TOOK THEM LONG ENOUGH TO FIGURE OUT HE'S A REPUBLICAN:

The Cuban president and first party secretary, Raúl Castro, opened the meeting on Saturday with a sombre evaluation of the state of reforms he introduced after taking over from his ailing brother Fidel in 2008. Raúl Castro blamed "an obsolete mentality" and "attitude of inertia" for the state's failure to implement reforms meant to increase productivity.

First Vice-President Miguel Díaz-Canel, long seen as Castro's successor, repeated that criticism of the bureaucracy in a speech on Monday announcing the congress's formal acceptance of Castro's evaluation. He said obsolete ways of thinking led both to inertia in enacting reforms and "a lack of confidence in the future".

"Along with other deficiencies, there's a lack of readiness, high standards and control, and little foresight or initiative from sectors and bureaucrats in charge of making these goals a reality," Díaz-Canel said in an excerpt of a speech broadcast on state television.

However, lengthy state media reports on the four-day congress focused less on proposals for reform than on debates about political orthodoxy focusing on the need to protect Cuba's socialist system from the threat of global capitalism and US influence in particular.

A month after Barack Obama's visit to Havana, the first by a US president in nearly 90 years, Cuban leaders have begun to consistently portray his trip as an attempt to seduce Cubans into abandoning the country's socialist values in favour of a desire for free markets and multiparty democracy.

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