[NYTr] Fidel's Last Battle? John Lee Anderson

[nytr at olm.blythe-systems.com]

[Actually, Anderson is probably not in Cuba, since he's been doing
some very interesting reporting from the Middle East, so the "Letter
from Cuba" super-head is a bit of a misnomer. -NY Transfer]

The New Yorker - July 24, 2006 issue (posted 8/5/2006)
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060731fa_fact2

Letter from Cuba

CASTRO'S LAST BATTLE

Can the revolution outlive its leader?

by JON LEE ANDERSON

Late one Friday afternoon in March, a crowd gathered for a rally in downtown
Havana to denounce an incident that had occurred the previous evening in San
Juan, Puerto Rico. During a game between Cuba and the Netherlands in the
first international Baseball Classic, a spectator held up a sign to the
television cameras which said ?Abajo Fidel???Down with Fidel??and shouted
similar sentiments to the Cubans on the field. Among them was Antonio
Castro, an orthopedic surgeon, who is the Cuban team?s doctor and one of
Fidel Castro?s sons. A Cuban official angrily confronted the protester,
whereupon Puerto Rican policemen detained him. He was released after
receiving a lecture about freedom of speech. Cuba won, 11?2, but the
following day, in a tone of high umbrage, Cuba?s official Communist Party
newspaper, Granma, decried the ?cynical counter-revolutionary provocations?
of U.S. and Puerto Rican officials.

The rally was held, as are most such events in Havana these days, outside
the U.S. Interests Section, a sleek seven-story building on a curving
stretch of Havana?s seaside promenade, the Malecón. In the absence of
diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba, the Interests
Section serves as the de-facto embassy. (The building is technically part of
the Swiss Embassy.) Six years ago, during the custody battle over Elián
González, the five-year-old boy who was rescued after his mother and others
drowned while trying to reach Florida in a motorboat, Castro ordered the
construction of a permanent protest forum on a traffic island in front of
the Interests Section. Today, the Anti-Imperialist Tribunal, as it is known,
consists of a raised stage studded with klieg lights atop a bunkerlike
command center. A large banner bears a photomontage of men with guns, houses
burning, people weeping, and the baleful verdict ?You did this.?

The rally was not open to the general public. Guarding the approaches at
road barricades were several dozen policemen. A few hundred people, mostly
sports officials, athletes, and their relatives, listened as a baseball
player told the crowd, ?In the face of the shameless robbery of our players,
and the constant attacks against our people, they have still not been able
to undermine the quality of our team!? An elderly black man got up onstage
and said that in his youth he had played baseball in the United States. ?I
learned of that country?s racism personally when I was forced to sit in the
back of buses, eat in kitchens,? he said. He was followed by the mother of
one of the ballplayers. After denouncing the ?provocation? in Puerto Rico,
she signed off with ?Viva Fidel!?

Fidel wasn?t there, although, like most Cubans, he takes baseball very
seriously. (For years, there was a popular myth that as a student he was
scouted by an American major-league team.) Castro, who will celebrate his
eightieth birthday on August 13th, appears less and less frequently in
public, and only rarely at events where foreigners are present. For decades,
Castro?s legendary stamina served him well. He was thirty-two when he
overthrew Cuba?s dictator, Fulgencio Batista, in 1959, with a guerrilla army
of bearded fighters that included Ernesto (Che) Guevara. Castro presented
himself as a nationalist, determined to eradicate Cuba?s gangster-run casino
culture and end its reputation as ?the whorehouse of the Caribbean.? Once in
power, he moved quickly to the left, nationalizing large plantations (his
mother?s was among those seized) and foreign-owned businesses, and moved
closer to the Soviet Union. In 1961, the C.I.A., with the help of Cuban
émigrés, organized the Bay of Pigs invasion to remove Castro from power. The
invasion was ignominiously defeated, and since then, despite a U.S. trade
embargo and numerous assassination attempts, Fidel Castro has outlasted nine
American Presidents. He is the world?s longest-serving ruler.

In June, 2001, Castro fainted from heat exhaustion during a lengthy public
address, and in 2004, after delivering a speech, he stumbled and fell,
shattering his left kneecap and breaking his right arm. Although he still
gives the long speeches for which he is famous, his hands sometimes tremble
and he walks unsteadily; he has occasional bouts of forgetfulness and
incoherence; and he sometimes falls asleep in public. In briefings to
Congress last year, the C.I.A. reported that Castro was suffering from
Parkinson?s disease. Castro has mocked the report and said that, even if it
were true, he would be able to stay in office?citing Pope John Paul II as
his model.

This spring, a friend of Castro?s, a veteran Party loyalist, told me that
the Cuban leader was angustiado?literally, ?anguished??over his advancing
years, and obsessed by the idea that socialism might not survive him. As a
result, Castro has launched his last great fight, which he calls the Battle
of Ideas.

Castro?s goal is to reëngage Cubans with the ideals of the revolution,
especially young Cubans who came of age during what he called the Special
Period. In the early nineties, the collapse of the Soviet Union brought a
precipitous end to Cuba?s subsidies, and the economy imploded. The crisis
forced Castro to allow greater openness in the island?s economic and civil
life, but he now seems determined to reverse that. In a speech last
November, Castro said, ?This country can self-destruct, this revolution can
destroy itself.? Referring to the Americans, he said, ?They cannot destroy
it, but we can. We can destroy it, and it would be our fault.? And in May,
during an angry, seven-hour televised panel discussion that he convened to
protest his appearance on the Forbes list of the world?s richest leaders
(the magazine estimated his net worth at nine hundred million dollars),
Castro said, ?We must continue to pulverize the lies that are told against
us. . . .This is the ideological battle, everything is the Battle of Ideas.?

Castro has approached the campaign in the manner of a field marshal, with a
Central Command of ideological loyalists drawn from the Communist Youth
Union, the U.J.C. Some Cubans refer to them sarcastically as ?the Taliban.?
A better analogy might be the Red Guards: the Battle of Ideas has, in a
sense, become Cuba?s Cultural Revolution, although it does not have the same
violent intensity. Castro?s Central Command organizes marches and dispatches
specially recruited ?battalions? of Trabajadores Sociales, or Social
Workers, which now intervene in most areas of daily life. Earlier this year,
when Castro announced that Cubans should begin using more energy-efficient
light bulbs, the battalions went from house to house across the country to
deliver the bulbs and make sure that they were installed.

Privately, many Cubans regard the Battle of Ideas as a spectacle they must
tolerate but which is irrelevant to their lives. Most of them do not earn
enough money to eat well, much less live comfortably. As a result of the
island?s endemic shortages, almost everyone has some contact with Cuba?s
black market. The tension between the public Cuba of rallies and tribunals
and this hidden one is growing, and a number of Cubans and American
officials I spoke to fear that the pent-up chaos could erupt into open
unrest upon Castro?s death: looting, rioting, and revenge killings. Senator
Mel Martinez, of Florida, who left Cuba as a fifteen-year-old, in 1962,
said, ?My hope is that there will be one of those wonderful European
revolutions, like the Velvet Revolution, without violence, but because of
what?s gone on?the repression and the iron grip of those in power for so
long?there could be a vacuum, and that creates a potential for violence.?
Cubans worry about how the United States, and the exile community in
Miami?which has been poised for Castro?s departure for decades?will respond.
For them, and for Castro?s possible successors, this is an exceedingly
anxious time.

Jokes about Fidel Castro?s putative immortality once formed a canon in
Havana. In one, Castro is presented with the gift of a Galápagos turtle, but
he declines it after learning that it might live for more than a hundred
years. ?That?s the problem with pets,? Castro says. ?You get attached to
them, and then they die on you.? Most jokes now start from the opposite
premise. For example: Castro has died, and his body is lying in state.
Mourners have lined up to pay their respects. At the head of the line is
Felipe Pérez Roque, Cuba?s forty-one-year-old Foreign Minister, who is often
called Felipito. (Behind his back, he is also called a Taliban.) Pérez Roque
stands before Castro?s coffin, his head bowed, while Ricardo Alarcón, the
president of Cuba?s National Assembly, waits his turn. The minutes drag on;
Alarcón becomes impatient and taps Pérez Roque on the shoulder, whispering,
?Felipito, what are you waiting for? He?s dead, you know.? Pérez Roque
whispers back, ?I know he is; I just haven?t figured out how to tell him
that.?

Very few Cubans will speak on the record about ?the succession.? Castro
recently confirmed that, as many Cubans believed, he expected his brother
Raúl, who is the Defense Minister, to inherit the leadership of Cuba?s
Communist Party. In an interview with a European journalist, he said that he
had ?no doubt? that if he died the National Assembly would elect Raúl. But
because of Raúl?s own age?he is seventy-five?the received wisdom in Havana
is that he will share power with a civilian triumvirate made up of Pérez
Roque; Alarcón, who is sixty-nine; and Carlos Lage, the country?s economics
czar, who is fifty-four. Aurelio Alonso, a sociologist and editor who is a
Communist Party member, told me, ?This used to be a taboo subject, but Fidel
has begun to speak about it lately. Anyway, Fidel?s exit doesn?t concern me
in terms of who succeeds him; it?s known that there is a relief team
prepared??he mentioned Alarcón, Pérez Roque, and Lage. ?This doesn?t mean
there won?t be upset. There will be.?

One evening in April, I met with Alarcón in the Baroque Presidential Salon
of the venerable Hotel Nacional. The Nacional, with rooms that overlook the
Malecón, was built in 1930, and in its pre-Castro heyday it was the Havana
residence of gangsters like Meyer Lansky. Today, it is the hotel of choice
for visitors like Leonardo DiCaprio, Muhammad Ali, and Naomi Campbell. As we
looked at our menus, the manager informed me that Al Capone had once dined
in the same room.

Hearing this, Alarcón smiled somewhat uncomfortably. He is a slim,
loquacious man with a boyish face and a prominent forehead, and was wearing,
as usual, a white guayabera shirt. He began speaking about Cuba?s long and
complicated relationship with the United States. ?Fifty years of the same
U.S. policy, which is, it has to be said, a failed one,? he said. ?Of
course, now they are waiting for the next generation, based on the idea that
this government is finished. Well, if that?s the way it is, I guess I?m done
with, too, because I?m a member of the outgoing generation.? Alarcón paused.
?A half century in France passed from the time of the monarchy of Louis XVI,
the great revolution, the guillotine, all the counter-revolution that
ensued, Bonapartism, the bourgeois republic of the thirties. All the twists
and turns that France underwent took place in the same period of time that
we have managed to keep the Cuban revolution in power. Not even Robespierre
could say that; Napoleon couldn?t say that. Hey, we?ve done a lot!?

Alarcón has dealt with Americans for more than forty years. He left Havana
University to head the Foreign Ministry?s U.S. office in 1962, when he was
only twenty-five, and became Cuba?s Ambassador to the United Nations in
1966. In 1992, Castro made him Foreign Minister but, less than a year later,
moved him to the comparatively low-profile post of president of the National
Assembly. At the time, the position was widely seen as a demotion, but it
gave Alarcón experience with domestic politics in Cuba for the first time
since his youth. And he has continued to be Castro?s chief adviser on the
United States. (He interrupted our dinner at the Hotel Nacional to take a
call on his cell phone from Castro.) Alarcón was also intimately involved in
the case of Elián González, acting as the chief adviser to the boy?s father,
Juan Miguel González, who travelled to the United States to fight relatives
in Miami for custody of his son. Two and a half months later, when Elián was
finally flown home, Alarcón greeted him at the airport. For Castro, Elián?s
return was a major symbolic victory over his opponents in the exile
community.

Alarcón?s latest cause involves the Five Heroes, as they are known in
Cuba?five Cuban spies who are serving prison terms in the United States. In
January, 1996, Alarcón, in the midst of secret negotiations with the Clinton
Administration about improving relations, told the Americans that Cuba had
received information that Brothers to the Rescue, a Miami exile group, was
planning illegal flights to drop leaflets over Havana. They had made such
flights before, and the Administration had offered to do what it could to
stop them. The White House passed Alarcón?s information on to Florida?s
F.B.I. headquarters, but nothing was done to prevent the aircraft from
taking off. The Cuban Air Force shot down two of them, killing four
Cuban-American men. In retaliation, President Clinton signed the
Helms-Burton Law, tightening the embargo against Cuba. The F.B.I. also
stepped up the search for Cuba?s sources, and the Five were arrested in
September, 1998. In 2001, a Miami jury found them guilty of charges that
included ?espionage conspiracy? and, in the case of one, the murder of the
Brothers to the Rescue pilots. They were given sentences ranging from
fifteen years to two consecutive life terms. (Last August, an appeals court
ordered a new trial, saying that the men had not received a fair trial
because of ?pervasive community prejudice.?)

Alarcón acknowledges that the Five were spies, but he argues that they
intended the United States no harm, and that their sole purpose was to
prevent terrorism. ?Look, these were five people who were performing a
mission,? he said. ?Just as the United States believes it should have a
greater capacity to know and to predict, Cuba has for a long time had a need
to defend ourselves, with the difference that the terrorism against Cuba has
been sponsored by the United States.?

Alarcón has made it his personal crusade to bring the Five home; every
conversation with him turns to them. I asked him whether there was an
element of guilty conscience involved. Hadn?t Cuba indirectly betrayed the
men?s presence in Miami? Alarcón replied, ?Don?t think for a minute that
Cuba gullibly gave out information that somehow gave the Americans leads to
find them. We may be amateurs in baseball, but in this subject we really are
professionals.?

Like most of those in Castro?s inner circle, Alarcón is determinedly
self-effacing in public and never contradicts his boss, but because of his
amiability and his long experience with Americans?who generally like
him?most Cubans see him as a moderate. He is a familiar and reassuring
figure for foreigners visiting Cuba; while I was in Havana, he hosted a
delegation from Vietnam, and also Louis Farrakhan. Alarcón has long been a
top contender for the position of Prime Minister in a transitional
government. But nothing is certain; Castro has been known to abruptly shift
people from one position to another. Alarcón may also have serious
competition from Pérez Roque, who is perceived as the chief spokesman in
Castro?s Battle of Ideas.

Pérez Roque is a short, wide-bodied man whose demeanor is reminiscent of a
bull terrier?s. He became Castro?s personal secretary at the age of
twenty-one, and remained in the job for seven years. No one doubts that he
is devoted to Castro, whose opinions and policies he assumes with a fervency
that is unparalleled, even in Cuba. In 1999, Castro made him his Foreign
Minister. Pérez Roque was only thirty-four, and seemed gauche and
ill-prepared; he was nicknamed Fax, in the sense that he was merely a
transmitter of Castro?s utterances. He has grown into the role, though, and
earned a measure of respect, if not popularity. The veteran loyalist told me
that it was clear that Castro had ?chosen? Pérez Roque to lead the
succession team under Raúl?s temporary supervision, but that Pérez Roque was
?too narrow-minded? for the next generation of Cubans. Other Cubans I talked
to agreed. Everyone recalled how, after Castro fainted in 2001, it was Pérez
Roque who stepped up to the microphone and, in a display of zeal, rallied
the crowd with shouts of ?Viva Fidel! Viva Raúl!?

I lived in Havana during the Special Period. The government couldn?t afford
to import fuel; bicycles replaced cars on Havana?s streets, and there were
daily blackouts lasting up to twelve hours. Many people did not have enough
to eat, subsisting on the Cuban staple chícharo?split-pea porridge?or on
sugar and water. Crime spiralled. Castro responded by permitting limited
private enterprise and the legal use of the dollar, and by opening Cuba to
mass tourism, measures that saved the regime.

In the past year, Castro?empowered by shipments of cheap oil from Hugo
Chávez, the President of Venezuela, and by Chinese investments?imposed a
heavy tax on dollar transactions. This has made Cuba much more expensive for
foreigners, although European package tourists continue to stay in
all-inclusive beach resorts, where they have little contact with Cubans.
This seems to be the way Castro wants it. ?Fidel has always felt revulsion
toward tourism, because it encourages prostitution and increases social
inequalities,? Aurelio Alonso told me. ?Tourism is bad because it creates a
contrast between a population that lives very badly and a population that
lives very well.? In a recent speech, Castro referred to Cuba?s family-run
private restaurants, paladares, another Special Period concession, saying,
?I know this pains our neighbors to the north, but it could well be that in
a few years there will be no paladares left in Cuba.?

The reforms of the Special Period were carried out by Carlos Lage, the third
member of the relief team. Lately, however, Lage appears to have been
sidelined, at least in terms of domestic economic policy; instead, one Party
insider told me, Castro was micromanaging it. ?This has people worried,
because, as we all know, the economy is not Fidel?s strong suit,? she said.

An Eastern European diplomat said, ?To me, the one distinguishing feature of
this dictatorship??he added quickly, ?But please don?t use that word!???is
how Fidel is building what comes afterward. His problem was that, after he
opened up the economy, in the nineties, a new social stratum appeared here;
it has its own political views and has produced leaders who supported those
views. After some stabilization of the economic situation, Cuba?s leaders
began to think about how to get rid of those social strata.? He went on, ?I
think they are doing all of this to prepare for the social problems that are
inevitable when Fidel dies.?

The contradictions of Cuban society are unsettlingly evident.
Satellite-television dishes are banned, but many people install them
secretly, and often tune in to anti-Castro Miami stations. The prostitutes
who congregated openly on Havana?s streets in the hard years of the nineties
are less visible today, but, despite a crackdown on the sex trade, they are
still around. One evening, I went to a popular Havana night spot directly
across the Plaza de la Revolución from the headquarters of the Cuban
Communist Party Central Committee. It was swarming with young jineteras, as
they are called, and their foreign?mostly much older Italian or
Spanish??boyfriends.? One girl, who asked if I wanted a ?date,? looked
fifteen, or younger.

I visited a veteran Party member who, as we sat on her terrace drinking
tamarind juice, complained at length about Castro?s most recent drive?a
grandiloquently proclaimed energy-saving campaign, one of the central
features of which is to provide every Cuban household with a new
Chinese-manufactured pressure cooker. ?After forty-seven years of
revolution, we get pressure cookers?? she said bitterly. They were not even
free. ?Energy is his latest obsession, and, like all of his other obsessions
in the past??she listed a few of the more quixotic ones, including Castro?s
doomed effort, in the eighties, to breed a ?super-cow???we have no choice
but to go along with them.?

She told me that it was time for Castro to step down. ?When I see Fidel
speaking nowadays, it?s as if I am seeing my great-grandfather there,
talking away for no reason in particular. He?s got nothing to say anymore.
It?s a great pity, too,? she said. ?The people here still respect him?even
though they don?t listen to him anymore. After him, there?s no one else. So
his successors are going to open up, because they will have to; they aren?t
stupid. The people are fed up.?

One Sunday afternoon, I went to Lenin Park, on the outskirts of Havana. A
salsa band was playing for a crowd of four or five hundred mostly young
people, who were dancing and drinking beer from paper cups. When the concert
ended, a couple of hundred youths began walking out of the park along the
road to the city.

A police van was parked in the middle of the road, with a dozen
blue-uniformed officers standing around. Suddenly, one of them hit a
teen-ager with his nightstick. Other officers came over and joined in,
kicking and hitting the boy. Then they dragged him to the van and threw him
into the back. Several youths were holding their faces with their hands and
stumbling, and I realized that the officers had blinded them with pepper
spray.

In the next five minutes or so, the officers beat and arrested eight or nine
young men, none of whom, as far as I could tell, had done anything to
provoke them. People in the crowd simply stared, or moved away, out of
striking range of the policemen. I asked a man what the youths had done, and
he said quietly, ?Nothing. Someone probably mouthed off to one of them. The
cops are just trying to show who?s boss. They always do this.?

The onlookers might be far less restrained in Castro?s absence. During the
summer of 1994, at the height of the Special Period, after clashes between
the authorities and would-be migrants, hundreds of men and youths rioted
along the Malecón. Castro went to the scene and, with his nervous
bodyguards, waded into the melee. The rioters were holding rocks and bricks,
but when they saw Castro they dropped them and applauded. The tumult, which
had been expanding dangerously, began to dissipate. After Castro left,
police riot squads arrived, along with truckloads of stick-wielding men from
an élite workers? brigade, who then chased, beat, and arrested the remaining
rioters.

It is hard to imagine any of Castro?s potential successors having the
authority to pull off such a move, and a bout of unrest might spread across
the island if left unchecked, or if the security forces overreact. If Raúl
is in charge, moderation will not be a foregone conclusion. Despite his
reputation for warmth, Raúl can be impulsive, dogmatic, and, at times,
brutal. In 1959, he oversaw the surrender of Santiago, Cuba?s second-largest
city, while Castro made his way toward Havana. There, in the most notorious
act of retribution to follow the guerrillas? victory, Raúl presided over the
execution of more than seventy soldiers and officers, who were
machine-gunned and then dumped into a pit. More recently, in 1996, Raúl
orchestrated a purge of Party intellectuals, whom he accused of being
contaminated by ?capitalist ideas.?

In the past few years, Castro has increased the number of police officers in
Havana considerably, and given them salaries equivalent to those earned by
doctors. Many of the police are drawn from Cuba?s rural eastern provinces,
where the government has strong support, and are held in contempt by many of
the comparatively cosmopolitan habaneros.

After the 1994 riots, Castro relieved some of the pressure on the regime by
temporarily allowing people to leave the island by sea. As many as thirty
thousand Cubans tried to reach Florida in the space of three weeks, in what
became known as the ?rafters? crisis.? To forestall another sea exodus, the
U.S. significantly increased its legal immigration quota for Cubans and
instituted a ?dry foot, wet foot? policy, under which those intercepted at
sea by the Coast Guard are deported and those who manage to reach dry land
are allowed to stay. This reduced the numbers for a while, but last year
almost three thousand Cubans were stopped at sea and repatriated?double the
figure for 2004. There are fears both in Cuba and in the United States that
social instability after Castro?s death could provoke a huge wave of
emigration. According to some scenarios, this could be used to justify
American military intervention.

Many young people in Cuba today wish for nothing more than to emigrate. On
my latest trip, a longtime Party member confessed that he had recently
helped his own son leave Cuba. ?We have a lot of very good young people, but
they don?t like to be administered,? he said. ?And I?m afraid that the
revolution has not yet learned that the consciences of others do not need to
be administered.?

Randy Alonso Falcón, who is thirty-six, is one of the most recognizable
figures in the Battle of Ideas. Alonso, the host of the political talk show
?La Mesa Redonda Informativa???The News Round Table??is on the national
directorate of the Communist Youth Union, and is also a member of the
Central Command for the Battle of Ideas. Everyone calls him Randy.

One morning in April, I met Alonso, a short man with an easygoing demeanor
and a heavily pockmarked face, outside the Anti-Imperialist Tribunal. He
gestured toward the Tribunal?s most recent innovation, the Mount of Flags, a
cluster of a hundred and thirty-eight steel poles, as high as a hundred feet
and rising from a series of concrete plinths, flying black flags that block
the view of the Interests Section from the street. The Mount of Flags was
Castro?s response to the U.S. chargé d?affaires? installation, in January,
of an electronic ticker in the Section?s windows, offering uncensored news
reports twenty-four hours a day. To make room for the flags, the Cubans had
appropriated the Americans? parking lot. ?Naturally, if they are going to
fuck with us, we will fuck them, too,? Alonso said.

We drove east out of Havana to the Villa Panamericana, a complex of sports
facilities built to host the 1991 Pan American Games. One building had been
converted into the School for Social Workers. Begun in 2000 for
underprivileged?and potentially antisocial?youths, the school had turned out
more than ten thousand graduates, and its alumni form the core of the Social
Workers battalions. Alonso said that the leaders of the Battle of Ideas
decided where to deploy the battalions by studying secret ?opinion polls.?
?Every day, we receive five thousand opinions that we get from across the
country,? he told me. ?It?s not a survey. There are activists who hear
things, and then they send in exactly what was said.? These polls, if they
can properly be called that, are one of Castro?s favorite sources of
information.

At the school, a large, rambling prefab concrete facility, we joined Enrique
Cabezas Gómez, the director, who is one of Castro?s protégés. He invited us
into a reception room with three of his students, and began a disquisition
on the school?s role in the Battle of Ideas. He continued, without pausing,
for three hours.

As he spoke, the students listened quietly. It was hard to gauge their
enthusiasm. Cabezas mentioned that recently, when Castro, as part of an
ongoing Battle of Ideas anti-corruption drive, replaced employees at Cuba?s
gas stations with the Social Workers, they unearthed systemic graft and
theft. Some Cubans I spoke to predicted that it was just a matter of time
before the Social Workers themselves were corrupted. Most didn?t believe
that the anti-corruption campaign would work, because the many ruses that
Cubans had devised for their survival were too deeply embedded. One Cuban
told me that after the government had a fleet of cargo trucks equipped with
G.P.S. to prevent pilferage, the drivers figured out how to use condoms
filled with water to disable the devices. Confirming this story, a Western
European diplomat told me that his biggest concern for Cuba?s future was the
prospect that a powerful network of criminal Mafias would emerge, as they
had in the former European Socialist states.

In Havana, I visited a Cuban couple whom I?ve known for many years, and was
shocked to see how they were living. Some of their furniture had been sold,
and they both looked thin. Now in their sixties, they were getting by on the
equivalent of about sixty dollars a month?more, in fact, than most Cubans
earn. The wife told me, ?You know, to live in Cuba we have only three
alternatives, known as the three R?s?robar, remar, or rezingarse.? Robar is
?to steal.? Remar is ?to row??as in to take a boat to Florida. Rezingarse is
a play on the word resignarse, ?to resign oneself,? but in Cuban slang
zingar is ?to fuck,? so rezingarse means, literally, ?to fuck yourself.?

On June 2nd, the day before Raúl Castro?s seventy-fifth birthday, Granma
published an eight-page special supplement titled ?Raúl Up Close.? The
article included headings such as ?The Chief,? ?Patriotic Values,? and
?Capable, Responsible, and Brilliant.? In a typical passage, Raúl is
described as ?affable, affectionate, human, understanding; who knows how to
be serious and demanding but is, at the same time, friendly and capable of
listening to a story or enjoying a joke?a profoundly human being.? The
article ends with Fidel explaining why Raúl should succeed him: ?I choose
him not because he is my brother, because the whole world knows how much we
hate nepotism, but because on my honor I consider him to have sufficient
qualities to substitute for me tomorrow in case I die in this struggle.?

A couple of days later, I received an e-mail from a friend in Havana about
the supplement: ?Everyone here thinks this means ?the electoral campaign?
has begun??that is, the campaign to prepare Cubans for Raúl?s succession to
power.

Raúl rarely appears in public with his older brother. Foreign journalists
are never invited to his speeches, and he never grants interviews. In my
visits to Cuba during the past fifteen years, I have seen Raúl only once in
person, at the annual May Day rally in the Plaza de la Revolución, in 1993.
He had joined the rest of the Politburo on a podium, standing near, but not
next to, Fidel. While Fidel gazed solemnly over the proceedings, Raúl
bantered with the others.

In those days, a mantle of secrecy surrounded the Castro clan. Most Cubans
did not know the name of Castro?s wife, or even how many children they had.
Since then, however, several members of Cuba?s First Family have begun a
kind of gradual début that seems intended to prepare them for more public
roles. Dalia Soto del Valle, Castro?s wife of some forty years (it is not
clear when, or whether, they were legally married), has become more visible
since the Elián González standoff. She is the mother of five of his sons:
Alexis, Alexander, Alejandro (Castro has a fascination with Alexander the
Great), Antonio, and Angel. In 2000, I had lunch with Antonio Castro, the
oldest, at the orthopedic hospital in Havana, where he was doing his
residency before signing on with the baseball team; he was polite but
reserved. Alexis was rumored to be the more troubled son; a couple of years
ago, however, he began appearing at events as a photographer for Juventud
Rebelde, the U.J.C. newspaper. The less known brothers are Alexander, who
works as a cameraman for Cuban television; Alejandro, who is a computer
programmer; and Angel, the youngest, who is not known to have found a
profession.

Castro divorced his first wife, Mirta Díaz-Balart, the mother of his
firstborn son, Fidel, in 1955. She remarried and has lived in Madrid for
many years, though she often travels to Cuba to visit her son. She has never
spoken publicly about her former husband, but her nephew, Lincoln
Díaz-Balart, a Republican congressman from Florida, is one of Castro?s most
ardent critics. Fidel Castro Díaz-Balart, or Fidelito, is a Soviet-educated
nuclear physicist, and ran Cuba?s atomic-energy commission until the early
nineties, when he was removed from the post; Castro said during a trip to
Spain that he had fired his son for ?incompetence.? Lately, however,
Fidelito has reëmerged, and is now said to be an adviser to his father. One
evening last April, I was at a restaurant in Old Havana when a
chauffeur-driven Lada pulled up, and Fidelito came in. He had a beard and
bore a striking resemblance to his father, with the same pronounced Roman
nose and proud profile. It was as if Fidel Castro himself, thirty years
younger, had just walked by.

Castro also has a daughter, Alina Fernández, the product of his affair with
a society woman, Naty Revuelta, in the late fifties. In 1993, Alina, who had
long been estranged from her father, fled to Europe in disguise and later
settled in Miami, where she hosts a radio show, ?Simply Alina,? dedicated to
attacking him.

Raúl Castro and his M.I.T.-educated wife, Vilma Espín, the head of the Cuban
Women?s Federation, have four children, and they, too, have been more
visible lately. When I had dinner with Ricardo Alarcón this spring, he told
me that Raúl?s eldest daughter, Mariela Castro Espín, a sexologist, had been
lobbying the National Assembly to reform Cuba?s laws on behalf of
transsexuals and transvestites. She has been ?driving me crazy,? Alarcón
said, laughing.

I had heard about Mariela?s role as the godmother of Cuba?s transsexuals and
transvestites when I attended a transvestite show at a house in western
Havana. The occasion was the birthday of Imperio, one of the island?s most
famous transformistas (as transvestites who perform in cabarets are called),
a slim, handsome mixed-race man in his mid-thirties. In a large upstairs
room, there was a bar, and a hundred or more gay men applauded and blew
kisses as Imperio danced and lip-synched to songs by Gloria Gaynor and Rocío
Jurado. I was struck by the openness of the event; I had been to a
transvestite show in Havana in the late nineties, but it was a clandestine
affair. Until very recently, Cuba?s gays, and transvestites in particular,
were harassed and frequently arrested by the police. Imperio?s friends told
me that the change was due to Mariela Castro.

I went to see Mariela Castro at the Instituto Nacional de Educación Sexual,
CENESEX, which is housed in an old nineteenth-century mansion in the Vedado
district, with a wide porch and shade trees on the grounds. Mariela, an
attractive, relaxed-looking woman in her late thirties, has been the
director of CENESEX since 2000. We sat down in a small upstairs office to
talk.

?Look, a lot of people think that we?ve been able to do what we?ve done
?because of family relations,? she said. ?On the contrary, sometimes family
?connections are an obstacle in life?I can?t make my proposals through my
?father or mother, because neither of them would allow that. Whatever I do,
?I do through official channels. What happens, though, is that when I go to
?these official channels the people don?t know how to react, because of my
?family connections. They ask, ?What does your father say about this?? And I
?say, ?It doesn?t matter what my father says.? ?

Three years ago, Mariela said, some transvestites complained to her that the
police were harassing them, and asked for her help. ?I felt really bad for
them, because I felt that the revolution had some very beautiful proposals,
but changing people?s attitudes takes a lot longer than we would sometimes
like.? When there are problems with the police, ?we go straight to the
police station,? she said. ?Speaking honestly, the cultural level of the
policemen is not always good.? She had spoken to the Ministry of Defense?run
by her father?but said that initially it had been difficult to convince her
father that there was a need for change.

In the sixties and seventies, the military, under Raúl?s control, presided
over notorious camps known by the acronym UMAP (for Military Units to Help
Production), where homosexuals, including Reinaldo Arenas, the late author
of ?Before Night Falls??as well as some unemployed and religious Cubans?were
?rehabilitated? through forced labor. During the eighties, men who were
H.I.V.-positive were forcibly quarantined in medical asylums known
colloquially as sidatorios (?AIDS,? in Spanish, is SIDA). In the past
decade, official policies have relaxed, but laws guaranteeing sexual freedom
are still nonexistent. Mariela told me that her legal team was preparing a
brief that proposed specific changes in the penal and civil code; for
example, transsexuals who had had sex-change operations would be able to
marry and to enjoy the same inheritance and pension rights as heterosexual
spouses. She said that her next project was to secure similar rights for
Cuba?s gays, lesbians, and bisexuals.

First, though, Mariela was enlisting the transvestites in the Battle of
Ideas. ?I thought it would be good if they had a social mission,? she told
me. She said that two groups of transvestites had already completed training
as sexual-health Social Workers. ?Every time we have a course graduation
ceremony, we let them put on their transvestite shows right here?the whole
spectacle, just as they like it to be. It may not be to my aesthetic
taste??Mariela smiled??but it is theirs, and we respect that.?

Both Mariela Castro and Ricardo Alarcón implied that the Battle of Ideas had
initiated a sort of social and cultural opening. During our dinner at the
Nacional, Alarcón mentioned that he had volunteered to inaugurate a recent
exhibition of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe in Havana. ?That raised
some eyebrows,? he said. Political openness is a different matter: over a
four-day period in March, 2003, beginning the day before the United States
invaded Iraq, Cuban authorities arrested seventy-eight dissidents, including
labor unionists, human-rights activists, and journalists; many are still in
jail. But the government seems serious about its initiatives in the
arts?there are, for example, a host of new art and dance schools, and
educational-extension programs?in part as a means of getting Cuba?s youths
off the streets.

Abel Prieto, Cuba?s Culture Minister, told me, ?The appetite for culture,
the social prestige of the artist, of the intellectual, of the writer, has
grown enormously. There was a time when parents thought that the arts would
turn their sons into gays, or their daughters into sluts, but now everyone
wants to have an artist in the family.?

Prieto is well over six feet tall, and, with his muttonchop sideburns and
shoulder-length hair, he cuts an incongruous figure as a senior Communist
Party official. One of his proudest achievements was having one of Old
Havana?s plazas dubbed Lennon Park, with a bronze statue of John Lennon. (In
the sixties, the Beatles? ?decadent? music was banned.) He talks openly
about using pirated programming on state television: ?We don?t pay copyright
for television material?we are blockaded. So we take a lot from the
Discovery Channel, for instance.? When we visited Havana?s main art museum,
an entourage of admirers followed him from gallery to gallery.

Prieto had told me that the arts scene in Havana had become less
conventional, and more ?disquieting,? though I saw little evidence of this
at the museum. A couple of days later, however, I visited a fringe
exhibition put on by students at the School of Fine Arts. Their work was
much more political than what I had seen elsewhere in Havana. In one
display, a Cuban peso coin with the official slogan ?Patria Libre o Muerte?
(?Free Fatherland or Death?) had been cut so that it read, ?Patria Libre o
Suerte? (?Free Fatherland or Luck?). In one part of the room, an old
reel-to-reel tape recorder and speaker blared out, in an endlessly repeating
loop, an extract of a patriotic speech by Castro, and in front of it was a
placard that read, ?Just talk to me about baseball.?

Castro?s greatest obstacle, if he is to insure that his succession plan
survives him, is the United States, which has, in effect, been trying to
force a transition in Cuba for five decades. In that time, the relationship
between Washington and the exile community in Miami has, more often than
not, been unhealthily close. During the first years of Castro?s rule, U.S.
policy was to try to overthrow him by force, or to assassinate him. The
C.I.A. set up an office in Miami?then its largest for clandestine
operations?and recruited thousands of exiles, forming a paramilitary
organization that attacked Cuba?s interests. That aspect of the C.I.A.?s
operations had mostly wound down in the seventies, but by then the
anticastristas had formed groups of their own. Cuban exiles with C.I.A.
links carried out bombings and assassinations aimed at Cuba and its allies,
including the 1976 murder of Orlando Letelier, Chile?s Ambassador to the
United States, in Washington, D.C.

The hard-liners within Miami?s Cuban-exile community are now mostly elderly
men themselves, but they are still a volatile factor. Castro has used the
case of Luis Posada Carriles to argue that America has a double standard in
its war on terror. Posada Carriles, a Cuban who holds Venezuelan
citizenship, has spent the past forty-five years trying to kill or depose
Castro. He is wanted in Venezuela for allegedly helping to plan the midair
bombing of a Cuban passenger jet near Barbados in October, 1976, which
killed all seventy-three people on board. (Cubans, citing recently
declassified C.I.A. and F.B.I. documents that appear to support them, accuse
the agency of having had prior knowledge of the attack.) In between escaping
from a Venezuelan jail and?as he admitted to the Times?planning the bombing
of hotels in the summer of 1997, killing an Italian tourist, Posada Carriles
worked for Oliver North?s program to resupply the Contras in Nicaragua. Last
year, he surfaced, holding a press conference in Miami, and Hugo Chávez
demanded his extradition. Posada Carriles was detained, but after several
months a federal judge ruled that although he had entered the country
illegally, the U.S. would not deport him to Cuba or Venezuela, because he
might be tortured. He is now appealing to remain in the United States, on
the ground that he worked covertly on its behalf for many years.

In Miami, I met with Santiago Alvarez, a prominent Cuban exile and a close
ally of Posada Carriles, in his office in a Hialeah strip mall. Alvarez, who
runs a construction business, is a rough but good-looking man of sixty-four.
?Look, Posada Carriles is not a saint. He is a Cuban freedom fighter, and he
has made some mistakes,? Alvarez said. ?But what?s happened here is that
Fidel Castro has mounted a big show.?

Alvarez went on, ?As an anticastrista, I look upon Bush?s attempt to harden
the embargo with a certain pleasure. On the other hand, I can see how
loosening it might well be the best weapon against Fidel. For instance, a
relaxation on the restrictions of visits to the island?this could help us
conspire against the regime. I do not believe that Fidel Castro will ever
fall from power through the activities of a few dissidents. I maintain that
he must be brought down by armed force.?

Alvarez said that the time to attack is while Castro is still alive. ?After
Fidel dies, it will be a different game,? he told me. ?And what happens if
he lasts another ten years? We can?t wait that long. I would feel ashamed if
I waited for him to die before I returned.? (Soon after our meeting, Alvarez
was arrested for illegal possession of machine guns and a grenade launcher.
He is now awaiting trial.)

Senator Martinez didn?t want to comment directly on the Posada Carriles
case, because it was in the courts. But he denied that it had anything to do
with the war on terror. ?Cuba began the practice of hijacking airliners, and
if Luis Posada Carriles bombed an airliner??Martinez paused??without
condoning any specific act of violence, there was a hostile state of affairs
at the time. This is no longer an issue and is just being used by a failed
regime to keep people stoked up. We need to talk about the future, not the
past.?

In December, 2003, President Bush appointed Senator Martinez as co-chair of
the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, along with Colin Powell. Their
mandate was to find ways to ?hasten the end of Castro?s tyranny,? and to
develop ?a comprehensive strategy to prepare for a peaceful transition to
democracy in Cuba.? The result of their work was a five-hundred-page report,
issued in May, 2004, that included guidelines for everything from setting up
a market economy to holding elections. It also recommends ?undermining the
regime?s ?succession strategy.? ?

?I looked for lessons from Iraq, for things the Cubans will need,? Martinez
?told me. ?For instance, a governmental structure should remain in place. As
?in Iraq, in Cuba there are those with blood on their hands, but that?s not
?the case with everyone. And there are issues like the electrical grid,
?housing, and nutrition. What we learned in Iraq is that there would be a
?disruption of these things in an extraordinary moment.?

The report, which the Bush Administration adopted as policy, recommended the
appointment of a Cuba transition coördinator. The person named to the new
post was Caleb McCarry, whose previous position was staff director for the
House Foreign Relations Committee?s Western Hemisphere subcommittee. When I
spoke with McCarry, he said, ?My function is to be the senior U.S. official
in charge of planning and supporting a genuine democratic transition in
Cuba, and to work on it now.? He is, in effect, the Paul Bremer designate of
Cuba. As with Iraq, however, the United States is hampered by its inability
to operate openly in Cuba, and by its reliance on information from exiles
and dissidents. And it does not seem to have a candidate for Castro?s
replacement.

McCarry said that, while the transition would be in Cuban hands, ?we will be
there to offer very concrete support.? The U.S. is already channelling money
and aid to the opposition. Two leading dissidents, Osvaldo Paya and Elizardo
Sánchez, have said that this tactic has been counterproductive, and
criticized it as heavy-handed meddling. Many of the dissidents arrested in
2003 were accused of illegally receiving American funds. (In a speech,
Castro called them ?mercenaries.?)

McCarry emphasized that the Administration would not regard the accession of
Raúl Castro as a satisfactory outcome, even if it was accompanied by
economic reforms. ?We will continue to offer support for a real transition,?
he said. ?You know, this is not an imposition. It?s an offer, a very
respectful offer, with respect for the sense of Cuban nationhood.?

Not all exiles are in agreement with U.S. policy. Damian Fernández, a
Cuban-American who runs the Cuba Research Institute, at Florida
International University, told me, ?There are some lessons to be learned
from the experience in Iraq. Do we really want a transition, a clean break
with the past, or do we want succession, which would mean keeping some of
the old state and the orderliness that would bring? The fact is that it?s
unlikely there?ll be a tabula rasa after Fidel dies. But this Administration
has this line on transition that ?if we push we can make it happen.? ?

In Havana, the so-called Bush Plan is regularly denounced on lurid
billboards and by Castro?s deputies. Felipe Pérez Roque said that the U.S.
transition plan would ?take away Cubans? land and their houses and schools,
in order to return them to their old Batistiano owners, who would come back
from the United States.?

Cubans are receptive to such talk. Many are living in homes that were
confiscated from owners who fled the country, and the prospect of being made
homeless by returning exiles frightens them. ?The day when Cubans will rise
up is when the gentlemen from Miami arrive and try to appropriate people?s
homes, and to give orders,? one Cuban academic told me. (Martinez, whose own
childhood home is now a youth center, said that a ?vehicle? might be devised
to restore homes to exiles or to compensate them, but he acknowledged that
Cubans on the island had a claim to them as well. ?The last thing we want to
do is make people who?ve suffered so much feel more insecure,? he said. ?I
think the exiles should have a say, and I think it will be helpful, in terms
of being able to provide resources and ideas. They can help lead Cuba to the
economic miracle, which, given the Cuban people?s abilities, I think it
should have. It is also their right?I should say our right?to be allowed a
role.?)

In a speech in March, Ricardo Alarcón called the Bush Plan ?annexationist
and genocidal.? In private, afterward, he was only slightly less adamant,
telling me that it was ?profoundly irresponsible, made up by people who
prefer to ignore reality and who try and change it capriciously. Maybe it?s
a messianic thing.?

He added, ?For us, our relation with the U.S. is the one great theme, the
big problem. There is no other single issue of such force, of such permanent
and universal importance to us, than having the U.S. normalize relations
with Cuba.? Under the Bush Administration, all contacts have ceased, he told
me, with the sole exception of low-level meetings over the ?wet foot, dry
foot? immigration policy. ?There is nothing at all going on,? he said.
?Nada.?

Cuba didn?t win the Baseball Classic, but it came close. On the night of the
final match, in San Diego on March 20th, against Japan, large video screens
were set up around Havana. I watched in the Parque Central, in Old Havana,
along with hundreds of Cubans. By the bottom of the first inning, when Cuba
scored, the plaza had become an animated wall of noise and celebration.
Cuba?s winning streak didn?t hold, however, and Japan won, 10?6. Even so,
the next day officials in Havana orchestrated a huge homecoming for the
team, with a victory procession through Havana, along streets filled with
flag-waving Young Pioneers, culminating in a rally in the city?s sports
stadium which was presided over by Fidel Castro himself.

The stands of the sports stadium were filled with thousands of students and
Social Workers. A huge placard showed Che Guevara?s face in a Pop-art
rendition of blue, red, and orange. I also noticed quite a few people
wearing red T-shirts decorated with an image of Hugo Chávez.

We were waiting for Fidel. I stood among a group of Cuban newsmen. The first
Politburo member to appear was the ancient General Guillermo García Frías, a
former peasant and guerrilla fighter who is famous for his passion for
cockfighting. Next came Ricardo Alarcón. As the minutes dragged on, the
students in the stadium began chanting, ?Fi-del! Fi-del!? Carlos Lage
appeared next, and Chávez?s brother Adan, Venezuela?s Ambassador. Suddenly,
everyone stood and, as a new roar came from the youths in the stands, I
spotted Castro?s bodyguard, José Delgado, a bald, bull-chested man with
worried eyes. If Delgado was there, it meant that Castro was about to
arrive.

Castro emerged from behind the tribune and, amid more cheers, took a seat.
His personal secretary, Carlos Valenciaga, a pale man with spectacles and a
large black portfolio, sat behind him. The ceremony began immediately.
Dancers dressed in white guajiro peasant costumes were followed by modern
dancers in yellow Lycra body stockings. Finally, Cuba?s baseball team walked
out and stood in formation, each player holding the hand of a small child in
uniform, as a singer lauded them for turning down the offer of ?millions of
dollars? to ?betray the fatherland.? At the appropriate moments, Castro,
like everyone else, waved a little Cuban flag.

A local journalist pointed out a pale, overweight photographer, and told me
that he was Alexis Castro. Like the other photographers, Alexis spent more
time staring up into the stands, watching his father, than he did watching
the athletes, and periodically raised his camera, with its long zoom lens,
to shoot pictures of him.

One by one, the players trooped up to greet Castro. He clapped each of them
on the back, smiling, and presented them with new bats, which two young
women in military tunics handed to him. When Antonio Castro, the team?s
doctor, stepped forward, however, he and his father shook hands formally.
Then it was time for Castro to speak.

In a tone of grandfatherly admonishment, Castro said that so many Cubans had
watched the Classic that ?our electrical grid was at risk of collapsing.? He
said that what Cuba?s team had achieved was colossal. ?The fact that a
modest little island in the Caribbean managed to compete against a country
like Japan in an international sports event?this is an occurrence of great
magnitude!?

Castro then began shuffling some clippings he had brought with him; he
grumbled that they were out of order. A couple of minutes rolled by before
he found what he was looking for, an article praising Cuba?s performance in
the Classic from one of the international wire agencies, and he proceeded to
read it out loud. Castro?s voice was tremulous. He finished reading the
dispatch, and then he read another, and another, and another, for more than
a half hour. The students in the bleachers around me were, by now, clearly
bored. Many fidgeted or talked. Some slept. As Castro read commentaries from
Miami?s El Nuevo Herald, ESPN, and the BBC, it struck me that he was sharing
information from sources that were out of bounds to most Cubans. But if he
was aware of the paradox he didn?t show it. When he was done with the
articles, he talked for another hour about Cuba?s achievements in medicine
and education. The restless din in the stadium grew, but Castro seemed
oblivious. I tried to read the faces of the members of the Politburo who
were seated near Castro, but all I saw was their disciplined and neutral
expressions.

(c) Conde Nast