Cuba’s Raul Castro discreetly lifting restrictions

With Cuba’s veteran leader Fidel Castro, 81, forced to retire due to illness, Cuba’s new President Raul Castro has begun discreetly lifting some of the many restrictions on daily life as he tries to meet popular demands for better living standards in the socialist state.

In the first month since he took over as president from his ailing brother, Raul Castro’s government - according to Reuters - has launched a restructuring of agriculture to reduce bureaucratic bottlenecks and boost food production. He has also decided to allow Cubans to buy computers, DVD players and other appliances, including air-conditioners and toasters.

On taking office on February 24, Raul Castro pledged to start lifting “excessive regulations and prohibitions” within weeks in response to complaints and proposals made in national debates that he had encouraged on Cuba’s social and economic woes.

Since Fidel Castro first handed over power provisionally to his younger brother in July 2006, there are no more mass marches led by the revolutionary through Havana’s streets that once turned city life upside down, or late night presidential addresses on television berating U.S. capitalism and praising the achievements of Cuba’s 1959 revolution.

“Raul’s style is completely different from Fidel’s. He’s discreet, methodical and more domestically oriented, but just as red,” a local Communist Party militant said.

Cuban-born economist Carmelo Mesa-Lago, a University of Pittsburgh professor, said Raul Castro’s initial steps are in the right direction but fall short of tackling the problem of excessive state control of the economy, the major obstacle to increased production.