Cuba Without A Castro: The Island's Old Guard Exits The Stage

A generation of Cuban revolutionaries who seized power more than six decades ago, directly challenging the U.S. and later pushing Washington and Moscow to the brink of nuclear war, is set to exit the stage.

At a party conference that started Friday, 89-year-old Raúl Castro, the brother of the late revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, said he will step down as head of the Cuban Communist Party. Three years ago, he resigned the presidency and handed the reins to a much younger Miguel Mario Díaz-Canel Bermúdez.

The move, at Cuba's Eighth Party Congress, will mark the first time since the 1959 communist revolution that a Castro will not hold one of the most powerful roles in Cuba's government.

It also comes on the symbolic 60th anniversary of the failed Bay of Pigs, a CIA-led operation to use Cuban exiles in an invasion that sought to overthrow the communist regime. The following year, American spy planes discovered evidence that Soviet-supplied, nuclear-armed missiles were being installed on the island — leading to a showdown between the U.S. and the Soviet Union that many historians regard as the closest the superpowers ever came to a full-scale conflict.