After 49 years as Cubas president, Fidel Castro retires

After 49 years as Cuba’s president, Fidel Castro retires
By Karen Juanita Carrillo

After taking a year to recover from intestinal surgery, Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz finally announced on Tuesday, February 19, 2008 that he would no longer serve as president of Cuba.

Castro announced his retirement in an official letter reproduced in Granma, Cuba’s paper of record.

In the letter, Fidel specifically states that he will not accept the positions of President of the State Council and Commander in Chief at Cuba’s next Parliament session set to take place on Sunday, February 24th.

“My wishes have always been to discharge my duties to my last breath. That’s all I can offer,” the Cuban statesman wrote: “To my dearest compatriots, who have recently honored me so much by electing me a member of the Parliament where so many agreements should be adopted of utmost importance to the destiny of our Revolution, I am saying that I will neither aspire to nor accept, I repeat, I will neither aspire to nor accept the positions of President of the State Council and Commander in Chief.”

Fidel served as the leader of this island nation of 11 million people for some 49 years –since Jan. 1, 1959. Under his Socialist revolution, Afro-Cuban quality of life indices were raised substantially.

In noted past speeches, Castro has pointed to the advances his country made to defeat racial discrimination. “We are not only a Latin American nation, we are an Afro-American nation also,” he said during a 1977 speech in Havana. The next year, at the World Communist youth conference on July 26, 1978, Fidel responded to questions of his administration’s human rights record by comparing his country to the United States: “With what morality can the [US] leaders talk of human rights in a country where there are millionaires and beggars, where Blacks face discrimination, women are prostituted, and great masses of Chicanos, Puerto Ricans and Latin Americans are deprecated, exploited and humiliated?”

Castro’s government banned laws that allowed outright discrimination against Afro-Cubans. And, although there are indications that racial prejudices are still found among white Cubans, the Socialist revolutions’ guarantees that each citizen would have basic living conditions, access to education, wages, health care, educational opportunities and housing significantly helped the nation’s Black population.

Fidel’s 76-year-old brother Raúl Castro has been serving as Cuba’s interim president since July 31, 2006. He will most likely remain in that position for the foreseeable future.

Fidel wrote that he has no doubt the strength of the Cuban Revolution will continue: “Fortunately, our Revolution can still count on cadres from the old guard and others who were very young in the early stages of the process. Some were very young, almost children, when they joined the fight on the mountains and later they have given glory to the country with their heroic performance and their internationalist missions. They have the authority and the experience to guarantee the replacement. There is also the intermediate generation which learned together with us the basics of the complex and almost unattainable art of organizing and leading a revolution.

“The path will always be difficult and require from everyone’s intelligent effort. I distrust the seemingly easy path of apologetics or its antithesis the self-flagellation. We should always be prepared for the worst variable. The principle of being as prudent in success as steady in adversity cannot be forgotten. The adversary to be defeated is extremely strong; however, we have been able to keep it at bay for half a century.

“This is not my farewell to you,” the 81-year-old noted. “My only wish is to fight as a soldier in the battle of ideas. I shall continue to write under the heading of ‘Reflections by comrade Fidel.’ It will be just another weapon you can count on. Perhaps my voice will be heard. I shall be careful.”