HAVANA—The man tapped as the likely heir-apparent to Raul Castro
is largely unknown off the island, but his rise to the country's
No. 2 job was anything but meteoric.  Miguel Diaz-Canel has
spent 30 years gradually paying his dues behind the scenes,
earning a reputation as a Communist Party loyalist and rising
through the ranks to a succession of ever-higher posts.  "He is
not an upstart or improvised," President Raul Castro said Sunday
in a speech to lawmakers in which he laid out the reasons for
his choice. In the past, Castro has praised Diaz-Canel's "solid
ideological firmness."  Tall, dapper and carefully groomed with
a 52-year-old's salt-and-pepper hair, Diaz-Canel presents a
serious public face before TV cameras, even as some people who
know him describe him as a sharp-minded jokester who can be
surprisingly relaxed in private.  "He's a much more flexible
type than he seems, open-minded and above all intelligent," one
official who has known Diaz-Canel since the 1980s told The
Associated Press on condit