He is the first president born after the 1959 Cuban Revolution and the first since 1976 not to be a member of the Castro family.
He received a visit from Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro just two days after his inauguration.
1960
Miguel Mario Díaz-Canel y Bermúdez (born 20 April 1960) is a Cuban politician and engineer who is the 3rd and current First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba.
As First Secretary, he is the most powerful person in the Cuban government.
Díaz-Canel succeeds the brothers Fidel and Raúl Castro, making him the first non-Castro leader of Cuba since the revolution.
Díaz-Canel was born on 20 April 1960 in Placetas, Villa Clara, to Aída Bermúdez, a schoolteacher, and Miguel Díaz-Canel, a mechanical plant worker in Santa Clara, Cuba.
1982
He graduated from Central University of Las Villas in 1982 as an electronics engineer and thereupon joined the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces.
1985
Beginning in April 1985, he taught engineering at his alma mater.
1987
In 1987, he completed an international mission in Nicaragua as First Secretary of the Young Communist League of Villa Clara.
1993
In 1993, Díaz-Canel started work with the Communist Party of Cuba and a year later was elected First Secretary of the Provincial Party Committee of Villa Clara Province (a top position higher than a governor).
He gained a reputation for competence in this post, during which time it is reported that he supported LGBT rights at a time when many in the province frowned upon homosexuality.
2003
Díaz-Canel has been a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party since 2003, and served as Minister of Higher Education from 2009 to 2012.
In 2003, he was elected to the same position in Holguín Province.
In the same year, he was co-opted as a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of Cuba.
2012
He was promoted to the post of Vice President of the Council of Ministers (Deputy Prime Minister) in 2012.
Díaz-Canel was appointed Minister of Higher Education in May 2009, a position that he held until 22 March 2012, when he became Vice President of the Council of Ministers (deputy prime minister).
2013
A year later, in 2013, he was elected as First Vice President of the Council of State.
In 2013 he additionally became First Vice President of the Council of State.
As First Vice President of the Council of State, Díaz-Canel acted as deputy to the President, Raúl Castro.
2018
He succeeded Raúl Castro as the President of the Council of State in 2018; in December 2019 the office would evolve into President of the Republic.
On 19 April 2021 Díaz-Canel assumed the reins of the Communist Party of Cuba, when he replaced Raúl Castro as First Secretary.
In 2018, the 86-year-old Castro stepped down from the position as president of the Council of State and the Council of Ministers, though he retained the most powerful position of First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba and The Commander-In-Chief of the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces.
On 18 April 2018, Díaz-Canel was selected as the only candidate to succeed Castro as president.
He was confirmed by a vote of the National Assembly on 19 April and sworn in on the same day.
Policy experts expected that he would pursue cautious reform of his predecessors' communist economic policies, while preserving the country's social structure.
He met with Maduro again in May 2018 in Caracas, during his first official foreign visit as head of state.
In his first multinational political trip since becoming president, Díaz-Canel traveled in November 2018 to visit all of Cuba's Eurasian allies.
Diplomatic meetings were held in Russia, North Korea, China, Vietnam, and Laos.
Brief stopovers in the United Kingdom and France also included meetings with British parliamentarians and French leaders.
2019
He is of direct paternal Spanish (Asturian) descent; his great-grandfather Ramón Díaz-Canel left Castropol, Asturias (Spain) for Havana in the late 19th century.
In March 2019, Díaz-Canel and his wife hosted Charles, Prince of Wales and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall in Havana as the first British royals to visit the island.
In October 2019, Diaz-Canel became the President of the Republic of Cuba, an office that was recreated that February after a series of constitutional reforms were approved in a constitutional referendum.
This office replaced the one he had held since April of the previous year, which was the President of the Council of State, which was previously the head of state of Cuba.
The position of President of the Council of State became a less important position and is now carried out by Esteban Lazo Hernández in his authority as the President of the National Assembly of People's Power.
Diaz-Canel's reforms among other things, limited the presidency to two consecutive five-year terms and banned discrimination based on gender, gender identity or sexual orientation.
His government also reformed the country's Family Code in 2022, after a referendum was approved, which, among other things, legalised same-sex marriage, same-sex adoption and altruistic surrogacy.
These policies have been described as the "most progressive" in Latin America.
His administration has suppressed dissent, particularly surrounding the 2021 Cuban protests triggered by the worsening of the COVID-19 pandemic, suggested combatting the country's food crisis with pizza, guarapo and lemonade, changed the currency system.
During the protests, he said: "The order of combat has been given - into the streets, revolutionaries!"
On 19 April 2021, he officially became the First Secretary of the Communist Party following the resignation of Raúl Castro.
