Cuba: What if Castro comes back?
LONDON —For anyone who knew the old Soviet Union, a visit to Cuba is
always a trip down memory lane. From the ubiquitous revolutionary
slogans and the absence of advertising to the cautious shorthand in
conversation (stroking the chin means Fidel Castro) and the sour,
fatalistic jokes, it is a Communist country of the classic era. But this
time, I kept thinking about an old Soviet joke that had not made it to
Cuba (though I have now done my best to get it started there).
A rising young apparatchik in the Communist Party, starting to enjoy the
privileges that come to high officials of the regime, brings his peasant
mother to Moscow from her distant, impoverished village and installs her
in a grand apartment in the Arbat. His mother, instead of being
delighted, just falls silent and looks worried. So he takes her to one
of the special Party shops, a wonderland of western consumer goods
unavailable to ordinary Russians, and tells her to buy anything she wants.
She buys only a kilo of oranges, and looks even more troubled.
Desperate to please her, he takes her to dinner at the Praha, the
grandest and most expensive restaurant in the capital, but by now
there's no denying it. This display of privilege is not impressing her;
it's frightening her half to death. So her son finally asks her straight
out: Isn't she pleased with what he has accomplished? Isn't she proud of
him?
"It's wonderful, darling," she replies. "But what will happen to us if
the Communists come back?"
The question in Cuba is: What will happen if Fidel comes back? It's
eight months since he fell gravely ill and handed the president's powers
over to his brother Raul, and the "transition" is complete. Fidel's
lengthy illness created the ideal circumstances for an orderly hand-over
of power, and by the end of last year the new collective leadership was
firmly in charge. Most people were quietly relieved that it was all over.
It felt a bit strange no longer having Fidel on TV all the time nagging
and exhorting the population, a larger-than-life father figure, but
after 47 years of that most people were very tired of being treated like
backward children. There was enormous respect for Fidel in Cuba, but
there was also enormous weariness with him, combined with a great secret
fear of what would happen when he finally went.
Partly it was just fear of the unknown — 80 percent of Cuba's population
have known no other leader — but it was also fear of chaos, because
everybody knew that the United States would use Castro's death to try to
change the regime. As Wayne Smith, former head of the U.S. diplomatic
mission in Havana, said recently, Cuba has the same effect on the U.S.
that the full moon has on a werewolf. Washington doubtless had all sorts
of regime-change projects lined up and ready to launch as soon as the
Old Man died.
The new leadership is collective, with brother Raul out front as
chairman of the board. Its members are well known and respected by the
Cuban public — people like Felipe Perez Roque, the foreign minister,
Ricardo Alarcon, head of the National Assembly, Ricardo Lage, now in
charge of energy, and Francisco Soberon, governor of the Central Bank —
and they can expect a couple of years' grace to show that they can grow
the economy faster and give Cubans more freedom without destroying the
welfare state that gives people free education and health care.
Or rather, they did expect a couple of years' grace — but then Fidel
started to get better. He is still far from fit, but he is out of bed
and on the phone, and the specter looms that he might decide he is well
enough to take over again.
"[Fidel cannot participate in decision-making] the same way he did
before, because he has to dedicate a good part of his time to
recuperating physically," said Ricardo Alarcon last week. "To what
extent he will go back to doing things the way he did, the way he is
accustomed to, it's up to him." And it really is up to him. Fidel Castro
so dominates modern Cuban history, and the reflex respect that all his
colleagues feel toward him is so deep, that nobody would tell him he
can't take back supreme power.
But it would be a disaster for the regime. Many Cubans revere Fidel, but
few want him back in power, jerking them around again with his constant,
arbitrary changes of policy. Moreover, the odds are very much against
another smooth transition of power some time in the future, when death
finally does take Fidel. Miracles happen, but not with any regularity.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist.
http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070327/OPINION04/70327011
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