Cuban communists meet to debate party overhaul

Cuba's Communist Party opened an unprecedented two-day conference here Saturday to press for a "change of mentality" in the country's single-party political system to match efforts to reform the economy. More than 800 delegates to the special conference have been given the task of overhauling a party that has ruled the island uncontested for 50 years but faces growing pressure to change its ways. "There is no ideology without economy," the Communist Party newspaper Granma declared Saturday, setting the tone for the push to put the party in synch with a gradual opening of the 90-percent state-run economy to private initiative. The newspaper stressed that President Raul Castro's top priority is to overcome the party's attachment to "obsolete dogmas and criteria," which Granma likened to a psychological barrier. Not up for discussion, however, is the Communist Party's monopoly on power or its Marxist-Leninist principles. The conclave is supposed to make decisions on nearly 100 proposals, including calls to open party leadership to more youths, women and blacks and to allow gays to serve openly in government, the party and the military. "Yes, we are pushing for rights; and we have to include them in every way," as "their sexual orientation has nothing to do with their ideological or party identity," said Mariela Castro, a daughter of Raul Castro who leads the National Center for Sex Education. The new embrace of gays comes a full two decades after the government dropped its policy of official atheism and accepted religious believers into its ranks. Castro also has called for a 10-year term limit for the presidency and the party leadership, as well as other high offices -- a huge change in a country ruled by his brother, revolutionary icon Fidel Castro, for nearly 50 years. Raul Castro, 80, became president in 2008 after Fidel became ill, and only last year assumed the leadership of the Communist Party from his brother, who is 85. The younger Castro has expressed "shame" that a new generation of Cubans has not been prepared to take over from the old guard of revolutionary leaders, now near the end of their lives. Of 15 Politburo members selected at the last party Congress, only three were under the age of 65. The conference has the power to make changes to party leadership, but the agenda for the meeting did not include that as a proposal for discussion. Castro, who has criticized the party's "bureaucratic methods," is also seeking to separate it from the government, convinced that party meddling has undermined the government's work. "Either we make corrections or we will sink, and sink the efforts of entire generations," he warned in August. The conference is the culmination of a process that began with some 65,000 meetings of party cells, followed by a meeting earlier this month of conference delegates on the proposals to be decided this weekend. There are 800,000 registered members of the party in a country with 11.2 million people. Also expected to figure prominently in the conference debates are proposals to use information technology more effectively to present a "true" picture of Cuba, a country where what little public debate there is occurs on Internet blogs and social networks. The media in Cuba remain under rigid state control, but the conference will be considering proposals to encourage "objective and investigative journalism." "Cuba needs an unofficial revolutionary press," said Fernando Rojas, the vice minister of culture, on the eve of the conference. "It is a necessity, it is a challenge: an unofficial revolutionary press that allows for a critical perspective... which could emphasize the omissions, the errors, the problems, to say what is going on in stark terms," he said. The conference, which symbolically begins on the birthday of Cuban independence hero Jose Marti, is the first of its kind to be convened by the Communist Party since it was founded in 1965 by Fidel Castro. Raul Castro convened it because last year's VI Party Congress was devoted entirely to proposals to reform and modernize the island's Soviet-style economic system, which has been mired in crisis since the Soviet Union's collapse. Under the reforms, Cubans have been allowed to open small businesses, and buy and sell houses and automobiles on the private market for the first time, which also aim to reduce the size of state-run bureaucracies.