Raúl Castro Urges Cubans to Remain Alert to U.S. Efforts to Alter Communist System
MEXICO CITY — President Raúl Castro of Cuba
on Saturday offered a somber assessment of his nation’s economic
advances and warned that the United States — despite the historic thaw
in relations — was still intent on changing Cuba’s communist system.
In
a two-hour speech at the opening of the Cuban Communist Party’s
three-day congress, President Castro said that the United States, in
promoting the island’s small private sector, was using “other means” to
undermine the system. Islanders needed to be “alert, more than ever,” he
said.
The comments, in a wide-ranging speech, amounted to a pushback against President Obama, who made a groundbreaking visit to Cuba less than a month ago.
“We
are not naive,” Mr. Castro said, adding that “powerful external forces”
hoped to “create agents of change to end the revolution.”
In
a speech that veered between chiding those who resisted change and
warning of the perils of moving too quickly, President Castro admitted
that the government had completed only a fifth of the economic changes
approved at the last congress in 2011, and that Cubans still struggled
to get by on their paltry state salaries.
The
country was being held back by “the weight of an obsolete mentality,”
he said, adding that the “worst that a revolutionary can do, whether
they are a communist or not, is to cross their arms in the face of
problems.”
Half
a million Cubans now work outside the government sector, but the
country’s economy is growing at less than 3 percent a year.
Entrepreneurs have limited access to goods and are prohibited from
exporting them.
The
congress, the first since the United States and Cuba restored
diplomatic relations last year after more than 50 years of hostility,
will take stock of the economic reform program and elect the party’s
leadership for what will be the final years of President Castro’s
tenure.
Arturo
López Levy, a lecturer at the University of Texas who for years worked
for Cuban intelligence, said the slow rate of economic liberalization
signaled a victory by the party’s powerful conservatives over its
reformers.
“They are organizing the reforms at their own pace,” he said.
Younger
Cubans, including members of the party, have expressed frustration in
recent weeks about the lack of information about the congress’s agenda
and the party’s overwhelmingly elderly hierarchy.
“Now
is the moment for a generational change,” said Harold Cárdenas Lema, a
Cuban blogger. The process of passing the reins of the party from a
group of octogenarians to people, say, 30 years younger, “should start
now,” he said.
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