3 Jun 2008, 0728 hrs IST,AFP
HAVANA: Raul Castro, Cuba's President, celebrates two anniversaries on
Tuesday: his 77th birthday, and his first 100 days in power since
formally taking over from his brother Fidel in February.
The latter milestone is the one, Cubans and much of the world are
focusing on, as stock is taken of the changes he has thus far ushered in
on the communist island state, speculation is mounting as to how much
further he will go.
Cubans can now buy computers, own mobile telephones, hire cars and spend
nights in hotels previously only accessible to foreigners.
Raul Castro has implemented agricultural reform to address the national
repercussions of the world food crisis, giving farmers better pay and a
freer hand to acquire machinery.
He has commuted 30 death sentences and freed some political prisoners,
and signed human rights accords.
Intellectuals live less in fear of of decrying censorship, television
has fewer taboos imposed, and even Granma, the venerable mouthpiece of
Cuba's Communist Party, has taken to publishing grievances from residents.
But the list of wanted transformations remains long, and includes:
opening the country to private enterprise, permission to travel abroad,
and an end to the double-currency system.
Raul Castro, who officially succeeded his brother on February 24, has
been de facto ruler since July 31, 2006, when Fidel Castro, 81, left the
political stage with serious health problems.
His reforms have been welcomed by many in Latin America, but Cuba's
greatest foe, the United States, has dismissed them as "cosmetic" and
said they were insufficient for it to lift its economic embargo on the
island.
Some Cubans agree more has to be done, and quickly. "It's not enough for
the measures to just knock at the door. They have to go inside the house
and sit at the table, and quickly," said a 22-year-old economy student,
Pablo, who declined to give his full name.
"It's still the same thing: repression," said Elizardo Sanchez, head of
the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, an
opposition group that is banned but tolerated.
Still struggling economically, Cuba has grown to rely on the oil-funded
largesse of Fidel Castro's acolyte, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez,
but there is hope that sector too will be overhauled.
"With Raul, there is clearly a change of style and the possibility of
economic reforms. There has to be a new government in Cuba soon, because
in five years' time, the current one will have been here for 82 years,"
said a Cuban political analyst, Marifeli Perez Stable, with the
Inter-American Dialogue think tank based in Washington.
That remains to be seen, however. Raul Castro has not cast free the
hardline supporters of Fidel and the revolution, instead naming several
of them to the State Council that decides many important national
matters, and to the political bureau of the Communist Party.
"The anti-reformists, the hardliners, remain in the line of succession,
which shows the refusal of the regime to further open the economy and
its rejection of a political openness," said Jaime Suchlicki, an expert
at the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies in Miami.
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