When I first took the job as the Tribune’s Havana correspondent last summer, everyone pretty much had the same reaction: You’re going to be there when it happens.
Of course, no one had to explain what they meant. Yes, I answered, Cuban President Fidel Castro is getting up in years and “it” could happen soon. Then again, maybe not.
Castro has outlasted nine U.S. presidents and countless wacky assassination attempts. He has survived a failed invasion, a near-nuclear holocaust, a punishing economic embargo, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and numerous mistakes of his own making.
Forty-four years after leading his rebel forces to victory, he remains in power, defying the eternal enmity of his sworn enemies among the hundreds of thousands of countrymen who have fled his rule.
Most Cubans have not lived a day without Castro in some way entering their minds, whether it’s his visage on a highway billboard, his words painted on the facade of a building or the nightly newscast beaming his image at the opening of a new school.
Then, last month, the ubiquitous Castro suddenly disappeared. He missed a key national assembly meeting. A few days passed. The official line was that the 76-year-old leader was suffering leg pains and that doctors ordered him to rest.
But was there something more to it? Had “it” finally happened? Could anybody dare to think what a post-Castro Cuba would look like and, for that matter, the rest of Latin America, where the bearded revolutionary has held sway for more than four decades?
In many ways, Cuba and Latin America are already looking past the aging leader. Despite his relentless invectives against the United States government, the dollar is the currency of life here. Trade with the monster to the north is increasing exponentially.
And the separation between the haves–Cubans with dollars and the privilege of traveling abroad–and the have-nots is perhaps greater than at any time since the 1959 revolution, communist ideology notwithstanding.
Castro can still call out hundreds of thousands of people on a moment’s notice to rail against what he sees as capitalism’s inherent injustices and expound on the revolution’s much-heralded advances in health care and education.
Despite the hardships of life on the island, Castro is admired, if not loved, by many Cubans. Many others, even those who oppose his rule, respect his audacity and determination to never yield to the most powerful nation in the history of humanity.
His trademark theme, the bankruptcy of the neoliberal economic model, resonates with many at a time of profound economic crisis across much of Latin America. But the scramble for dollars here now occupies the energy of most Cubans these days. Many Cubans, it seems, don’t have time to listen to the Commandante or his ideas anymore.
At a recent political rally, thousands of Cubans clapped and waved flags as a teenage student, a karate champion and the director of a maternity ward hammered away with youthful clarity at communism’s predetermined triumph over capitalism.
“Viva Fidel!” the crowd shouted in response to the speaker’s calls. “Socialism or death! We will be victorious!”
But in between the chants, some Cubans dozed off while others wore mile-long stares that spoke volumes about the political and ideological fatigue that has descended on the island.
In the rest of Latin America, some leftists still see the revolution through rose-colored lenses, especially given the continent’s horrendous violence and poverty. They see the movement’s ideals of equality and sacrifice as admirable in a world fixated on mindless celebrity and crass consumerism.
But no one, it seems–not Brazil’s newly elected leftist president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, nor Venezuela’s populist president, Hugo Chavez–is looking to copy Cuba’s economic and political system.
“I’m not a socialist,” Chavez said in a recent interview with foreign correspondents. “I’m a humanist.”
Chavez spoke those words in part to ease the fear of many Venezuelans that he is trying to establish a Castro-like dictatorship in the oil-rich country. False rumors of Cuban militias landing on its Caribbean coast have sent waves of panic among middle- and upper-class Venezuelans, who are demanding Chavez’s resignation and early elections.
Yet, while that fear is a testament to Castro’s lingering psychological grip over Latin America, the massive and largely peaceful protests in Venezuela reflect more the isolation of Cuba, where such protests are unheard of, than any real influence.
In fact, Cuban officials are following events there closely not because they can influence the outcome but because Chavez’s downfall and a cutoff of cheap Venezuelan oil imports would further devastate the fragile Cuban economy.
Even the continent’s most powerful guerrilla force, the 18,000-strong Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, pays only lip service to its leftist ideology as it presses its seemingly endless war against the Bogota government.
The FARC continues its car bombings and assassinations because the group knows little else, not because it sees them as a strategy for solving Colombia’s profound economic and social problems. Colombians, sensing as much, strongly back President Alvaro Uribe’s campaign to ramp up the war in an effort to pound the guerrillas into submission.
Of course, Cuba is grooming a new generation of communist leaders to take over when Castro finally passes from the scene. Among the most prominent of the younger generation is Felipe Perez Roque, Cuba’s foreign minister, and Carlos Lage, the country’s economic czar.
Raul Castro, Fidel’s younger brother and the head of the Cuban armed forces, has been formally designated as the man to step into the top spot. But many observers say the younger Castro–he’s in his early 70s–lacks the thirst for power as well as the charisma and political acumen to remain there for very long.
All this is complicated by the fact that the issue of succession is still generally taboo here, with Castro portrayed both as an indispensable, Moses-like figure who has led his people to the promised land, and as just another communist functionary whose death will be outlived by a popular system.
That contradiction makes for some interesting reading. Under the headline “The candidates of the people,” a passport-size photograph and thumbnail biography of Castro was published last month in the Communist Party newspaper next to those of a student leader, a railroad labor official, a sports director and dozens of other obscure candidates for the Cuban National Assembly.
As if he were some fledgling politician whose election was in doubt, Castro listed several major accomplishments, which included leading “the Cuban people’s struggle for the consolidation of the revolutionary process, the advance toward socialism and the unity of all revolutionary forces.”
In truth, nobody knows what will happen when Castro finally passes from the scene, but no one can replace him–not his singular will, not his obsession with the U.S., not his fabled ego nor his sense of mission.
There could be a peaceful transition or a civil war, a military government or a democracy, more communism or more capitalism.
In a New Year’s Eve e-mail, one top Cuban official wished everyone success in 2003 and ended with the hope that “Fidel will be with us a thousand years.”
Even for someone of Castro’s legendary endurance, that seemed a bit optimistic. Yet, for now, any talk of Castro’s imminent demise is premature. He reappeared after a week’s absence, smiling and looking healthy for a man in the twilight of his life but whose parents lived into their 80s and 90s.
In a letter published Christmas Day, Castro wrote almost sheepishly that his brief “rest,” as he called it, was caused by an infected bug bite on his left leg. After taking antibiotics, Castro said he was ready to continue on into 2003.
“I’m fine, dear compatriots,” Castro wrote, “and I feel more optimistic than ever about the future of the revolution.”
