There are few, if any, Cubans without the surname Castro who are more influential in the island than 75-year-old Dr Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada. A leader of the student opposition in Havana to Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship in the 1950s and thus a key ally of the young Fidel Castro fighting in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra, he became a key figure after Castro’s victory in 1959. Before he was 30 he was named Cuba’s permanent representative at the UN where several times during decades of service he presided over its Security Council. He became foreign minister briefly, and since 1993 has been president of Cuba’s national assembly, the Poder Popular.
His views have long held more sway than most in shaping the country's policies on finance and many other matters. This is particularly the case today, at a time when Cuba’s political landscape is simultaneously overshadowed by economic difficulty, chronic austerity, the challenge of overhauling an excessively centralised economy and the difficulties of running one economy with two currencies. (There is the non-convertible peso for domestic transactions, which is of little use outside Cuba, and the second, the CUC or 'convertible peso', for goods and services purchased by foreigners.)