Miguel Díaz-Canel facts for kids

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Quick facts for kids His Excellency Miguel Díaz-Canel
Díaz-Canel in 2023

8th First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba
Incumbent
Assumed office 19 April 2021
Second Secretary	Salvador Valdés Mesa
Preceded by	Raúl Castro
17th President of Cuba
Incumbent
Assumed office 10 October 2019
Prime Minister	Manuel Marrero Cruz
Vice President	Salvador Valdés Mesa
Preceded by	Himself (as President of the Council of State) Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado (as President, 1976)
President of the Council of State and Ministers
In office 19 April 2018 – 10 October 2019
Vice President	Salvador Valdés Mesa
Preceded by	Raúl Castro
Succeeded by	Himself (as President) Manuel Marrero Cruz (as Prime Minister)
19th Vice President of the Council of State and Ministers
In office 24 February 2013 – 19 April 2018
President	Raúl Castro
Preceded by	José Ramón Machado Ventura
Succeeded by	Salvador Valdés Mesa
Minister of Education
In office 8 May 2009 – 21 March 2012
President	Raúl Castro
Preceded by	Juan Vela Valdés
Succeeded by	Rodoldo Alarcón Ortíz

Personal details
Born	(1960-04-20) 20 April 1960 (age 64) Placetas, Villa Clara Province, Cuba
Political party	Communist Party of Cuba
Spouse	Lis Cuesta Peraza (m. 2009)
Children	2
Alma mater	University of Las Villas
Occupation	Politician
Profession	Engineer
Signature

Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez (Latin American Spanish: [miˈɣel ˈdi.as kaˈnel]; born 20 April 1960) is a Cuban politician and engineer who is the 8th and current First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba since 2021, and as well as the 17th President of Cuba since 2019. As First Secretary, he is the most powerful person in the Cuban government. Díaz-Canel succeeds the brothers Fidel and Raúl Castro, making him the first non-Castro leader of Cuba since the revolution, and as well as the first non-Castro President since 1976.

Díaz-Canel has been a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party since 2003, and served as Minister of Higher Education from 2009 to 2012. He was promoted to the post of Vice President of the Council of Ministers (Deputy Prime Minister) in 2012. A year later, in 2013, he was elected as First Vice President of the Council of State. He succeeded Raúl Castro as the President of the Council of State in 2018; in December 2019 the office would evolve into President of the Republic. On 19 April 2021 Díaz-Canel assumed the reins of the Communist Party of Cuba, when he replaced Raúl Castro as First Secretary.

Early life
Political career
Leader of Cuba (2018–present)
State visits
- As Vice President
- As President
Awards
Personal life
See also

Early life

Díaz-Canel was born on 20 April 1960 in Placetas, Villa Clara, to Aída Bermúdez, a schoolteacher, and Miguel Limón, a mechanical plant worker in Santa Clara, Cuba. He is of direct paternal Spanish (Asturian) descent; his great-grandfather Ramón Limón left Castropol, Asturias (Spain) for Havana in the late 19th century.

He graduated from Central University of Las Villas in 1982 as an electronics engineer and thereupon joined the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces. Beginning in April 1985, he taught engineering at his alma mater. In 1987, he completed an international mission in Nicaragua as First Secretary of the Young Communist League of Villa Clara.

Political career

In 1993, Díaz-Canel started work with the Communist Party of Cuba and a year later was elected First Secretary of the Provincial Party Committee of Villa Clara Province (a top position higher than a governor). He gained a reputation for competence in this post, during which time it is reported that he supported LGBT rights at a time when many in the province frowned upon homosexuality. In 2003, he was elected to the same position in Holguín Province. In the same year, he was co-opted as a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of Cuba.

Díaz-Canel was appointed Minister of Higher Education in May 2009, a position that he held until 22 March 2012, when he became Vice President of the Council of Ministers (deputy prime minister). In 2013 he additionally became First Vice President of the Council of State. As First Vice President of the Council of State, Díaz-Canel acted as deputy to the President, Raúl Castro.

Leader of Cuba (2018–present)

In 2018, the 86-year-old Castro stepped down from the position as president of the Council of State and the Council of Ministers, though he retained the most powerful position of First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba and the commander-in-chief of the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces. On 18 April 2018, Díaz-Canel was selected as the only candidate to succeed Castro as president. He was confirmed by a vote of the National Assembly on 19 April and sworn in on the same day. Policy experts expected that he would pursue cautious reform of his predecessors' communist economic policies, while preserving the country's social structure. He is the first president born after the 1959 Cuban Revolution and the first since 1976 not to be a member of the Castro family.

He received a visit from Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro just two days after his inauguration. He met with Maduro again in May 2018 in Caracas, during his first official foreign visit as head of state. In his first multinational political trip since becoming president, Díaz-Canel traveled in November 2018 to visit all of Cuba's Eurasian allies. Diplomatic meetings were held in Russia, North Korea, China, Vietnam, and Laos. Brief stopovers in the United Kingdom and France also included meetings with British parliamentarians and French leaders. In March 2019, Díaz-Canel and his wife hosted Charles, Prince of Wales and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall in Havana as the first British royals to visit the island.

In October 2019, Diaz-Canel became the President of the Republic of Cuba, an office that was recreated that February after a series of constitutional reforms were approved in a constitutional referendum. This office replaced the one he had held since April of the previous year, which was the President of the Council of State, which was previously the head of state of Cuba. The position of President of the Council of State became a less important position and is now carried out by Esteban Lazo Hernández in his authority as the President of the National Assembly of People's Power. Diaz-Canel's reforms among other things, limited the presidency to two consecutive five-year terms and banned discrimination based on gender, gender identity or sexual orientation. His government also reformed the country's Family Code in 2022, after a referendum was approved, which, among other things, legalised same-sex marriage, same-sex adoption and altruistic surrogacy. These policies have been described as the "most progressive" in Latin America.

Díaz-Canel with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin, 22 November 2022

His administration has suppressed dissent, particularly surrounding the 2021 Cuban protests triggered by the worsening of the COVID-19 pandemic, suggested combatting the country's food crisis with pizza, guarapo and lemonade, changed the currency system. During the protests, he said: "The order of combat has been given - into the streets, revolutionaries!"

Díaz-Canel with Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Paris, France, 22 June 2023

On 19 April 2021, he officially became the First Secretary of the Communist Party following the resignation of Raúl Castro. This made him the leader of Cuba in fact as well as in name. It had been understood that Raúl retained the real power after ceding the presidency to Diaz-Canel in 2018. Diaz-Canel is the first non-Castro to lead the party since the Cuban revolution of 1959. BBC News stated that Díaz-Canel is loyal to the Castros' ideologies.

During the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Cuban government blamed the United States for the crisis in Ukraine and backed Russia's right to "self-defense" against NATO expansion, but did not endorse the invasion, saying the conflict should be resolved diplomatically. Díaz-Canel visited Vladimir Putin in Moscow in November 2022, and the two leaders criticized Western sanctions against Cuba and Russia. They also opened a monument to Fidel Castro in one of the Moscow's districts.

On 19 April 2023, Díaz-Canel was re-elected by the National Assembly for a second five-year term as president, along with Salvador Valdés as vice president. Despite the difficult economic conditions facing the country, his re-election was widely expected and received widespread support from the Assembly members, with 97.66% backing Diaz-Canel's proposal and 93.4% supporting Valdés. The president was praised by the Assembly members for his leadership in difficult circumstances and for prioritizing collective work, innovation, and science.

In December 2023, Díaz-Canel condemned the alleged genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and called Israel a "terrorist state". He joined a pro-Palestine demonstration in Havana.

State visits

As Vice President

Country	Areas visited	Date(s)	Notes
South Africa	Pretoria	16 March 2015
Angola	Luanda	17 March 2015	40 years of independence of Angola and the establishment of relations between Cuba and Angola.
Namibia	Windhoek	20 March 2015	25th anniversary of Namibian independence
Angola	Luanda	26 September 2017	Inauguration of Angolan President

As President

Diaz-Canel and President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev, 24 October 2019
Diaz-Canel and Vladimir Putin at Novo-Ogaryovo, 29 October 2019
Diaz-Canel and Argentina's President Alberto Fernández, 25 January 2023

Awards

Angola
- Dr. António Agostinho Neto Order (2019)
Venezuela:
- Collar of the Order of the Liberator (2018)
Vietnam:
- Order of Ho Chi Minh (2018)
Mexico:
- Collar of the Order of the Aztec Eagle (2023)
Portugal:
- Grand Collar of the Order of Prince Henry (2023)

Personal life

Díaz-Canel has two children from his marriage to his first wife, Marta Villanueva, which ended in divorce. He currently resides with his second wife, Lis Cuesta.

On 23 March 2021, Díaz-Canel obtained a PhD in technical sciences, defending a thesis titled "Government Management System Based on Science and Innovation for Sustainable Development in Cuba."