Cuba looks to a future without a fading Fidel

Cuba looks to a future without a fading Fidel
James Bone, Havana

If President Castro fails to attend his 80th birthday celebrations
today, it may mean the end for the world's longest-serving leader

After dark in one of the Cuban capital’s few privately owned
restaurants, or paladares, the conversation turns cautiously to politics.

With President Castro so unwell that he may miss today’s huge military
parade to mark his 80th birthday, Cubans are on the brink of a new era
when key decisions will no longer be taken by one man alone.

“It’s been more than 40 years the same. No nobody knows what will
happen. There is great uncertainty. People want liberty — more liberty,”
says a man who works in a state-owned metals factory.

His friend, a cook, comes over and whispers in my ear: “Fidel’s a user.
Cuban money is worth nothing. To get clothes, beer, perfume, you need
convertible currency. All you can buy with Cuban money is rice and beans
and cooking oil.” Scratching his bulging belly, he consoles himself,
however. “But I eat as well as Fidel — and I’m going to live on.”

Hundreds of blue plastic garden chairs have already been put out in rows
in the Plaza de la Revolución for dignitaries to review the troops at
today’s parade. Shiny tanks and missile launchers have already been
rumbling through the 11-acre square in rehearsals.

A line of more comfortable chairs has been placed at the foot of the
colossal statue of José Martí, the Cuban nationalist hero, the spot from
where Mr Castro has delivered many of his legendary, almost day-long
speeches. It will be the first military parade in Havana for a decade
and the state-run papers report that 300,000 people have been mobilised
to march. Yet it remains unclear whether Fidel Castro, the world’s
longest-serving President, will be able to attend.

After fainting in public in 2001 and fracturing his kneecap and elbow in
a fall in 2004, Mr Castro underwent emergency surgery for “sustained”
intestinal bleeding in July.

For the past four months, he has been seen only in photographs and
videos, even skipping a Non-Aligned Movement conference in the Cuban
capital. His gaunt appearance in the last video on October 28 led many
to conclude that he was too ill to take back the reins of power.

Based on the images, US officials say that Mr Castro appears to be
suffering from terminal cancer of the stomach, colon or pancreas, and is
unlikely to survive beyond the end of next year.

Mr Castro actually turned 80 on August 13, but his surgery forced him to
put off his birthday celebration until today’s 50th anniversary of the
landing of the Granma. It was the yacht that brought his guerrilla band
from Mexico to launch the revolution against General Fulgencio Batista,
the US-backed dictator.

When the postponement was first announced, it was assumed that Mr Castro
would be well enough to appear at today’s military parade — the
highlight of five days of celebrations that included an art exhibition,
a concert, and a symposium called “Memory and Future: Cuba and Fidel”
that was attended by fawning intellectuals from 81 countries from
Venezuela to Mozambique.

Among them were Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian author, who said
that he planned to return when the Cuban leader turned 100, and Gérard
Depardieu, the French actor.

Leftist Latin American and Caribbean leaders, including President
Morales of Bolivia, the newly elected President Ortega of Nicaragua and
President Preval of Haiti, were scheduled to attend. President Chávez of
Venezuela had to stay at home for his country’s election tomorrow.

This week Mr Castro sent a message to a birthday gala attended by
several thousand people in the Karl Marx Theatre in Havana, which said
that he could not join them, on doctors’ advice. He was also absent from
last night’s closing ceremony.

Dan Erikson, a Cuba analyst at the Inter-American Dialogue, a
Washington-based think-tank, said that the country has been “running on
autopilot” since Mr Castro relinquished power to Raúl, his younger
brother and the Defence Minister.

“If Castro does not show, or if he appears only briefly or does not
appear well, that would be a sign he would not be returning,” Mr Erikson
said. “On the other hand, this would be the perfect moment for him to
make a dramatic speech.”

The Cuban Government waited four days after Fidel’s surgery before
announcing that Raúl was taking command. The delay was seen not merely
as a waiting period to determine whether Fidel would recover, but also
as giving the security services time to prepare for possible protests.

Whatever the precise state of the President’s health, the country is now
well into a transition and so far there has been no serious threat to
the continued rule of the Castro dynasty.

“We recognise Raúl as the steadfast guardian of the Cuban Revolution,”
Ramiro Valdés, the Information Minister and a former security chief,
told a military-civilian rally this week.

Raúl, who is five years younger than Fidel, has been Defence Minister
for 47 years but lacks the charisma that has made Fidel an icon of the Left.

He is the runt of the seven Castro children, born to the maid of a
wealthy Spanish immigrant landowner. That he stands a head shorter than
Fidel, the third-born, and can barely grow a wispy goatee on his chin
compared with his big brother's famous beard, has fuelled persistent
rumours that he was sired by a different father, a local guardsman named
Felipe Miraval.

Raúl is expected to embrace the "Chinese model" of economic
liberalisation, twinned with continued political oppression. "I do not
think Raúl has any choice. Raúl has got to govern by giving them more
bread and less revolutionary circus, because Raúl is not a circus master
like Fidel," said Brian Latell, a former CIA Cuba analyst and author of
After Fidel: The Inside Story of Castro's Regime and Cuba's Next Leader.

"Things may change, but it will take five years," a carpenter in
historic Old Havana said. "Foreigners come to Cuba but they don't see
how Cubans live. They take a bus tour with government guides. It's very
hard for Cubans."

Since taking over, Raúl has governed in a much more collegial manner.
The proclamation putting him in charge also named six other senior
figures from the Government and Communist Party Politburo to fill
Fidel's other positions.

Experts predict, however, that Raúl will wait till after Fidel's death
before renewing his push for economic reform. "I think Raúl is attracted
to the Chinese model. He is probably setting the State to give
legitimacy to such economic reformulation once Fidel is gone. He cannot
say it before Fidel dies, because Fidel hates the Chinese model," Mr
Latell said.

The alleyways of Old Havana crawl with tourists, who treat the city's
historic core as a Spanish Colonial theme park with a dash of
revolutionary zest in their mojitos. But Cubans are stopped from
entering the high-priced hotels and lingerers have their ID cards checked.

Beyond the tourist zone, Havana's picturesque colonial architecture
continues to crumble. There are signs of the prosperity coming from an
influx of foreign money, however, with some new buildings under
construction and cheap new Asian cars now easily outnumbering the
vintage American automobiles left over from before the revolution. The
paladares were once seen as the vanguard of economic liberalisation in
Cuba in response to the loss of Soviet subsidies.

But in his final years, Fidel has cracked down on private enterprise and
political dissent in an apparent attempt to maintain the purity of his
1959 revolution as his legacy.

Two years ago Fidel abandoned a decade-long experiment with permitting
Cubans to possess US dollars.

One pensioner said that his brother, who works in a state-run cigar
factory, has to steal cigars and sell them on the black market to survive.

A young woman selling fruit at the Cuatro Caminos market in Havana said
that she earned more than 1,000 pesos (about £23) a month working at the
privately owned stall, compared with 400 as a government nurse.

Her boss, who rents the stall from the Government and buys produce from
peasants who bring it to the city, said that he made ten times what he
was paid at a state-owned fruit company. "Things have to change. Working
for the Government you earn nothing," he said. "But while Fidel stays
alive, things will remain the same. He is the one who made it like this.
After that it will change." It is noticeable, however, that ordinary
Cubans speak most often of economic liberty, rather than political rights.

A revolutionary life

# Fidel Castro has ruled Cuba since January 1959 and has been President
since 1976, the longest rule of any world leader

# Castro's four-and-a-half hour address to the UN General Assembly in
1960 was the longest in the organisation's history. He accused US
"monopolists" of having turned Cuba into a colony and attacked both
American presidential candidates, John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon

# According to his former head of security, President Castro has
survived 638 attempts by the CIA to assassinate him. Plans included
using exploding molluscs to kill him while scuba diving, poisoning his
handkerchief and rigging a radio station with noxious gas. He once
quipped: "If surviving assassination attempts were an Olympic event, I
would win the gold medal"

# With the fall of the Soviet Union, one of Cuba's strongest allies is
now Venezuela. President Chávez, its leftist leader, provides President
Castro with cheap oil in exchange for 20,000 Cuban doctors, who work
mostly in Venezuela's poorer districts

# In May 2004, amid concerns about President Castro's health, his doctor
ridiculed rumours of the leader's imminent demise, and said that his
patient would live to the age of 140

# The average life expectancy for Cubans is 77.4 years, just less than
the 77.8 years for Americans

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2482402,00.html