HAVANAL For half a century Fidel Castro seemed to be everywhere in Cuba — inspecting factories, farms and offices, expounding to the press and zooming to the scenes of natural disasters to direct the minutest details of the response.
His brother Raul was a military man who operated from behind the scenes, rarely making speeches and going weeks without appearing in public, even as he attempted historic reforms of Cuba’s economy and foreign policy.
A month after taking office, the Castros’ successor as president of Cuba has broken from the immediate past, and made clear to Cubans that he will be operating far more like a conventional modern politician than the spotlight-shy general who selected him or the revolutionary comandante who led Cuba for 47 years before that.
Miguel Diaz-Canel, 58, has set a whirlwind pace of public appearances since his first day in office — promising improvement in trash pickup and public transportation, inspecting state cafeterias and health clinics, and now acting as the public face of the government’s response to the air crash that killed 111 people when a Boeing 737 rented by Cuba’s national airline slammed into a farm field shortly after takeoff from Havana’s airport on Friday.
The first image that many Cubans saw of the accident was a photo of a grim-faced Diaz-Canel striding through the wreckage in shirtsleeves. Over the weekend, he made repeated visits to hospitalized patients, grieving family members, forensic investigators and the aviation officials leading the probe of the crash.
On Sunday morning, after nearly 48 hours of crisis management, he appeared with helmet-clad emergency workers carrying out a disaster-preparedness exercise for the upcoming hurricane season.
“I think that amid all the pain and consternation there’s a lot of personal solidarity, and that personal solidarity can be seen in the support being given to the families, and it’s expressed in the efficiency with which these cases are being attended to,” Diaz-Canel told state media after visiting the bereaved.
Raul Castro, meanwhile, hasn’t appeared in public since last month. Cuban officials said the 86-year-old leader is recovering from a planned hernia operation but is being briefed on the tragedy and offering advice on the government’s response.
“Diaz-Canel is putting himself before the public so the public can see him. Many of the places where he shown up or the issues he’s examined have to do with people’s everyday concerns,” said Jose Raul Viera, a retired vice minister of foreign relations. “It’s putting him in contact with people’s everyday lives. His focus hasn’t been ideological declarations, but rather practical things.”
Diaz-Canel isn’t Raul Castro, but he isn’t attempting to imitate Fidel either. Like many modern politicians, Diaz-Canel’s appearances remain tightly managed. Most are covered only by Cuba’s state-run press, and unlike the voluble Fidel Castro, the president rarely takes questions or breaks from brief prepared remarks. Most Cubans haven’t heard their president speak more than a handful of times, and rarely saying more than a few sentences.
