Cuban President Raul Castro, made the unprecedented proposal to Cuba limit to ten years the term of office for leaders on Saturday before the Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) which has over 300 adopt economic measures to save Cuba of bankruptcy.
"We came to the conclusion that it was advisable to limit to a maximum of two consecutive five-year term limits political rights," the president said before the 1,000 delegates of the congress of the CPC, the first since 1997.
This measure, he said, aims to "ensure a systematic rejuvenation of the entire chain of responsibility" within the government.
"While we have always tried to promote young people to key positions of responsibility, life has shown that these selections were not always the most appropriate," said Raul, who was for nearly half a century the minister of defense of his brother Fidel, 84.
Raul Castro, who turns 80 on June 3, made the proposal, unprecedented in Cuba since the establishment of the Castro regime in 1959 - during an analysis of the political leadership of the island.
Placing the Congress under the banner of "correcting the mistakes in the past five decades of socialist construction," Raul Castro called for "leave aside the formalism, dogmatism and stagnation."
He also advocated a strong degreasing of the "nomenklatura" of the party, which must by Tuesday renewed its senior management.
First secretary of the CPC since its founding in 1965, Fidel Castro, who ceded power to his brother Raul in the summer of 2006, announced in March that he wanted to abandon the last official functions held within the regime that it was founded in 1959.
In a speech two hours and twenty minutes, Raul Castro has also outlined the economic reforms that must be defined and adopted by Congress.
More than 300 economic measures will be submitted to Congress.
The original document, published in November, included 291 measures.After three months of discussions by 8.9 million Cubans over 163,000 meetings, the new document offers a range of 311 steps that need to "update" the socialist model, "said Raul Castro.
Job cuts in the public sector, opening the economy to private initiative, the autonomy of state enterprises, reform of the agri-food and openness to foreign capital are the main areas reforms proposed in the 6th Congress of the CCP.
The measure has attracted the greatest public attention during the public meetings for discussion, "said Raul Castro is the future of the" libreta "The ration book from 1963 that allows any Cuban to enjoy a basket of commodities at subsidized prices.
Eventually, the "libreta" should disappear, the president has confirmed.
"The disappearance of the libreta is not an end in itself but must be one of the measures that will be essential to adopt as part of an improvement in labor productivity," said Raul Castro emphasizing the parallel need for a general rise in wages.
Concerning redundancies in the state sector -95% of the Cuban economy, Raul Castro stressed that "nobody would be abandoned to its fate" and a "system of social attention will be implemented to guarantee a minimum support to those who really need it. "
