolution,” according to Granma, the Party’s daily newspaper. Espinosa fought in Cuba’s incursions in Africa and is thought to be close to Raúl Castro, who officially retired as the Party’s secretary last year but is still the country’s ultimate leader.
Division General Ricardo Rigel Tejeda, 58, recently named chief of the Eastern Army, was also selected as a member of the Party’s Central Committee on Tuesday. Rigel Tejeda replaced Division General Agustin Peña Porres, the former head of the Eastern Army, who died last year along with several other top active and retired military officials whose deaths have been linked to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The recent appointments illustrate “the importance of ensuring that the military maintains influence in the party and the country’s politics,” said Brian Fonseca, a former U.S. Southern Command senior analyst who is now the director of the Jack D. Gordon Institute for Public Policy at Florida International University.
Espinosa’s designation “is a result of loyalty to Raúl and the revolution as well as the fact that he is well respected,” Fonseca said. “Most appointments follow the same pattern. Still, it’s likely that his designation comes with the understanding that another one will be made in the coming years.”
As generals who fought with the Castro brothers get older, changes atop the leadership have become more frequent.
Espinosa’s designation comes amid rumors about the declining health of the armed forces minister, Álvaro López Miera, 79, also a member of the Politburo. Cuban state media do not usually publish information about the health of government officials, but a recent report indicated that Espinosa and Rigel Tejeda presided over an event commemorating the creation of the Eastern Army, an annual ceremony usually attended by the top army chief. López Miera sent a letter instead congratulating the troops, a Cuban state news agency reported.
López Miera himself took over the armed forces when its former chief, Leopoldo Cintra Frías, 80, one of the old-guard generals close to the Castro brothers, was “liberated of his responsibilities,” just before the start of the Party Congress in April last year, Granma reported.
Cuba’s military is one of the pillars sustaining the six-decade-old regime, and generals fill roughly one-third of the Politburo’s seats. Under Raúl and his successor, Cuba’s handpicked president Miguel Díaz-Canel, top military officials have been given key ministries and other government positions while also taking more seats in political bodies such as the National Assembly and the Party’s Central Committee.
Other generals at the Politburo include the chief of the Ministry of the Interior, Lázaro Alberto Álvarez Casas and Luis Alberto Rodríguez López-Calleja, the head of the military conglomerate GAESA who is linked to a network of offshore companies.
A former son-in-law of Raúl Castro, Rodríguez López-Calleja was a figure mostly moving in the shadows. But as Castro turned 90, the general was finally made a member of the National Assembly and the Politburo last year.
The military plays a dominant role in the economy too, through GAESA, the consortium that manages most of the island’s economic life, including hotel chains, real-estate development, grocery stores, gasoline stations and many other profitable ventures, including the Special Development Zone at Port Mariel near Havana.
“The Cuban military plays a central role in the future of the country, whether people like that or not,” said James Bruno, a former U.S. diplomat who acted as a liaison during talks held with Cuban officials at the Guantánamo Base in the 1990s.
Under the Trump and the Biden administrations, several military leaders have been sanctioned for their roles in human rights violations in Cuba and their support of the Nicolás Maduro regime, including López Miera, the head of the armed forces, and Rodríguez López-Calleja. But excluding those engaged in serious abuses, Bruno said, the U.S. would likely have to deal with the Cuban military during a transition.
“When a transition comes to Cuba, eventually, if we want to act in a pragmatic way, we’re going to need to deal with military people because, for one, I believe they will, like it or not, have to exercise a stabilizing influence,” Bruno said.
The former diplomat described the military he interacted with as professional, pragmatic and even “opportunistic.”
“I really had the sense that most of these guys, they’ll go with whatever system takes over the future of the country,” Bruno said. “We’ve seen that when the Soviet Union fell apart. We saw all these guys who are communist apparatchiks suddenly becoming capitalists getting rich. But in a strictly pragmatic sense, they also provided some stability to transition.”
Perhaps sensing the same perils, old-guard leaders have prevented mid-rank officials from climbing the political ladder, despite Castro’s vows to renew the leadership with younger loyalists. The widespread protests that took Cuban authorities by surprise last July might have given the so-called históricos [historical leaders] another argument to hold on to power — a concern that might also explain the unusual timing of Espinosa’s appointment between Party congresses.
“The selection of one of the last remaining and engaged históricos like Espinosa could mean that tensions remain among party leadership about Cuba’s future in the aftermath of July 11th,” Fonseca said. His appointment, he continued, “might be intentional and designed to balance the Party’s highest leadership so it remains in favor of continuity rather than change.”
