Raul’s retirement ends 60-year rule of Castros

RAUL Castro, who is retiring from high public office, for most of his life toiled in the shadow of his older brother, Fidel Castro. Yet he also played a key role in Cuba’s 1959 revolution and the preservation of Cuban socialism.

While Fidel was the charismatic leader who rallied Cubans to defend the revolution and defy the US, Raul, 89, built the military into a formidable fighting force that saw off enemies including a US-backed invasion at the Bay of Pigs.

Later, after the fall of former benefactor, the Soviet Union, sent Cuba into an economic tailspin and left it politically isolated, Raul launched market-style reforms to its centralised economy and sought to normalise relations with Western powers.

But he leaves office amid an economic crisis that has caused shortages of even basic goods and is threatening universal access to quality healthcare and education, hailed by supporters of Cuban socialism as among the revolution’s most important achievements.

Former US president Donald Trump unravelled a detente Castro reached with Barack Obama and tightened the decades-old US trade embargo. The rollout of internet has fuelled internal dissent. Still, 30 years after the Cold War ended, Cuba remains one of the last Communist-run countries in the world.

“Always preferring the supportive role to his brother and carrying out that role brilliantly, Raul eventually had to take on Fidel’s leadership himself at a time when the revolution showed every sign of faltering,” said Hal Klepak, a Canadian historian living in Havana who wrote a book on Raul’s military life. “That it is still there, wounded and shaken but still there, in the face of massively powerful forces out to destroy it, is no small part a result of his leadership.”

Raul backed Fidel in his revolution against the US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista since 1953, when they led a failed assault on the Moncada military barracks. Later he demonstrated his leadership in the guerilla uprising in the Sierra Maestra mountains that finally overthrew Batista.

In the early years of Cuba’s one party system, he was known as an ironfisted ideologue involved in the summary trials and executions of Batista supporters, and later the imprisonment of thousands of political prisoners. He also built a rag-tag bunch of guerillas into a feared army that fought “anti-imperialist” wars abroad, notably in Angola where Cuban soldiers helped defeat South African troops.

An early admirer of communism, it was Raul and Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the Argentine-born doctor turned Marxist revolutionary, who persuaded Fidel to seek support from the Soviet Union. But he was also quick to launch reforms to move Cuba away from a Soviet-style command economy after the fall of the Berlin Wall plunged his nation into economic crisis. First he established thriving enterprises in the armed forces – which now control much of the economy. Upon becoming president in 2008, he expanded the private sector, seeking to decentralise state institutions and opening the economy to greater foreign investment.

“Raul’s 12 years in power will be remembered for the transformative policies he attempted to carry out despite concerted opposition from regime hardliners,” said Brian Latell, a former CIA analyst.

Raul’s retirement from the even more powerful position of Cuban Communist Party first secretary, expected to be made official today, will end six decades of rule by the Castro brothers. The jury is out on whether he will be remembered as a successful reformer, or as the caretaker of a failing socialist experiment, say analysts