Cuba set for new leader

SANTA CLARA, Cuba -- Raul Castro travels in motorcades of gleaming imported sedans. Rings of grim-faced bodyguards protect him, pistols under crisp guayabera shirts. The 86-year-old president of Cuba arrives at official events moments before they begin, and the audience rises to applaud.

A different style was on display March 11 as a crowd of reporters, voters and nervous provincial apparatchiks waited outside a voting station in the central city of Santa Clara for Miguel Mario Diaz-Canel Bermudez, the Communist Party official widely expected to take Castro's place as Cuba's next president this week.

An hour passed, then another. Suddenly, the crowd stirred. A half block away, a tall, bulky figure in an untucked white button-down shirt walked with his wife and a few bodyguards down the street toward the polling station. Shaking hands and hugging voters, Diaz-Canel took his place in line.

"We're building a relationship between the government and the people here," he said after voting for members of Cuba's next National Assembly. "The lives of those who will be elected have to be focused on relating to the people, listening to the people, investigating their problems and encouraging debate."

Then Diaz-Canel left for Havana, ending an unusual bit of political theater neatly scripted to send a single message: A new type of Cuban president is coming.

Castro has pledged to step down Thursday and hand the presidency to a successor most Cubans believe will be the man Castro named in 2013 as his first vice president.

Diaz-Canel, who turns 58 on Friday, would be the first non-Castro to hold Cuba's top government office since the 1959 revolution led by Fidel Castro and his younger brother, Raul. The new president will confront a stagnant economy, decaying infrastructure, a hostile U.S. administration and widespread disenchantment with a centrally planned system not providing state employees with a living wage, but forbidding most forms of private enterprise.

Raul Castro will remain first secretary of the Communist Party, a potentially more powerful position. And since power in Communist Cuba has long flowed from personalities more than institutions, how much influence Diaz-Canel will actually wield is an open question pointing many observers to look at his past for clues.

Most Cubans know their first vice president as an unremarkable speaker who initially assumed a public profile so low it was virtually nonexistent. Until March, Diaz-Canel had said nothing to the Cuban people about the type of president he would be. The white-haired, unsmiling Diaz-Canel had been seen at greatest length in a leaked video of a Communist Party meeting where he somberly pledged to shutter some independent media and labeled some European embassies as outposts of foreign subversion.

Raised and educated in the city of Santa Clara, Diaz-Canel graduated from the local university in 1982 and performed three years of obligatory military service. In 1987 he joined the Young Communists' Union. He also went on to work as a professor of engineering at the University of Santa Clara and traveled to Nicaragua as part of a government-run mission to support that country's socialist revolution.

Santa Clara residents remember him wearing his hair long and openly admiring the Beatles, who were frowned on by ardent communists who considered the group as representative of the decadent culture of Cuba's capitalist enemies.

Nonetheless, the young professor was named first party secretary in Villa Clara province in 1994 and gained a reputation as a hard-working public servant with a conspicuously modest lifestyle. Residents told The Associated Press this month Diaz-Canel was the first official they remembered who didn't move to a new government-provided home after accepting the position of first secretary.

"He didn't even fix up his house to live more comfortably," said neighbor Roberto Suarez Tagle, 78. "He always found out about the real problems that people had."

Diaz-Canel traveled the city on a bicycle during the economic crisis spawned when the fall of the Soviet Union cut off subsidies for Cuba, and he accepted visits at all hours at his home and office from residents with complaints or suggestions. When he finished work, residents said, he would start his shifts with the local Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, a mix of a neighborhood watch committee and local militia.

"Some comrades didn't want to put him on watch because he would be overwhelmed with work, but he would say, 'I'm a citizen of this country and I'll stand watch like anyone else,"' said Liliana Perez, whose house faces the red-and-yellow-painted home where Diaz-Canel lived with his wife and two children.

In 1996, he began appearing on a local radio program during which he would take two hours of live phone calls from people complaining about problems ranging from bad state restaurants to pothole-rutted side streets, radio journalist Xiomara Rodriguez said.

"He undertook an intense effort to communicate with the people," Rodriguez recalled.

In a country where the state controls most daily activities, Diaz-Canel also made surprise visits to government-run establishments such as the local funeral parlor to check on the quality of services.

"He focused on creating a culture of attention to detail," Rodriguez said.

Diaz-Canel also became known for pushing back against the intolerant tendencies of the Communist Party, an organization with strains of deep social conservatism and conformity.