Cuba underwent a historic shift yesterday, elevating a relatively unknown Communist Party official, Miguel Díaz-Canel, to replace retiring President Raúl Castro.

Making Mr Díaz-Canel Cuba’s new president puts the island’s government in the hands of someone outside the Castro family for the first time in nearly six decades.

Mr Castro remains head of the powerful Communist Party that oversees political and social activities.

The National Assembly selected First Vice President Díaz-Canel on Wednesday as the sole candidate to succeed Mr Castro. The official handover of power yesterday is also the anniversary of the US-backed Bay of Pigs invasion defeated by Cuban forces in 1961.

Little is known about Mr Díaz-Canel, 57, who will lead the communist nation that has been ruled for nearly 60 years by Raúl Castro and his brother Fidel. State-run newspapers in Cuba have shared only snippets of his travels inside the country and abroad.

The mystery surrounding Mr Díaz-Canel is by design, said Christopher Sabatini, a lecturer of international relations and policy at Columbia University who has studied Cuba. He said the Cuban regime has carefully presented a profile of a man who is a staunch communist but in touch with Cuba’s younger generation as it moves away from Castro’s contemporaries.

“He likes the Rolling Stones. He likes The Beatles. He has an iPad. We hear that repeated over and over,” Mr Sabatini said. “That to me smacks of a well-managed PR campaign.”

Mr Díaz-Canel will carry the weight of the presidency as relations with the United States become more antagonistic and Cuba’s main economic lifeline, Venezuela, deteriorates.

Here are four things known about Cuba’s future president: Communist Party leader After graduating from college in the central city of Santa Clara, Mr Díaz-Canel served his three years of obligatory military service and jumped right into party politics.

In 1987, he joined the Young Communists’ Union and rose through the ranks. By 1994, he was named first party secretary in Villa Clara province. Neighbours say he didn’t move to the larger homes provided by the government to people in that position.

“He didn’t even fix up his house to live more comfortably,” neighbour Roberto Suarez Tagle, 78, said. “He always found out about the real problems that people had.”

In 2003, he was named first secretary of the more populous province of Holguin in eastern Cuba and was named to the Communist Party’s Politburo, one of its highest decision-making bodies.

In 2013, Mr Castro named Mr Díaz-Canel first vice president of the Council of State, placing him in line to replace Mr Castro.

Minister of education Mr Díaz-Canel maintained a separate career track throughout his time in politics. After finishing his military service, he was an engineering professor at the University of Santa Clara. Years later, he was named Cuba’s minister of education.

Cuban media fawned over his approach to that role, boasting that he was one of the first high-ranking government officials to bring a laptop to government meetings and push for more technology in Cuba’s underfunded classrooms.

The state-run newspaper Granma routinely publishes stories of Mr Díaz-Canel’s visits to schools around the country. During a visit to Santiago de Cuba – where Fidel Castro’s ashes were buried in 2016 – Mr Díaz-Canel called on teachers to ensure that Castro’s legacy of free education continues.

“If we took the oath that Fidel would always be with us ... this work must become a bulwark,” he said, according to Granma.

Raising his profile Would-be successors to the Castro brothers have come and gone, but the Cuban regime has been easing Mr Díaz-Canel into more prominent roles in recent years.

According to state media, he hosted meetings in Cuba with leaders of Mexico, Spain, Germany, India, Pakistan, El Salvador, South Africa, Portugal, the United Arab Emirates, the Vatican and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.

True believer The few times he has spoken publicly, Mr Díaz-Canel has made clear he believes in the ideology that formed the basis of the Castro revolution. He also has fully embraced the country’s suspicion of the Yankees In a speech in October, he blasted the US for its insistence that Cuba change its government.

“Imperialism can never be trusted, not even a tiny bit, never,” he said, echoing revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

Mr Díaz-Canel’s most extensive comments came in a video in which he said the embassies of the US, Norway, Spain, Germany and Britain supported “subversive activity” on the island. And he vowed to crack down on dissidents, saying they were paid by foreign actors to foment dissent.