Reforms in Cuba debated at unprecedented Communist Party convention

Jan 28, 2012, 17:20 GMT

Havana - Cuban President Raul Castro on Saturday presided over the first-ever convention of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC), in Havana, during which reforms are expected to be debated behind closed doors.

According to Cuban state media reports, PCC deputy leader Jose Ramon Machado kicked off the two-day gathering of 811 delegates at the Havana Convention Centre. Foreign media had no access to the meetings of the four commissions created for the convention.

Although the convention features in the constitution, such an assembly has never been held before. It was called in the wake of the party's April congress, which institutionalized the island's economic reform process.

Delegates are expected to debate the re-organization of the party in light of recent reforms, which among others grants more space to private initiative in many fields.

Raul Castro, who temporarily took over from his brother Fidel Castro at the helm of all major decision-making bodies in Cuba in 2006 and became the island-country's president in 2008, only officially took over the PCC leadership in April.

The convention's draft declaration was debated in 65,000 meetings of PCC groups and of the Young Communists Union, according to the party's daily newspaper Granma on Friday. There are more than 800,000 registered members of the Communist Party in the country of 11 million people, it said.

Dissidents and the Cuban Roman Catholic Church, among others, have stressed that the decision-making process in the country still lacks political plurality and demand political reform to go with economic changes.