DEATH OF A DICTATOR
CUBA’S FUTURE: With brother still in power, what’s next for nation?
MEXICO CITY — Fidel Castro, the fiery apostle of revolution who brought the Cold War to the Western Hemisphere in 1959 and then defied the United States for nearly half a century as Cuba’s maximum leader, bedeviling 11 U.S. presidents and briefly pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war, died Friday. He was 90.
In declining health for several years, Castro had orchestrated what he hoped would be the continuation of his Communist revolution, stepping aside in 2006 when he was felled by a serious illness. He provisionally ceded much of his power to his younger brother Raúl, now 85, and two years later formally resigned as president.’
Fidel Castro had held on to power longer than any other living national leader except Queen Elizabeth II. He became a towering international figure whose importance in the 20th century far exceeded what might have been expected from the head of state of a Caribbean island nation of 11 million people.
He dominated his country with strength and symbolism from the moment he triumphantly entered Havana on Jan. 8, 1959, and completed his overthrow of Fulgencio Ba-
tista by delivering his first major speech in the capital before tens of thousands of admirers at the vanquished dictator’s military headquarters.
Fidel wielded power like a tyrant, controlling every aspect of the island’s existence. From atop a Cuban army tank, he directed his country’s defense at the Bay of Pigs. Countless details fell to him, from selecting the color of uniforms Cuban soldiers wore in Angola to overseeing a program to produce a superbreed of milk cows. He personally set the goals for sugar harvests. He personally sent countless men to prison. Despised, yet hailed
But it was more than repression and fear that kept him and his totalitarian government in power for so long. He had both admirers and detractors in Cuba and around the world. Some saw him as a ruthless despot who trampled rights and freedoms; many others hailed him as the crowds did that first night, as a revolutionary hero for the ages.
Even when he fell ill and was hospitalized with diverticulitis in summer 2006, giving up most of his powers for the first time, Fidel tried to dictate the details of his own medical care and orchestrate the continuation of his Communist revolution, engaging a plan as old as the revolution itself.
By handing power to his brother, Castro once more raised the ire of his enemies in Washington. U.S. officials condemned the transition, saying it prolonged a dictatorship and again denied the long-suffering Cuban people a chance to control their own lives.
For half a century, as Fidel transformed Cuba into a communist state and sparred with the U.S., his brother Raúl worked in his shadow, the authoritarian leader’s disciplined, junior partner.
But by the time the elder Castro died Friday night, Raúl, had transformed Cuba into country that was unrecognizable in many ways — and yet remarkably the same.
Raúl discarded some of the precepts that Fidel had considered sacred, chipping away at the communist scaffold his brother had built. And in a stunning embrace that caught the world off guard, he negotiated an end to the 50year diplomatic standoff with the U.S. that Fidel had fiercely maintained. New economic course
It is now solidly Raúl’s Cuba, an island where millennials talk to their cousins on Skype, where restaurant owners hustle for zucchini at privately run farms and where Americans clog the streets of old Havana.
Over all this, he has a firm hold on power, secured by trusted military leaders in vital positions and a new economic course of his making in which private enterprise plays an essential — but unthreatening — role.
Still, Fidel died at a time of great uncertainty. Cuba’s regional benefactor, Venezuela, is collapsing economically. And many Cubans are trying to reach the U.S. while special immigration privileges are still in place.
And now, after multiple rounds of changes by President Barack Obama to knit the two countries closer together, a wild card has emerged: the election of Donald Trump, who has threatened to undermine the détente between the two nations unless he can extract more concessions from the Castro government.
With Fidel gone, a lingering question may now be answered: Did the weight of his legacy hold Raúl back, preventing him from substantially dismantling the cherished system his brother had constructed, or were the slow, halting steps toward change a reflection of Raúl’s own desire to insert new life into the ailing Cuban economy — without weakening the structures of state power? Stability for nation
Roberto Veiga, the director of Cuba Posible, an organization based in Havana that promotes political dialogue, said that Fidel’s passing would “deeply affect people” on the island, but that it would not change the course of the country.
“It’s a long time since Fidel was in the presidency,” he added. “Raúl Castro has been leading the country for years. He has a team. There’s stability.”
Enrique López Oliva, a retired church historian in Cuba, expects change. While he did not rejoice in Castro’s death, he said, he found himself excited about the possibilities that it could bring for Cuba’s future.
“NowRaúl will feel more free,” he said. “The process of change will undoubtedly accelerate.”
Some experts contend that Raúl held back true economic reforms because his brother opposed them. Fidel, some believe, prevented the Communist Party from announcing major new endeavors at the party congress this year, López said. A pledge to step down
Some Cuba watchers wonder if the breakthrough with the U.S. could have been achieved if Fidel had still been in power or in better health. But others believe that the changes must have carried Fidel’s endorsement, or at least that Raúl acted in a belief that he was following his brother’s grand design.
In the televised speech to announce the rapprochement with the U.S., Raúl said his openness to talks was “a position that was expressed to the United States government, both in public and in private, by our Comrade Fidel at different moments of our long struggle.”
While Raúl is firmly in control, and seemingly in good health, many people inside and outside Cuban wonder what kind of Cuba comes after him.
Raúl, 85, has pledged to step down in 2018. His vice president and former minister for higher education, Miguel Mario Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, 56, is expected to fill the presidency. But in the opaque, tightly guarded circles of Cuban politics, it is impossible to know for sure.