An Italian television journalist once asked Fidel what must have been the most impertinent question ever put to him on the record. Recalling that Fidel has often spoken admiringly of Ernest Hemingway’s fiction, the journalist asked him about the Nobel Prize winning author’s classic, The Old Man and the Sea.1
The story is set in Cuba. Hemingway’s old man, Santiago, is a fisherman down on his luck, who goes out in a small skiff and hooks the biggest fish of his career. After Herculean struggles, the old man subdues the giant marlin and lashes it to the side of the skiff. But he is out of sight of the Cuban coast now and has to sail slowly back to port.
“He’s my fortune,” the old man thinks, the biggest, most valuable catch of his life.
But sharks begin to attack. At first it is one, then others, and soon a roiling, ravenous pack, methodically gnawing away at the giant fish. The old man is helpless as his greatest triumph is eaten away before his eyes.
Nothing but shreds of flesh and glistening bone are left hanging at the side of the small boat when the old man finally gets back to shore.
Talking to himself, and to what is left of the fish, he mutters, “I am sorry, I went too far out. I ruined us both.”
The Italian reporter thought of Hemingway’s tale as a metaphor for Fidel and the revolution.
“Aren’t you afraid you will wind up like Ernest Hemingway’s fisherman?,” he asked.
Fidel was incredulous. No one had ever challenged him with such an offensive question before. The commander-in-chief hurriedly changed the subject, launching into a long, dissembling monologue.
It was true. The wasting of the revolution began to accelerate beyond Fidel’s control in 1990 as the Soviet Union was going into its death throes. Deliveries of fuel and other essentials were no longer arriving on time, if at all. Shortages multiplied daily. Street crime reached such high levels that Fidel was complaining in speeches. Hungry Cubans waited in interminable ration lines as social tensions flared.
The internationalist glories of the past were also in shreds. In March, Daniel Ortega lost presidential elections in Nicaragua by a wide margin, a resounding repudiation of Cuba’s only remaining socialist ally in the region. Fidel blamed the loss on the CIA but had been furious with the Sandinistas for agreeing to hold elections in the first place—a mistake he would never have made. Cuban advisers returned home.
It was the same in Angola. After nearly sixteen years of military intervention, American-led negotiations had forged a regional peace settlement. Cubans were coming home in a steady flow, and in May 1991 Raul welcomed the last of them accompanied by their commanding general. Fidel’s last, best hope in Central America, the Marxist insurgents in El Salvador, were negotiating the end of their conflict as well. Puerto Rico still came up occasionally in the regime’s rhetoric, but even that favorite flame was flickering out.
There was almost nothing left of Fidel’s globe girdling internationalist triumphs. In one of the most difficult concessions he has ever had to make, he told the Cuban people their internationalist duty now was to stay at home and join together “in extraordinary efforts to save the revolution.”
Soon he was talking about almost nothing but the economy. It continued to sink through the rest of 1990, and then plunged precipitously the following year as the Soviet Union disappeared and what was left of the massive subsidies ceased. The free fall continued through the next two years with a total economic implosion of between 40 and 50 percent from the 1989 level. It was the worst depression Cubans could remember.
The country was put on the equivalent of a war footing under the futuristic sounding Zero Option plan and the Special Period in Peacetime, terms adapted from Raul’s contingency planning for invasion and war. The military was ordered to become self sufficient, meaning that soldiers went to work in the fields, planting, weeding, and harvesting their own food. It was a humiliating epilogue for the former internationalists to be reduced to the roles of peasant farmers and field overseers. Raul felt it necessary to state publicly that, under the circumstances, “beans are worth more than cannons.”2
The impact on the civilian population was devastating. Unemployment soared to include more than half of the work force. Most factories had to curtail production or shut down, because fuel, spare parts, and materials were not available. Food shortages and distribution problems caused malnutrition and disease. Public health and sanitation deteriorated sharply.3
Without enough fuel to power electrical generators the lights literally were going out across the island. Blackouts lasted for up to sixteen hours a day, causing terrible hardships as food rotted without reliable refrigeration. Public transportation and farm machinery idled. Havana looked like a city at war or under siege.
“We are entering the bicycle era,” Fidel told an audience in late January 1991. He meant it to be somehow reassuring.
More than 700,000 bicycles were purchased from China for assembly in round-the-clock shifts at a dozen technical schools turned over entirely to that task. Soon Fidel was talking incessantly about everything conceivable related to bicycles. He had been reading up and became the nation’s premier bicycle expert.
“I can assure you that is easier to put together a Swiss watch than a bicycle. It is a complicated thing. I believe it requires three hundred forty-seven different parts.”4
The era of the tricycle came later that year.
In December Fidel said that sixty thousand of the three wheelers had been purchased to “perform many of the activities for which motorized vehicles are now used.”5
Then it was oxen to replace tractors and other farm vehicles.
“We are breaking in one hundred thousand oxen. And as soon as we are done we are going to break in another hundred thousand.”
Civilians from the cities were moved to the countryside to perform stoop labor in the fields. In April 1991, Fidel spoke of that for the first time and later admitted that some, who he insisted were volunteers, would be gone for as long as two years.6
“Over sixty camps with room for two hundred thousand workers were built in a few weeks,” he said, adding that “tens of thousands of people went from Havana to Pinar del Rio to pick tomatoes.”7
He had previously commented in a speech about how much he liked the Roma tomatoes from Pinar del Rio in his salads. He wanted everyone to eat more fresh vegetables.
Cassava roots were a good source of protein, he lectured, and could be used instead of imported wheat to make bread. It was a comparison like another in the mid-1970s when he had talked endlessly about the nutritional value of a new Cuban beer as a substitute for rationed foodstuffs.
I was anxious to try Cuban beer myself the first time I visited Havana, but there was none to be had during that trip in early 1990. I remember entering a workingman’s bar in Old Havana, near the wharves, walking up to the counter, and asking the big, gruff bartender for una cerveza, por favor. He glowered at me, probably thinking I was a Cuban or a Latin American. Ponderously, he placed his big hands on his hips, rubbed his broad stomach, and scowled. “You know perfectly well there is none of that to be had!”
I visited a second time, during the worst of the economic crisis, in the early spring of 1993, to assess conditions for myself. Fidel and Cuban intelligence had known of me for a long time by then, but the necessary entry visas were issued expeditiously by the diplomatic mission in Washington. I was an analyst, not an operative. My objectives were harmless: to consult with American diplomats in Havana and to get a sense of how much the situation had deteriorated. I had no clandestine or operational assignments, although Cuban officials could not be sure of that.
I had been warned by other American officials who traveled to the island that they had been harassed and intimidated, presumably by Cuban counterparts. There were abusive phone calls at three or four in the morning, near misses with menacing drivers on the roads, and I even heard that garbage was dumped between the sheets in the hotel beds of visiting CIA analysts.
One colleague woke up in his Havana hotel room in the middle of the night as two counterintelligence agents silently picked through all of his belongings. Wisely, he pretended to be asleep, and they left as surreptitiously as they had entered. I don’t know why, but I was not bothered by Cuban intelligence in any way, although of course, I was kept under total, blanket surveillance.
It was after dark that Havana was most haunting. The dim light in the streets was penumbral, the few low-wattage bulbs here and there casting hazy shadows that quickly dissolved in the dark. People out and about mostly scurried, avoiding eye contact, saying nothing to each other. I remember how depressingly monochromatic almost everything seemed. Exterior paint and stucco had washed out and puckered over the years. It surprised me that Cuba and Cubans seemed to be all faded hues of brown and gray. I never heard laughter during any of my walks around the city.
Exploring Havana during those grim nights in 1993, I was reminded of fragments from a few of Fidel’s speeches in the late 1980s and of the chokehold he has so long imposed on Cuban society. It was at a time when he was ranting against the liberalizing Soviet reforms, insisting that Cuba would never allow private initiative or what he disparagingly started calling “neo-capitalist” enterprise. He actually singled out for public denunciation a resourceful man who had briefly brought color and a bit of tawdry glamour to the lives of some Cubans, but who had been guilty, Fidel said, of illicit profiteering.
Somehow this unnamed individual managed to acquire a quantity of imported toothbrushes. It was probably in his kitchen where he melted and molded the plastic into bright red and yellow and green costume jewelry—simple necklaces and bracelets that he sold clandestinely for a few Cuban pesos. He brought some cheer to the streets, but he was branded a neo-capitalist exploiter and probably served a jail term.
Fidel denounced others like that man: one who bought chocolate bars in Havana’s Lenin Park and later resold them for a small profit; others who salvaged interesting bits of refuse from the city dump to make into works of folk art to sell; and, according to the commander-in-chief, “people painting and selling paintings, even to state institutions, earning more than two hundred thousand pesos in a year.” And after all, he complained, “these are not the works of Picasso or Michelangelo.” Fidel feared that if these and other microentrepreneurs were allowed to continue, the revolution’s egalitarian ideals would be compromised.
* * *
And as the revolution was being eaten away, Fidel increasingly resembled Hemingway’s old fisherman. Until his seventy-fifth year, in 2001, questions about the succession had attracted only the vaguest hypothetical interest. He had always endeavored to project an image of indestructibility, unfailing robust health even as he aged into his sixties and seventies. He continued delivering interminable speeches, sometimes out in the hot sun. He met with foreign interviewers late at night, often talking nonstop until dawn.
It was all calculated to suggest longevity and superhuman vigor. Regime flacks liked to point out that his father had lived into his eighties, hinting he had died years later than he actually did just a few months short of his of eighty-first birthday. (Lina died just before her sixtieth birthday.) The appearance of perpetual youth was as essential to the projection of Fidel’s revolutionary persona as the beard, the khakis, and the olive green cap.
He made quite a public show of giving up his trademark cigars in the summer of 1985 during a period when his speeches were peppered with peculiar allusions to health and mortality. The most remarkable of them was a telling allusion a few months earlier. More than an hour into a speech he muttered, in no particular context, that he was “being stalked by the grim reaper.”
I noticed an unusually high incidence in his public remarks of what seemed like a dark preoccupation with his health that went well beyond the normal hypochondria he keeps well hidden. He had been pontificating to audiences so often and so knowledgeably about intricate medical matters that in one appearance he admitted that Cubans had been asking him, “Are you in your fourth year of medical studies?”
He soon felt compelled by the persistence of the rumors to dismiss—though not explicitly deny—that he had cancer. He may very well have undergone surgery, and it is not surprising that no doctors have ever come forward or leaked to the press that they treated him. By the end of 1985 whatever afflicted him had apparently resolved, and for the next fifteen years or so there would be no further signs of health problems.
That all began to change in the second year of the new century. In June 2001 he was filmed for the first time faltering during a speech. He appeared disoriented and dizzy, nearly collapsing before being carried off by aides. Nothing like that had ever happened before, and the international media reported he had briefly lost consciousness.
In two subsequent appearances that summer he became strangely incoherent for short spells, as members of the audience each time squirmed in embarrassment. Something clearly was wrong, but whatever it was remained top secret. He started wearing athletic shoes instead of boots when putting in a symbolic lap in mass demonstrations in Havana. He was slipping out of character.
More incidents followed. The worst of his known pratfalls occurred in October 2004 when he was televised tripping stiffly off a low platform after completing a speech. He crashed into a heap, breaking his left kneecap and right arm, and spent weeks in a wheelchair. Since then the broken arm seems to have withered.
As in all of his mishaps, he and the regime hastened to reassure the public that he had quickly rebounded, was well and fully in charge. But the reality is that many Cubans suspect the commander-in-chief is suffering from one or more life-threatening ailments. Rumors of recurring cancer, heart attacks, minor strokes, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s disease have circulated.
A number of foreign visitors who have spent time with Fidel since 2001 have spoken of his mental lapses, strange verbal meanderings, and inability to concentrate. Some have been struck by how much he has declined physically just in the last few years. His skin has turned sallow; he is stooped and focuses poorly. His once characteristic striding gait has shrunken into a rigid shuffle.
The frequency and length of his public appearances have diminished, foreign journeys are not scheduled as they used to be, and even on the island he is uncharacteristically sedentary. He still manages to deliver speeches, but usually he is seated now, frequently lapsing into strange soliloquies. Observers increasingly wonder if he will live to celebrate his eightieth birthday on August 13, 2006, or if by then he might unravel into cognitive disarray. Meanwhile Raul is playing a larger role behind the scenes, perhaps already acting as a kind of regent, filtering and providing checks and balances on Fidel’s instructions to other subordinates.
* * *
It was at the height of the crisis in the early 1990s that Raul began to assert himself, seemingly with the same kind of determination he demonstrated in Houston in 1959. This time, however, he was the more flexible, cautious brother, less wed than Fidel to ideological certainties. Impressed with the Chinese political-economic model, Raul pushed for the adoption of decentralizing open market reforms, though mostly without success. He did manage to win his brother’s consent, probably grudging, to promote engagement between the Cuban and American military establishments and to let senior officers profit from running large sectors of the economy.
The tipping point for both Castros occurred in 1993 when street violence swept a Havana suburb in July, followed a few months later by disturbances in another nearby town. The most ominous rioting occurred in Havana, in August, 1994. Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets around the Malecon chanting “Freedom” and “Down with Fidel.”8
Raul and his generals feared that social stability was breaking down and that military command and control might be put at risk. The institution he had spent his adult life building could not be allowed to rupture, and the surest way for that to happen would be if he had to order troops into a bloody Tiananmen Square situation. And Raul knew that if the police were unable to restore order, Fidel would insist that the military complete the job. But the armed forces are not trained for crowd control and have never fired on civilians. Most commanders would be loath to acquiesce in orders to do so.
The situation in the streets was so bad that Raul had to put the populace on notice that further disturbances would not be tolerated. The military would do whatever was necessary to preserve order, he proclaimed, warning “the revolution’s enemies” not to “miscalculate,” and adding that we “have more than enough cannons and other things to defend this land.” This was “Raul the Terrible” laying down a line in the sand, but his threats only further undermined the limited popular support he enjoyed.9
Typically, too, Fidel sought relief by provoking another crisis with the United States. Following the 1994 rioting, he induced a third sea borne migration—this time of about forty thousand rafters—who set out from the north coast toward Florida with little more than paddles and jugs of drinking water.
Hundreds of thousands more would have taken their chances on any flimsy contraption that might float, but a negotiated settlement was reached providing for a legalized flow to the United States of at least twenty thousand emigrants annually. Some have described this as Cuban demographic blackmail. Still in effect today, the agreement relieved some of the pressure on the regime, and Fidel once again managed to find a silver lining in a domestic crisis.
Raul has eschewed public discussions of the 1965, 1980, and 1994 migrations, and it is therefore reasonable to infer that he was unenthusiastic in each instance. His thinking may well have been the same as that of General Rafael del Pino, who, after his defection, remembered that most honorable military officers considered Mariel a “Roman circus.” Del Pino and other officers believed Fidel had unnecessarily stirred instability across the island. They were more concerned with preserving domestic stability than lashing out against the United States.
It was not just in Miami that observers became convinced in the early 1990s that the regime was not likely to survive much longer. I was among them. In August 1993 I chaired the final meetings of a working group of Cuba specialists from CIA and the other intelligence agencies to produce another national estimate. We concluded there was “a better than even chance that Fidel Castro’s government will fall within the next few years.”10
I still believe that we were right, that the odds then were stacked slightly against him. I learned later that top Cuban officials had reached a similar conclusion. One of them later admitted in a private conversation with a senior American government official that Cuba was “only about six months from an economic meltdown.” They were preparing for hyperinflation and widespread instability.11
It was in the face of imminent upheaval that Fidel was persuaded that only a steady flow of hard currency from abroad could save him and the revolution. The situation was so dire that he was willing to compromise previously sacred revolutionary principles to maintain absolute power. There were only two realistic ways enough hard currency could be acquired: large-scale foreign tourism and dollar remittances from the Cuban diaspora.
The first—flinging open Cuba’s doors to foreign tourists—was a bitter and dangerous pill. For decades it had been dogma that waves of tourists would contaminate and destabilize revolutionary society. Fidel had boasted that one of his greatest moral accomplishments had been to eradicate the prostitution, casino gambling, and mafia vice associated with the tourism of the Batista era. If multitudes of visitors were allowed to come again, they would bring most of that back. Drugs and the sex industry would proliferate. Crime would increase, and most alarming of all, Cubans would be exposed to the contagions of counterrevolutionary ideas and attitudes.
Since then tourism has grown into one of the two principal revenue sources, and with all of the feared consequences. But the regime’s policy of tourism apartheid has been even more insidious and potentially destabilizing. The average Cuban is banned from the beaches, bars, hotels, and restaurants set aside for foreign tourists and regime elites. This segregation is bitterly resented by a populace that has been drilled for so many years in propaganda about its supposedly egalitarian society.
The regime’s decision in July 1993 to begin legalizing foreign currencies has done even more to provoke social tensions. Until then it had been a crime for Cubans to possess American dollars, but the government needed to provide incentives for Cubans abroad to subsidize their relatives. Dollars have been heavily taxed, and most of the money received has to be spent in government-run stores that charge exorbitantly for food and other essentials. Dollarization has made it legitimate for Cubans providing services to foreigners to accept tips or fees as all manner of street solicitation and individual entrepreneurship have flourished again.
Crime, drug abuse, and prostitution have soared, as many Cubans see greater advantage in hustling foreigners for hard currency than in pursuing traditional careers. Doctors and physicists drive taxis. Unemployed scientists and engineers wait tables for tips. University enrollment is less than half what it was in 1990. What good is a degree, many youths ask, when there are so few jobs and ten or a hundred times more than a government wage can be made by providing services to foreigners?
Racial discrimination was supposedly expunged decades ago. In fact it has grown worse as Afro-Cubans are generally discriminated against for jobs in the tourist sector. And since comparatively few blacks have relatives abroad, they are less likely to receive hard currency remittances and therefore are confined to the hardships of the peso economy.
A caste system has resulted. Foreign economists have concluded that by the early years of the current century, wealth and income distribution had become more unequal in Cuba than almost anywhere else in Latin America. Ironically, the one country where grotesque inequalities supposedly were forever eradicated has now probably become at least as unequal as it was before the Castros came to power.
Parallel economies operate side by side. The rich and the regime’s nomenklatura have access to hard currency and therefore to goods and services unavailable to the masses. The poor must do their best to subsist with worthless pesos while enduring long ration lines and shortages of almost all necessities. Animosities across these new societal faultlines are likely to intensify after Fidel leaves power and to confront Raul with grievous problems that will defy quick or easy solutions.
The revolution is literally in ruins. A University of Miami study found that in Havana alone an estimated three hundred buildings collapse every year, and that about one hundred thousand residents there live in unsafe structures.12 Highways, communications and sewage systems, water mains, and other critical infrastructure are in advanced stages of disrepair. The rot has spread across the island in almost every civilian sector. Even many government and Communist Party officials now admit to each other, when they are sure they cannot be overheard, that the system has failed. Raul will inherit all of these problems. And he will have no alternative but to try somehow to alleviate them.
* * *
A praetorian regime dominated by Raul and the generals seems all but certain to succeed Fidel, though for how long is impossible to know. Preparations for a smooth succession have been underway for some time, and second- and third-tier officials have every incentive to stand together, if only as the best strategy for preserving their equities.
Civilian elites, individually or in any conceivable alliances, will be unable to challenge the military as long as it remains united. The Communist Party and popular organizations are hollow shells that have been allowed by the Castros to fade in importance. Opposition groups dedicated to advancing human rights and democracy are still small and scattered. Thus, in the short term, no others could effectively confront the raulistas. The main threat to stability will be that the country’s new leaders will miscalculate as they deal with an increasingly restive populace desiring change.
With about fifty thousand to sixty thousand personnel, the military is the most powerful, competent, and influential institution in Cuba. It is also the richest. The many tourism and other enterprises controlled by active and retired senior officers are run from the fourth floor of the defense ministry. Raul’s son-in-law and General Casas, the second in command at the ministry, manage these for-profit activities, apparently without any outside oversight. They take in about 60 percent of tourism revenues and two thirds of hard currency retail sales.13 Several other government ministries and agencies are also run by ranking officers.
Raul was the lead architect of these adaptations in military missions. Like the concessions Fidel made to allow foreign tourism and dollarization, Raul had no illusions about the risks of giving selected officers access to substantial financial flows. But as the economy collapsed, he concluded there was no alternative if the military was to survive and the revolution was to endure. Nonetheless, the cost to the institution has been so great that it is no longer wise to assume that the high command will remain united when the new regime faces its first major tests.
Morale, discipline, and the once-strong sense of common national purpose have been eroding as resentments and jealousies among officers intensify. Faultlines run parallel to those in society at large, where some, who are favored by Raul and his top brass, thrive with access to hard currency, while others must manage on the margins in the peso economy. Younger officers, those stationed in the provinces beyond the tourist centers, and the non-commissioned cadre are probably mostly on the impoverished side of the divide. And it is likely that hardline traditionalists in the armed forces are appalled and angry as they see their once-proud institution turned into a hotbed of conspicuous consumption.
One of Raul’s colonels is a good example. He controls a large and attractive apartment building in the Vedado neighborhood of Havana, not far from the American diplomatic mission. The colonel lives comfortably in the penthouse unit he is said to own. A former American diplomat in Havana who knows the building and one of its foreign tenants has described it to me.
It is ten to twelve stories high, with a fastidiously restored Art Deco exterior, and contains more than thirty apartments. A British businessman rents one of the units and pays the colonel a handsome monthly rent in hard currency. That apartment is like most of the others. It has a large balcony on which thirty to forty people can congregate and is fitted with imported fixtures and expensive details. All the other luxury apartments apparently are also rented to foreigners who pay the colonel in hard currency.
The poor Cubans who lived in the building before it was renovated were evicted in a coup of what might be termed neo-revolutionary gentrification. Surely the former tenants were not inclined to resist an elite and well-connected army colonel as they packed their belongings and moved on, though their options were bleak in a country with a deficit of 1.6 million housing units. It is difficult to imagine that such behavior by high-handed military officers has not generated severe animosities that will undermine stability in the post-Fidel era.
Only a few officers are known to have been dismissed for corruption. A general and two colonels were fired for especially egregious fraud a few years ago, yet Raul’s ministry appears to tolerate all but the most blatant profiteering. No standards of conduct have been articulated and almost nothing is known outside the institution about how military entrepreneurs are managed, how they are selected, how long they serve, or what qualifications other than political acceptability they bring to their assignments. Not surprisingly, the praetorian enterprises are known to be inefficient and would be unable to compete in a free-market environment.
The short-term gains Raul achieved by granting these sinecures are likely to prove the longer term enemies of stability when he is in power. By giving favored officers access to higher living standards, he has secured their loyalty, but for how long will that be true as they become accustomed to the once-forbidden fruits of capitalism? Almost everything Raul has done to insert officers into the hard currency sector of the economy has deleterious implications. If the generals and colonels fall into conflict among themselves, the survival of the raulista regime would be immediately threatened. Several developments could shatter already brittle command and control.
The most dangerous possibility involves Raul himself. What if he were to die before Fidel? He is five years younger but is known to be an unreformed alcoholic. On occasion the stresses of his responsibilities have clearly weighed on him in ways that may have enduringly affected his health. Rumors that he is seriously ill periodically surface, in part because he often goes for lengths of time without appearing in public. In December 1991 persistent rumors that he had died forced him to talk to the local press.
“Every so often,” he told reporters, “a rumor gets started that I died. During the Pan-American Games they were saying I was being kept in a freezer.”14
Unlike his brother, Raul has a lively, often black sense of humor. He laughed, said he was in good shape physically, and that he walks several kilometers most days.
On June 3, 2006, he will be seventy-five. But if he were to predecease his brother, the succession plan would be thrown into chaos. A power struggle would be inevitable and Fidel’s ability to control it in doubt. The most destabilizing scenario would be if Raul were to die at a time when Fidel’s judgment was impaired by age or infirmity. The Castros’ regime would then be on the verge of disintegration.
Raul’s prior death would throw all three of the country’s most critical lines of succession—in the Communist Party, the government, and the defense ministry—into contention simultaneously. Fidel would come under enormous pressure as rivals anxious to move up jockeyed for his favor and clashed with each other. He would be reluctant to name a new defense minister, who would then have the unchecked ability to mount a coup. Under the constitution, the Council of State would meet to select Raul’s replacements in the government, but that body has always functioned as the Castros’ rubber stamp and would be paralyzed by indecision and infighting if neither brother could call the shots.
If they remained united, the generals could easily prevail, but rivalries and animosities would break out into the open if Raul were not around to mediate them. Foreign observers acquainted with the high command believe there is no internal consensus about who should succeed Raul as defense chief. General Colome is the ranking three star, but the tough and taciturn interior minister is thought to be best suited for the job he holds. General Casas would probably be an even more polarizing choice because of the taint of corruption that has attached to his business dealings.15
There has never been a back-up succession plan, or anyone poised as third in line. No other leader in the party, government, or military has the stature to make a credible claim to be next after the Castros. The brothers have always made certain that no one else could acquire standing as a contender to succeed either one of them. Their strategy worked well for decades to guarantee their respective hegemonies, but now that the succession is drawing near, it is a time bomb waiting to go off.
A Tiananmen Square scenario could also sunder the military. Even if the survival of the revolution were at stake, many troop commanders would probably be unwilling to fire indiscriminately on protesting civilians. There are elite units, however—the Special Troops that were the first dispatched to Angola in 1975, and other paramilitary forces—that would be likely to obey such orders. But that could be the surest formula for civil war, pitting loyalist and dissident commanders and units against each other.
It is a nightmare scenario for both Cuba and the United States. Any widespread breakdown of law and order on the island inevitably would result in the fourth massive seaborne migration to Florida. Some in the exile community would probably return with the hope of further destabilizing the regime. There would be politically influential calls for an American or international intervention. And if the loss of life on the seas or in Cuba escalated, there might be no widely acceptable alternative to military intervention. That would be the worst possible outcome for both countries.
The fear of such a crisis is probably a key reason why Raul and the high command have lobbied, unsuccessfully so far, to engage with the American military. They want the legitimacy that such contacts would bestow. They calculate that their standing with the Cuban people would improve. And most critically, they would use sustained contacts with the Pentagon to create the sense that a successor raulista regime is inevitable and the best alternative for American interests. They hold out the prospect of cooperation across the Florida Straits in counternarcotics, immigration control, and other areas of mutual concern.
I know a number of active duty and retired Pentagon officers, as well as academic specialists, who advocate such engagement. The Bush administration is opposed, however, believing that military-to-military exchanges would bolster the prospects for a praetorian succession while undermining the chances for a transition to democracy after Fidel. As a result, the only regular contacts between the two militaries occur at “fence-line” talks at Guantanamo, where the American base commander and a Cuban general meet monthly. They discuss issues of local concern, such as cooperation in fire fighting and disaster relief, and with the goal of minimizing the possibility of cross-border incidents.
These talks reached a higher plateau in early 2002, when Guantanamo was being prepared for the incarceration of Al Qaeda terrorists. The Cuban government was informed in advance of the decision to use the base for that purpose, and military authorities in that area were advised about what their troops should expect to observe so that unfortunate surprises might be avoided. A few days later, Havana issued a favorable statement. And then, to the surprise of most international observers, Raul told reporters that if Al Qaeda detainees were to escape into Cuban territory, he would be sure they were returned to Guantanamo.
* * *
That was not the only indication in recent years of Raul’s changing attitude toward the United States. I believe, as a result, that once in power in his own right, he will place an early and high priority on improving relations.
He will likely tap intermediaries to probe American interest while issuing conciliatory statements abandoning the decades of his brother’s anti-American vitriol. To a considerable extent Raul has already softened his rhetoric about the United States. With the support of the generals, he probably calculates that his regime can survive over time only if the four-and-a-half-decade bilateral impasse can be overcome. Many clues already point in this direction, although as long as Fidel is alive, Raul will not openly acknowledge such an interest.
Unlike his brother, he has never been motivated by an ego-charged quest for fame and glory or internationalist gratification. He does not thrive on conflict and confrontation as Fidel has since childhood. He worries more about the economic hardships the Cuban people endure and has been the most influential advocate in the regime for liberalizing economic reforms. He is likely to be more flexible and compassionate in power. Fidel’s daughter, Alina Fernandez, knows Raul well. She told me that “he is the practical brother.”
Raul’s anti-Americanism was unmistakable for decades, though it was probably never as intrinsic as Fidel’s. When Raul commanded his own guerrilla forces in 1958 he kidnapped about four dozen Americans, including civilians and military personnel stationed at Guantanamo. Fidel spread the myth that his brother had acted on his own, encouraging the notion that it was Raul who was the anti-American brother. Later, during the only visit Raul has ever made to the United States, in April 1959 when he conferred with Fidel in Houston, his boorish behavior added to that reputation. And for decades Raul’s infatuation with nearly everything Soviet put him in the forefront of Cuban hardliners. But his world view changed fundamentally when the Soviet Union disappeared.
By 1997 when the volume of candid interviews with forty-one Cuban generals was published, Raul’s thinking about the United States clearly had evolved. That the book appeared at all was a remarkable development, given Fidel’s paranoia and the historical secrecy at the top levels of the armed forces. But it was even more unusual that every one of the generals eschewed anti-American rhetoric at a time when Fidel was regularly ranting against the United States. The book was clearly orchestrated and reviewed in Raul’s office and was meant to confirm earlier indications that the high command wanted better relations with the United States, regardless of what Fidel was saying.
No other departure from his brother’s legacy would be as monumental for Raul as supporting a rapprochement with Washington. He would begin to move out of Fidel’s shadow, asserting himself definitively as his own man. It would be a popular policy in the military, with most civilian leaders, and especially with the Cuban people. His main objective would be to win a significant reduction, or termination, of the U.S. economic embargo. But I suspect that unlike Fidel, he will be willing to negotiate in good faith and with no superseding priorities.
It is impossible to say how much Raul would be willing to yield in a process of reconciliation. Nonetheless, in light of the stand he took regarding the Al Qaeda detainees at Guantanamo, he might be inclined openly to embrace counter terrorism cooperation with the United States, a possibility that has been anathema to Fidel. Furthermore, Raul might be willing unequivocally to renounce the use of violence in Cuban international relations and possibly even to expel known terrorists and felons wanted for capital offenses in the United States.
If he did just those things, the stage would be set for a fast-moving process of normalization. Legislation signed by President Clinton in 1996, the Helms-Burton law, that tightened the economic embargo, would lose support in Congress and would probably be repealed or modified to take advantage of new opportunities. If military-to-military exchanges were formalized, counternarcotics and immigration cooperation would be likely to flourish. Popular and congressional support for the embargo, including restrictions on travel to the island, would likely evaporate.
But Raul’s intent through such a process most likely would be to gain implicit American acceptance for a tough Chinese-style regime in Cuba. He realizes that if he were to permit a broad political opening, his government could be overwhelmed by spiraling popular demands for participatory government. The generals and the civilian elite alike would oppose any sudden political decompression, rightly fearing that they would lose most of their prerogatives. So the raulista regime will be keenly committed to maintaining order and keeping popular expectations for political change in check.
That will not be easy. Pent up demand for sweeping change will be powerful. A small and heroic dissident minority has been speaking out insistently and challenging the regime. Its numbers will probably grow exponentially after Fidel. Cubans want to be able to travel, study, and live abroad. They want the freedom to read whatever they want, to enjoy the media entertainments available in almost every other country in the world, and to express themselves without fear. More and more want to own property and businesses and be free from the eavesdropping and intimidation of the ubiquitous security services. The younger generations, who have known nothing but the rigors and sacrifices of the revolutionary years, are the most desirous of change.
Small but broadly representative dissident and human rights movements have coalesced around these needs. All involved are pacifists. They are Cuba’s Gandhis and Martin Luther Kings seeking peaceful democratic change. Although they are not allowed any access to the media on the island, they are getting known by word of mouth.
Independent libraries have opened in the homes of many brave citizens who lend non-subversive books to neighbors. A small cadre of independent journalists is waiting in the wings for the time any modicum of free speech is allowed. Now they compose mostly social and literary stories that are phoned or mailed abroad for dissemination. Courageous human rights activists have been calling on the regime to free political prisoners. Osvaldo Paya’s Varela Project, operating entirely within Cuban law, gathered many thousands of signatures from ordinary citizens on petitions seeking a democratic opening.
When these independent voices acquired real resonance in the spring of 2003, Fidel pounced ferociously. About seventy-five individuals were arrested and summarily imprisoned for terms up to twenty-eight years. They included one of the country’s most prominent poets, independent economists, librarians, journalists, and leaders of the Varela Project. Books were seized and burned, fax machines destroyed. One activist was found guilty of sending information about human rights to Amnesty International. An independent librarian was jailed for sharing a copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Whether a raulista regime will survive for just months or for many years will likely depend largely on how skillfully he and his associates deal with this coalescing independent civil society. Lacking Fidel’s exceptional leadership qualities and credibility with the populace, Raul will be hard pressed to strike just the right balance. He will have to take tangible steps to assuage public discontent and raise living standards for the masses, but without opening the valves too much or too quickly. He will have to do better than he has in the past at communicating with the people. And he will probably have to be adroit at managing crises. It may prove to be too large an order.
If he is to have any chance of retaining power for long, he will have to overcome the ingrained popular image of “Raul the Terrible,” the role he allowed Fidel to cast him in since the early 1950s. His government could not survive long, for example, if he resorted to the kind of brutal force in the streets that he threatened to employ in 1994. There are enough cannons in the military’s inventory to maintain order, but they cannot be deployed or used against the people. Killing civilians in the streets or plazas would be all but certain to bring down his regime, or that of any other successor who ordered it.
Perhaps in his own twilight years, this complex, repressed younger brother will find his own independent political persona. Maybe then the real Raul, unencumbered by Fidel’s uncompromising demands will come into focus. Their sister Juanita, and others who have known Raul are convinced that once he is freed of the need to please Fidel and honor his dictates, he will finally become his own person. Huber Matos, the former guerrilla leader who fought with the Castro brothers, told me, “Raul’s traumas are the result of being Fidel’s brother.”
Perhaps, then, Fidel’s death will be Raul’s catharsis.