Miguel Diaz-Canel, leader of the Communist Party won a landslide vote of 97.66 per cent of the National Assembly. Diaz-Canel, in 2018, succeeded Raul Castro as president and first secretary in 2021 of the Cuban Communist Party, respectively. He is the first non-Castro born after the 1959 revolution to hold both of those titles.
After getting re-elected, Diaz-Canel announced that the ministers of his government would mostly remain the same, CNN reported. Diaz-Canel, an electrical engineer, has failed a succession of calamities that pushed Cuba even nearer to the brink of economic collapse.
He is expected to continue implementing the political and economic reforms initiated by his predecessor, Raul Castro, in 2011. Late revolutionary Fidel Castro handed over power to his younger brother Raul in 2006, and Raul handed over power to Diaz-Canel.
Diaz-Canel was born in April 1960. He went on to study electrical engineering from the University of Las Villas. He graduated in 1982. Climbing the ranks of political hierarchy, Castro once said of Diaz-Canel, that he demonstrated "capacity" and a "solid ideological firmness."
He began his political career in his late 20s, as the head of the Young Communist League of Cuba (UJC) in Santa Clara. He also served as first secretary of two of the Communist Party of Cuba's (PCC) provincial committees-- Villa Clara and Holguin. He made it onto the Politburo, the Communist Party's executive committee in 2003. When Cubans endured hardships after the fall of the Soviet Union, Diaz-Canel became popular among the public in the localities that he served, always ready to listen to citizens' problems and find solutions.
In 2009, he was appointed minister of higher education in 2009. And in 2012, he was made vice president of the Council of Ministers in charge of education, science, culture and sports.
In February 2013, he was elected the first vice president of the Council of State by the National Assembly. Always maintaining a low profile, Diaz-Canel took centre stage only last year, during which he made several public appearances and defended the continuity of the Cuban socialist model.
Diaz-Canel has been critical of issues such as corruption, bureaucracy and foreign media manipulation. In the last three months he was seen engaging with locals more closely. Diaz-Canel said at a parliamentary election in March that "the people's freedom, independence and sovereignty will endure, and we will never give up on those things."