Late in the week, unconfirmable rumors said he was sitting up and eating. The loyal sibling who had been named as acting leader, 75-year-old Defense Minister Raúl Castro, remained conspicuously out of sight, as did just about every other senior member of the two brothers’ circle. Some observers said the regime was trying to project a sense of normalcy. Still, people in Havana seemed no more uneasy than usual. After 47 years under Fidel’s rule, Cubans have learned to wait. They spend life standing or sitting as patiently as possible while their officials insist that everything is OK.
Up north, the reaction was less restrained. Many of Miami’s 650,000 Cuban-Americans danced on Fidel’s grave, ignoring the fact that he wasn’t in it yet. For the first time, the Cuban dictator had turned over power, even if it was to his brother. In Miami, that was cause for a nonstop street party. The exiles hate Raúl, too, but never mind. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, a leader in the exile community, recalls his father predicting long ago: “When Fidel Castro goes, this regime will disintegrate like a sugar cube dropped in a glass of water.” Roger Noriega, former assistant secretary of State for Western Hemisphere affairs, thinks the younger Castro can’t hold on more than a few months. “I don’t see that Raúl has the legs to pull this off,” he says. “I don’t think he has the credibility or awe of the people.” There are potential schisms in the military that could bring down the regime, Noriega believes, but real change can only come from the grass roots. “This is the time for a burst of pride in the Cuban people,” he says. “They need to do it themselves.”
Still, Washington is desperate to help. On Wednesday a bipartisan team of Cuban-American lawmakers met at the White House to swap ideas about fostering democracy on the island. “Everything was discussed,” says Diaz-Balart, who was there. Another participant, Sen. Robert Menendez, says one topic was ways to gain more control over the granting of U.S. visas in Cuba. The State Department issues roughly 20,000 a year there, mainly by a lottery system, but the Castro regime decides who may leave the island. There was some discussion of giving visa priority to Cuban physicians living not only on the island but in many other countries, too. Doctors are among Cuba’s proudest exports; if they start defecting, the regime is in big trouble.
Everyone has ideas. Sen. Mel Martinez, another participant at the Wednesday meeting, wrote to Donald Rumsfeld the same day asking the Defense secretary for communications aircraft to transmit American TV broadcasts into Cuba. Others want to send gear to the island’s dissidents, particularly items such as computers, fax machines and satellite phones. Diaz-Balart likens it to what the Reagan administration did for the opposition in Poland while that country was still under communist rule. Far more controversial is a proposal to loosen restrictions on travel to the island, allowing Cuban-Americans to join their relatives there and perhaps spread democratic ideas. That would be a big departure from the administration’s hard-line policy on keeping Cuba isolated–and Havana hardly seems likely to permit a flood of troublemakers.
Raúl’s biography offers little encouragement to democrats. He’s been living in the older Castro’s larger-than-life shadow ever since the early 1950s, when they launched a revolt against the thoroughly corrupt dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. The brothers were thrown in jail together, left Cuba together for a two-year exile in Mexico and finally in 1959 toppled the Batista regime together. The younger one earned the nickname “Raúl the Terrible” for his readiness to eliminate anyone Fidel suspected of treachery, and at the revolution’s close he directed the summary execution of Batista troops by dozens and scores.
There is more hope that the younger brother may ease up economically, possibly in the way China’s communist rulers did. Fidel’s estranged daughter Alina Fernández, another member of the Miami community, has described her uncle as “the practical brother.” When the island lost its financial lifeline with the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Raúl argued forcefully for opening up the island to more foreign investment, and he has shown considerable interest in how China has done it. “Raúl is one of the foremost advocates of decentralizing the economy,” says retired CIA analyst Brian Latell, author of the younger Castro’s biography “After Fidel.” Other veteran Cuba watchers aren’t so sure. “Initially he will be as harsh or harsher than Fidel, and I don’t see any opening of the economy for the first year or two,” says Jaime Suchlicki, director of the University of Miami’s Institute of Cuban and Cuban-American Studies. “Raúl is no Gorbachev, and I don’t think he can afford to become a reformer.”
Long before that can happen, a lot of exiles hope he’ll be gone. So far, U.S. authorities are reporting no unusual traffic across the Florida Straits, whether by Cubans fleeing their country or by anti-Castro activists heading in. “This is not a time for people to try to be getting in the water and going either way,” said White House Press Secretary Tony Snow. A few forlorn banners hang from government buildings in Havana, bearing the slogan VIVA FIDEL! EIGHTY MORE YEARS. His 80th-birthday celebration, scheduled for Aug. 13, has been postponed to December. The question remains if he has even 80 more days.
