President of Cuba

Miguel Díaz-Canel, President of Cuba

Miguel Mario Díaz-Canel Bermúdez is the President of Cuba, in office since 19 April 2018, and First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) since 19 April 2021 — when Raúl Castro formally handed over the party leadership, ending six decades of rule by the Castro brothers. A Soviet-era electronic engineer and lifelong PCC apparatchik, Díaz-Canel was the first Cuban head of state since the 1959 revolution born after it, and the first not to carry the Castro surname. He governs in the middle of the most severe economic and social crisis the island has experienced since the 1990s Special Period: sustained double-digit inflation, extended nightly blackouts, and the departure of roughly one million Cubans — almost 10% of the remaining population — since 2022.

Díaz-Canel was born on 20 April 1960 in Placetas, Villa Clara province, into a family whose father worked in manufacturing and whose mother was a teacher. He graduated as an electronic engineer from the Central University of Las Villas in 1982, served three years in the military communications corps, and rose through the provincial Young Communist League. He spent nearly two decades as PCC first secretary of Villa Clara (1994–2003) and Holguín (2003–2009), earning a reputation for personal austerity — he famously cycled to work — and steady, uncharismatic competence. Raúl Castro appointed him Minister of Higher Education in 2009, First Vice President of the Council of State in February 2013, and finally designated him to succeed him as president in April 2018. A February 2019 referendum approved a new constitution formally separating the offices of head of state and head of government; Manuel Marrero Cruz has served as the country’s first modern Prime Minister since December 2019.

The 11 July 2021 Protests and After

On 11 and 12 July 2021, the largest anti-government protests since the 1994 Maleconazo erupted simultaneously in San Antonio de los Baños, Havana and more than forty other Cuban towns and cities. Demonstrators chanted “patria y vida” and “libertad,” responding to shortages of food, medicine and electricity during a severe COVID-19 wave. Díaz-Canel went on state television and called on regime supporters to confront the protesters in the streets — “la orden de combate está dada” — and security forces detained an estimated 1,400 people. Cuban NGOs later documented more than 700 subsequent convictions, many under charges of “sedition” carrying sentences of up to 25 years. It was a defining rupture in his presidency: smaller protests over blackouts have recurred in 2022, 2024 and 2025, most notably in Santiago de Cuba and Bayamo.

Energy Crisis and Economic Collapse

Cuba’s state thermoelectric grid — largely unchanged since the 1980s — has repeatedly failed, culminating in nationwide system collapses in October 2024 and again in March 2025, each leaving the entire island without power for several days. Daily rolling blackouts of 12–20 hours remain normal across the provinces. The January 2021 “Tarea Ordenamiento” monetary unification overshot badly: inflation hit triple digits in 2021 and has hovered near 30% since, while the official peso-to-dollar exchange rate is more than ten times overvalued against the black market. Remittances from the United States — frozen by Trump-era sanctions on Western Union in 2020 and only partially restored — fell to roughly one-third of their 2019 peak. A government package of dollarisation and privatised small- and medium-sized enterprise (MiPyMe) reforms, pushed through since 2021, has created Cuba’s largest private sector since 1968 but not stabilised macro balances.

Foreign Relations

Cuba retains close strategic alignments with Russia, China, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Iran. Havana has condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine only in abstention, while Russian energy assistance and a 2023 debt restructuring deal have taken on growing importance. Washington-Havana relations remain frozen under the current US administration, with Cuba returned to the State Sponsors of Terrorism list in January 2021 and no further normalisation since. China has become the island’s largest creditor after Russia. A 2023 Reuters investigation reported a Chinese signals-intelligence presence at Cuban facilities, which Havana denied.