HAVANA — Cuba's Communists replaced several men from President Fidel Castro's generation with younger figures as the country's sole political party ended a major congress Friday. There were no surprises about the top leadership: Castro was re-elected as party first secretary and his brother Raul, head of the armed forces, as vice president.
Four provincial party chiefs, a general and the minister of industry joined them on the party's elite Political Bureau, continuing a long process of adding new blood to the party leadership under the 71-year-old president.
Several famed figures from Cuba's revolutionary era were dropped.
They included Tourism Minister Osmany Cienfuegos, brother of revolutionary Comandante Camilo Cienfuegos, and economist Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, a Communist who had served in Cuban governments dating to the 1940s. He reportedly has been ailing.
Sugar Minister Nelson Torres, who has overseen a series of disappointing harvests, also was dropped.
The moves, which dropped the membership to 24 from 25, appeared aimed more at adding youth to the leadership than at changing political course. Much of the party leadership consists of men and women who were children — or note yet born — when Castro's revolutionaries marched into Havana in January 1959. The larger Central Committee also was reduced, to 150 members from 225.
Raul Castro told delegates the party "needs organs which are smaller, more agile and capable."
Six years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, portraits of Marx and Lenin loomed over the 1,500 delegates to the fifth national congress at the Palace of Conventions. Alongside were portraits of the turn-of-the-century freedom fighter Jose Marti, Castro's comrade-in-arms Ernesto "Che" Guevara and Julio Antonio Mella, founder of the Cuban Communist Party.
The congress, which meets roughly every five years, gave no sign of significant changes in political or economic direction for Cuba.
The Communist Party will remain Cuba's only legal party. Party resolutions castigated dissidents as U.S. hirelings bent on putting Cuba under American domination.
There was little discussion of market-oriented reforms introduced in the early 1990s — legalization of dollars and limited self-employment — though the country continues to stress tourism and foreign investment.
Instead, most debate centered on grave problems with agriculture and ways to make state factories more efficient.
"What is not efficient is not socialist," Vice President Carlos Lage, the country's chief economic planner, said Thursday.
Lage and President Castro blamed much of Cuba's economic problems on the U.S. economic embargo and accused the United States of damaging Cuban farms by spreading an agricultural pest, a claim U.S. officials have denied. They also cited damage caused by last year's storms.
The party called for cracking down on crime allegedly associated with the small private sector and expressed concern about social divisions created by the relative wealth of some Cubans under the new reforms.
Legalization of dollars "has not stopped creating serious ideological problems due to the inequalities it creates and the excessive desire to possess hard currency ... very distant from the values and principles we defend," according to a party resolution.
Although an economic free-fall stopped in 1995, the party still faces major economic problems. Overall production is projected to grow by little more than 2 percent this year and food production has slumped. The state food rations that fed Cubans in the 1980s fail to provide subsistence.
Some people receive about one egg a week and less than one chicken a month. That has forced them to depend on recently legalized private farmers markets, where supply-and-demand prices are often beyond the reach of many earning an average salary of $10 a month.
"Beans are more important than cannon," Raul Castro told delegates on Thursday.
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