But the real question is what will happen then. The dilemma facing the Cuban people—not just those who live on the island but those in Mexico, Spain, Miami or New Jersey—is whether the Pearl of the Antilles will finally join the rest of Latin America or continue to be a singular exception, as it has been for most of the last two centuries. For all of the 19th century, Cuba remained a Spanish colony while the rest of the Americas broke free. Independence in 1899 was short-lived as the 1901 Platt Amendment transformed Cuba rapidly into a formal protectorate of the United States. Freed from this U.S. tutelage by Franklin Roosevelt in 1934, Cuba enjoyed a brief period of Latin normality, when it experienced the same traumas and thrills—elections, coups, assassinations—as the rest of Latin America. But this interlude ended soon after Fidel and his comrades entered Havana in 1959, and turned Cuba into an exception once again.
From 1960 until today, Cuba has been what its rulers call a socialist country, for decades the only Soviet-bloc state in the Americas. Later it became part of a tiny group of nations that possess a different political, economic, social and foreign-policy approach from other parts of the world and the region. While the rest of Latin America, at least since the early 1980s, has moved consistently, though on occasion slowly and insufficiently, toward full-fledged representative democracy, respect for human rights, market economies, globalization and relatively peaceful relationships with Washington, Cuba has remained frozen. It is as if time itself stopped in Havana, where one can not only still admire the shark-fin cars of the 1950s but also dance in the high-ceilinged and chandeliered ballrooms of the hotels and casinos of the same epoch. Havana continues to bait the United States, to meddle in others’ business, to flout international conventions and to pursue an economic policy that has demolished many of the undeniable advances it achieved in health and education during the 1960s and ’70s.
With moderate governments—to the left of center in Chile, Brazil, Uruguay and Peru, or to the right of center in Colombia, Mexico and most of Central America—Cuba once again is Latin America’s odd man out. Only Hugo Chávez’s eccentric “socialism of the 21st century” even remotely resembles its contours; not even Evo Morales’s Bolivia does.
This, then, is the fundamental choice the island will face when the Castro era finally comes to a close: does it wish to cease being an exception, and simply be one more member of the Latin American concert of nations, for better (democratic, globalized, open) or worse (a high degree of inequality, limited leeway in dealings with the United States, slow progress in health and education)? Perhaps it should resign itself, like the rest of the region, to limiting its distinguishing traits within the region to culture, geography and history instead of insisting on going its own way, stressing its differences and punching well above its weight, whatever the cost to its inhabitants.
Beyond the byzantine discussions about Fidel’s imminent demise or his next appearance in public, or whether his last Granma column was in fact a rebuttal of Raúl’s apparent willingness to negotiate with the next American administration, the real option is this: join the club, or emphasize the exception. Raúl Castro might prefer the former; Fidel will impose the latter as long as he is around. It is a lacerating choice.
