Friday, August 14, 2015

Obama’s favorite Castro


By Ann Louise Bardach


When John Kerry raises the flag over America’s Embassy in Havana Friday, he’ll have Cuba’s new power, Raúl Castro, to thank.

As far back as 1980, Raúl Castro began to harbor doubts about Cuba’s long-term sustainability. By 1990, with the loss of their Soviet patron and its $5 billion annual subsidy, Raúl’s doubts crystallized into alarm even while his brother Fidel hunkered down, resisting reform. And though Raúl took power in 2006, it would be six years before he could finally overrule his ailing brother, who turned 89 years old on Thursday.
“There has been a sibling tug of war between Raúl and Fidel since childhood,” Domingo Amuchastegui, a former Cuban intelligence officer, tells me over lunch this summer at Versailles, the restaurant that serves as the mecca of Cuban life in Miami. Versailles bills itself as the “most famous Cuban restaurant in the world,” and Amuchastegui is no stranger to its mirrored dining room. Domingo and I had originally met not long after his defection in the 1990s, and I’ve learned over more than two decades of covering Cuba that he has uncommon insights into the Caribbean island that has bedeviled every American president since Dwight Eisenhower. Indeed, he is that rare breed of defector who somehow manages to regularly visit his homeland. As Amuchastegui carefully parses it over lunch, Raúl has always contended with “Fidel as the No. 1 braking system.”
For more than a half century, Raúl Castro, Fidel’s comrade-for-life and chief of the Cuban Armed Forces, lived and worked cheerfully in the shadow of his elder sibling. Not only was Raúl the rare politician contented to be No. 2, he bolted from the limelight — his brother’s oxygen — like a vampire escaping the dawn. “Raúl always consults with me about all the important questions,” Fidel Castro assured an American journalist in 1964, lest anyone doubt who was the boss. “Of course,” he hastened to add, “the constant presence of one outstanding leader tends to obscure the rest.”
And so it was. Or, at least, so it was for most of Raúl’s life.
The chance to override Fidel’s brake finally came last October — amid secret negotiations between the U.S. and Cuba — when a wobbly Venezuela slashed its daily oil subsidy to the island nation. The writing was on the wall: The island was running out of patrons. But the fates once again favored Cuba. President Barack Obama told his negotiating team he wanted a deal (just about any deal, his critics contend).
For 18 months, American and Cuban officials had rendezvoused in cloak-and-dagger meetings in Toronto, Ottawa and the Vatican, pulling off what many believed was unthinkable while the Castro brothers lived — a restoration of relations between the longtime enemies. (Almost as astonishing was that both sides, famously indiscreet, kept their year-and-a-half-long negotiations a secret.) It was a seismic shift in geopolitics, one launched unexpectedly upon an astonished world that had seen generations grow up during seemingly permanently frozen non-relations between U.S. and Cuba.
On July 20, the Cuban flag rose over its newly restored Embassy on 16th Street, NW, in Washington with Secretary of State John Kerry among the 500 attendees — a ceremony that will reprise on Friday morning when the American flag will be hoisted over the newly re-christened U.S. Embassy in Havana.
The twin moments highlight the remarkable political transformation of Raúl Castro — a zealot communist (and unrepentant Stalinist) throughout the 1970s who has morphed into a formidable agent of change, deftly negotiating an end to the Cold War with his northern nemesis. “I don’t think we have so much a new Raúl,” says John Caufield, the U.S.’s top diplomat in Havana at the nation’s Interests Section (now the embassy) from 2010 to 2014, “as Raúl being able to be himself, not being in the shadow of Fidel.”

And what a deal he has made with the United States, scoring the big-ticket items on his wish list: the release of the remaining Cuban Five prisoners, an avalanche of American tourists and their cash, a huge uptick in remittances and investment capital, while sliding off the U.S.’s state-sponsored terrorist list.
At the same time, he kiboshed most of the U.S. demands — open elections, human rights’ guarantees, $7 billion in U.S. property claims, an independent media and accessible Internet. Nor will any dissidents be allowed to attend the embassy ceremony on Friday, a move widely viewed as a capitulation. A senior State Department official explained Wednesday, somewhat improbably, that the absence of dissidents was due to “limited space,” while declining to give the number of invitees.
While America can merely claim that it has finally removed Cuba as a hot potato irritant for itself, its allies and neighbors — and retrieved the hapless USAID contractor Alan Gross — Raúl Castro has rescued his island-nation from bankruptcy, collapse and isolation.
This summer has seen minor and major steps forward in the relationship: Ahead of Kerry’s visit to Havana this week, Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, made a call on the Cuban Mission in New York City on August 3. And rumors abound that President Barack Obama has chosen January to become the first sitting American president to visit Cuba since Calvin Coolidge disembarked in 1928.
As America grapples with its new relationship with a new Castro and a new Cuba, the kingmakers of Washington and Wall Street are keen to suss out the island’s reigning powers that be. One thing is headline clear: As of December 17, 2014, the Castro to be reckoned with was no longer Fidel. When John Kerry alights in Havana this week for his history-making visit, he will be landing in Raúl Castro’s Cuba.
While lacking his brother Fidel’s gravitas, erudition and ambition, Raúl has proven to be the more complex and less predictable of Cuba’s ruling siblings for 56 years — the most successful political brother act in history. He is a man of two seemingly contradictory impulses, hard-line enforcer and conciliatory pragmatist, a man who has steered Cuba into the future even as he fought fiercely, at times, to keep it in the past.

On one level, Raúl’s power is a logical outcome: For a half-century, he’s held the ultimate trump card, control of the army, the FAR (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarios), which has been the single most important organ of the government and a respectable fighting force. “In the 1970s and 1980s, the U.S. lost the war in Vietnam and the Soviet Union lost the war in Afghanistan,” points out Jorge Dominguez, Harvard’s resident Cuba scholar. During the same period, however, “the Cuban Armed Forces won the three wars, [that] they fought far from home in Angola and Ethiopia.” Then there are its domestic successes — such as tourism and the farmers markets — that elevate the Army and its myriad divisions — into the most efficient and reliable pillar of Cuban life.
These days, Raúl is building an even deeper legacy, one that will likely outlast both him and his brother — ensuring that the Castro family will hold the reins of power for some years to come.
* * *
Partial to practical jokes, rum and cockfighting, Raúl Modesto Castro barely made it through school, earning the nickname — el pulguita — the flea. In 1951, he dropped out of the University of Havana.
In the early 1950s, Raúl, tutored by Fidel, became enamored with left-wing politics. “Fidel was always an influence on Raúl,” their younger sister, Juanita, who — disillusioned with her brothers’ revolution — fled to Miami in 1964, told me at our first meeting in 2000. “They’ve always been very close.”
Fidel often sought to give the impression that his sibling was more of a hard-liner than himself. “Raúl was already quite left-leaning,” he said at one point, then conceding in 2005, “Actually, I was the one who introduced him to Marxist-Leninist ideas.”

In March 1953, a 21-year-old Raúl attended a Communist Party conference in Vienna representing Cuba. Quick to make friends, it was the personable Raúl who lassoed an invaluable contact while there — KGB agent Nikolai Leonov, who would play a central role in the 35-year Cuban-Soviet alliance. Indeed, it was Raúl, not Fidel, who deeply bonded with Soviet President Nikita Khrushchev, the two passing more than one night drowning their enmity to the U.S. in pails of Russian vodka. (Raúl also drank their Cold War Kool-Aid, reportedly telling Life magazine in July 1960: “My dream is to drop three atom bombs on New York”).
And it was Raúl who first met Che Guevara in Mexico City during the brothers’ exile there and who brought him back home to meet Fidel.
Upon their revolution’s victory, Raúl was installed as head of the army and assigned the role of bad cop and enforcer versus his more charismatic sibling’s good cop. “These are roles they took at the beginning of the Revolution,” Juanita Castro corrected me. “It’s not true — maybe the opposite.”

In fact, Raúl, spontaneous and voluble, has always been more comfortable with himself and with other people than his famous brother was. However, he suffered from stage fright and dreaded public speaking. “Fidel sent him to a voice teacher for speech therapy and to improve his elocution,” recalled a general who worked with him. Even when compelled to give a speech, Raúl never improvised, but read from brief prepared texts. “I am not used to making frequent appearances in public, except at times when it is required,” Raúl reminded a college audience in 2006. “I have always been discreet, that is my way.”
Even as much has changed in Cuba, this trait did not: On December 17, 2014, Raúl announced the momentous rapprochement with the U.S. by dourly reading from a sheaf of papers in a near-monotone — as if he were reciting a weather report.
Such performances have over the years made it easy to underestimate Raúl Castro, but those close to him say he’s always possessed a secret weapon, unknown to all but his inner circle. Raúl is capable of extravagant charm, borne out of the certain knowledge that he was his mother’s best-loved child.
Addressing a University of Havana audience in 2006, Raúl spoke of accompanying his mother to his brothers’ Jesuit school in Santiago de Cuba. Having persuaded his mother to let him stay on, the 4-year-old was immediately consumed by an unquenchable need for “my bottle,” recalled Raúl. An unusually unabashed Raúl explained his malady — he was a mama’s boy: “I had one [bottle] every night to go to bed,” he said. “One of the teachers had to go to the pharmacy and buy me my bottle.”
“He was our mother’s favorite because he was so tender-hearted,” Juanita told me during an interview in 2002, re-writing the narrative that depicted Raúl as a soulless apparatchik tempered by his charismatic brother.
I saw his charm and mischievousness first-hand in 1994, when I was interviewing Fidel Castro in Havana. It was just minutes into my Vanity Fair interview with Fidel in the green room area of the Council of State, when the trim, energetic No. 2 bounded over to us and began to chat. The interruption so surprised me that it took a moment to recognize him as Raúl. Who else, after all, could barge into a conversation with Fidel and not end up in the pokey — or worse? Fidel did not move nor was he pleased as Raúl playfully bussed my cheeks in greeting, offered a few quick jests and departed as cheerfully as he’d arrived.
Raul’s “tender-heartedness,” to be sure, only went so far: He took the lead role, with Che, in the summary execution of the Revolution’s enemies and in the creation in the mid-’60s of the forced labor camps known as UMAP (Military Units to Aid Production). More than 30,000 “undesirables” — gays, dissidents, priests, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Catholics and hippies — were herded into internment camps for “rehabilitation” as the Castros sought to institutionalize El Hombre Nuevo, The New Man — Che’s credo of “revolutionary morality.”
* * *
It can be challenging to square the seemingly bifurcated nature of Raúl — the velvet fist inside an iron glove — but a helpful prism to understand him is through his two most politically active children: Alejandro Castro Espin, 50, an army colonel and intelligence expert who studied and honeymooned in Moscow, and Mariela Castro Espin, 53, Raúl’s free-spirited, bohemian daughter who has put LGBT rights at the top of Cuba’s social agenda, transforming Havana’s famed esplanade, the Malecon, into the Christopher Street of the Caribbean.
For more than a decade, Alejandro has worked by his father’s side, charged with a singularly significant portfolio that includes state security, foreign intelligence, as well as controls on dissidents and activists — a crackdown that shows no signs of abetting, despite the warming relations with the U.S. (More than 600 were arrested in March alone.)
Christened with Fidel’s revolutionary nom de guerre, Alejandro fought in Angola with Cuban troops in the mid-’80s, losing the vision in one eye to a noncombat mishap. A handsome 6-footer, he is the father of two children (grown twins) from his first marriage. He has inherited his uncle’s hard-line views, as well as Fidel’s policy wonk gene, earning a doctorate in international relations. In 2009, Alejandro published The Empire of Terror, a 300-page anti-American screed. In February, he spoke at the Havana Book Fair to promote his latest inquisition of the Cuban Goliath, a volume titled The United States: The Price of Power.
In January, while visiting Greece, Alejandro gave a rare interview to the Havana Times. Sounding like an apparatchik of yore, he turgidly alluded to historical texts and economic data. When queried on the issue of elections — Cuba has not had a multiparty, free and open one since 1948 — he was evasive and humorless. But he was quick to point out that the U.S.-Cuban rapprochement was reached because of American, not Cuban, concessions, lending credence to critics of the deal. “Barack Obama has recognized the errors of the 10 preceding presidents,” he said, “that their policy towards Cuba has been flawed and failed.” As for the great economic opening that so many in Washington predict lies ahead, he was quick to tamp down expectations: “Cuba will never return to capitalism.”

Until recently, Alejandro had long emulated his father’s modus operandi, working quietly behind the scenes. One friend calls Alejandro “his father’s gatekeeper,” but he is far more than that. In April, he accompanied his father to his brief exchange with Obama during the Summit of the Americas in Panama and in May, he was with his father during his historic visit with the pope at the Vatican. Raúl’s decision to showcase his son — at the two most significant meetings of his career — augurs a major leadership upgrade for Alejandro.
Some believe him to be the heir apparent when Raúl steps down, as he has promised to do in 2018 — despite Raúl’s continual hints that he will hand power to his protégé, 55-year-old Miguel Diaz-Canel, whom he made first vice president of the Council of State. Regardless of his title, Alejandro will be a power behind the throne, ensuring that castroismo — however mutated and diluted will prevail for another decade.
Meanwhile, his older sister, Mariela, is temperamentally Alejandro’s opposite — outgoing, simpatica, with a healthy slice of her father’s sense of humor. Well-traveled and cosmopolitan, she has three children — one from a liaison with a Chilean ex-guerrilla fighter and two with her Italian husband, Paolo Titolo. She is clearly the daughter of her revolutionary feminist mother, Vilma Espin, and heads up the Cuban National Center for Sex Education. She has also assumed role as Cuba’s unofficial first lady after her mother’s death in 2007.
Like her mother, she is not averse to political heavy lifting. She has transformed Cuba — a country and culture saturated in homophobia — into being the beacon on the hill for LGBT rights in Latin America. She also urged free and unfettered travel for Cubans and visitors — when such suggestions were pure heresy. “Mariela brought perestroika into my home!” Raúl often jokes.
Mariela’s most audacious move to date has not been her landmark work for gay rights. Rather, it was her decision last year to cast the first “no” vote in the history of the National Assembly, Cuba’s rubber stamp Congress where she is a member, which dropped jaws in Havana and Washington. (The civil code in question did not adequately address her signature cause — gay rights.) Of course, dissent comes without the usual price when one is the president’s daughter.
However, while Alejandro is rarely far from his father’s side—and was in the loop of the delicate talks with the U.S. — significantly Mariela was not. Voicing how “thrilled and excited” she was about the historic agreement, she said that she “didn’t have the slightest idea” that the negotiations had been ongoing. The day after the announcement, she allowed, “Yesterday, I was as surprised as you.”
* * *
Few have spent as much time with Raúl’s family as Juan Juan Almeida, whose comandante father, Juan, was a lifelong comrade of Raúl and Fidel. For decades, until his death in 2009, Juan Almeida represented the sole Afro-Cuban in the Castros’ inner circle and Politburo.
So close was the families’ bond that son Juan Juan lived with Raúl’s family from the ages 8 to 14, from 1973 through 1981. Juan Juan was one of the two witnesses at Alejandro’s wedding, the other being Mirta Diaz-Balart (Fidel’s first wife, and the aunt to the Castros’ ideological foes in Miami, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart and former Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart).
Chatting at a restaurant in Miami’s Design District, Almeida, accompanied by his wife Consuelo, spoke of the two tightly knit families — a tie that irreparably frayed when Almeida wrote a book in 2002 critical of the government and its leaders. Over the next seven years, he was arrested nine times — his release finally negotiated by the Catholic Church. Despite his expulsion from Cuba in 2009, Almeida, a round man with an easy smile, is remarkably free of the bitterness that haunts many exiles.
He explains how he came to live with Raúl’s family in their spacious, well-guarded, seventh-floor Havana apartment. “I was raised with my three sisters, and therefore I began to adopt what were certain feminine mannerisms,” he said with a mock raised eyebrow. “And the son of a great comandante — a great man — cannot be gay. So for that reason, they brought me to live at Raúl’s house.”
Raúl Castro and his wife, Vilma Espin, also had three girls and a boy, virtually the same ages. The families made the decision — one no doubt borne out of cultural machismo — that it would be better if the two boys were raised together. “I lived in their apartment in Nuevo Vedado,” Almeida says. “Then much later, when Vilma and Raúl separated, Raúl went to live in Siboney, cloistered, where he lives today,” a sprawling home closer to Fidel’s and the sea. “We [Alejandro and Juan Juan] went to visit Raúl almost every day.”

Growing up in Raúl’s household was a mix of the pedestrian and the rarified — enjoyed by the island’s elite. Notwithstanding his criticism of both father and son, Almeida has only praise for Raúl and his late wife as parents—in contrast to Fidel’s absentee parenting. “Vilma and Raúl were separated by 1978,” Almeida says. Raúl had found a younger companera, virtually the norm for the Revolution’s leadership. “But that is not to say they ceased to be a family. They were excellent parents,” regardless of Raúl’s marital affairs, Almeida said.
According to Amuchastegui, the former Cuban intelligence officer, when Raúl left Vilma for the pretty chica, “Fidel told him to move back into the house because they could not afford to lose Vilma.” Somehow, he managed both. In the matters of state and family, Almeida says, “Raúl did not abandon Vilma. Up until the day she died.”
Alina Fernandez, the 59-year-old illegitimate daughter of Fidel and Naty Revuelta, the socialite turned revolutionary who died earlier this year, was another privileged member of the Cuban Brat Pack. Like Almeida, Cuban life profoundly soured for her, leading to her sensational defection in 1993.
Following her mother’s death, I spoke with Fernandez who said she had spent more time with Raúl’s family than her own half-siblings. “Raúl’s children were well provided for but they were not isolated from Cuban society,” she told me. “They went to public schools like everyone else. There were no bodyguards. Fidel’s children went to [private] special schools.” In fact, it was Raúl who made sure that her mother and herself were taken care of. “He was always helpful to us,” she said at the time. “I knew I could always count on Raúl.”
Growing up in a family divided by exile and illegitimacy, she said she often thought of Raúl’s family as being something akin to Cuba’s “Leave it to Beaver.” “There was so much normality in that family,” she laughed.
Almeida maintains that aside from Raúl, his old pal Alejandro is “the man who has the most power in Cuba today.” But the son, Almeida explains, lacks his father’s natural ease and confidence. “Alejandro is terrified of ridicule. So he practices a lot. He is very dogged,” Almeida says. He also possesses a singular gift, in common with his famous uncle, which has helped ensure his academic success: “He has a photographic memory.”
Alejandro, however, shares his father’s prideful nature. Almeida says his most vivid memory was an evening when he watched Raúl’s passion for cockfighting — likely an invitation intended to bolster the boys’ machismo. According to Almeida, Raúl’s rooster began to flounder and retreat after several rounds, prompting laughter from the attendees. As he recalls, “Raúl, humiliated, took out his pistol and shot the rooster dead.” A mortified young Almeida burst into tears.
“The fact that a leader can drink expensive wine, that’s not the story,” Almeida says. “The story is the power they have to live above the law.” Cockfighting, after all, was outlawed in Cuba in 1968. “To me,” he says, “that’s the worst thing about the leaders of the Cuban Revolution.”
That carte blanche authority carried over from father to son. Almeida related an oft-told episode, passed on by guards and soldiers who were in Angola in the 1980s when Cuba intervened in that country’s civil war. “Alejandro had ordered a case of beer,” recounts Almeida, “but when the africano delivered the case, a bottle was missing, and it was clear that some of the other bottles’ contents had been watered down.” Furious at the thieving, the 20-something Alejandro reportedly drew his pistol and shot the African. “For Alejandro,” explains Justo Sanchez, a friend of Almeida’s, “this was the worst form of insult — coger de bobo — to be taken for a fool, or to be taken advantage of by somebody.”
* * *
Unlike his elder sibling, Raúl does not mask his emotions. When their mother, Lina Ruz, died in 1963, Juanita described her brother as “inconsolable,” staying at his mother’s side after her death and escorting the casket by train across the island for burial at the family finca, in eastern Cuba. At the 2007 funeral of his wife, Vilma, Raúl wept profusely.]


About five years ago, the health of one of Raúl’s oldest friends, Efigenio Ameijeiras, began to fail. A five-star general and comandante of the Revolution, Ameijeiras, 85, had lost four brothers who died fighting against Batista. A hospital in Havana is named for the brothers. “Raúl calls Efigenio every week to see how he is,” says a close friend of Ameijeiras, adding that Raúl has provided his friend with an office at the prestigious Council of Ministers and a chauffeured car. “Raúl is a much better person than Fidel,” a friend says.
Friendship and sentimentality, however, go only so far. Raúl, like his brother, insists on blanket loyalty and allegiance. To ensure there are no breaches, the doings and conversations of officials are thoroughly monitored. While Big Brother programs have been a hallmark of Cuban life since the beginning of the Revolution, the ruling family instituted more targeted surveillance following a series of embarrassing defections.
In 1991, Col. Jesus Renzoli, Raúl’s secretary of 20-plus years, defected to the U.S. Not only did Renzoli have ongoing access to Fidel and Raúl Castro, he was the chief of the 2nd Secretariat from 1983 to 1990. Renzoli led Cuba’s Military Mission to U.S.S.R. and served as ambassador to the Soviet Union. As Fidel’s and Raúl’s Russian translator, Renzoli was privy to all their conversations with the Soviets. (A man of considerable accomplishment, Renzoli began a second career at the World Bank in 1995.)
There have been scores of other top-drawer defections: In 1987, General Rafael del Pino, deputy chief of staff of the Cuban Defense Ministry and the former chief of the Cuban Air Force, piloted a small training plane carrying his family to Key West. In 1993, Interior Ministry Colonel Filiberto Castineiras likewise fled to Miami. Also unforeseen was the defection of Alcibiades Hidalgo, Raúl’s former chief of staff and Cuba’s ambassador to the United Nations, who decamped in the U.S. 2002 with much to impart.
Defection is not the only mode of betrayal in Raúl’s eyes. The Castros insist on an exceedingly high loyalty bar. Felipe Perez Roque and Carlos Lage, former foreign minister and vice president, were given their walking papers and compelled to write mea culpas after being caught on tape in 2008 making mild, passing comments about the succession. “They were gone in a heartbeat. That was a message to everyone,” says John Caufield, the former U.S. chief in Havana. “Don’t say anything or you’re going to pay a price. These guys [Cuba’s political class] don’t even talk to their wives about stuff. They’re all surveilled. They don’t trust anybody after the demise of Perez Roque and Lage.”
There was another small matter: Both men had been fidelistas and neither had come up through Raúl’s army. Over the last seven years, Raúl has slowly but systematically re-shuffled the Politburo, pushing aside fidelistas and moving raúlitos into the most senior slots.
 * * *
Remaining in Raúl Castro’s good graces hinges not only on loyalty but on discretion. Exhibit A is Raúl’s relationship with Cuba’s two most famous artists, the sculptor/painter Kcho and the performance artist Tania Bruguera. Kcho is a stalwart Castro family friend and political ally. Raúl and other Castro members attended Kcho’s wedding in 2008 and, in turn, Kcho is welcome at many Castro family celebrations.
Earlier this year, Kcho did the unthinkable and turned his studio in El Romerillo, a working-class neighborhood of Havana, into a free Internet hot spot for anyone who happens to wander by. Internet access is prohibitively expensive for most Cubans and is vigilantly monitored for content. Kcho, though, remains in the Castro family embrace and was even among the invitees who attended the Cuban Embassy opening in Washington.
Meanwhile, internationally renowned Bruguera, whose father was a minister and close friend of Fidel’s, is under house arrest for orchestrating a performance piece that never even took place. En route to her event in the Plaza de la Revolucion — where Fidel gave many of his famed stemwinder speeches and where she had planned to have ordinary Cubans step up to a microphone and express whatever they wanted — Bruguera was arrested.
The difference? Kcho’s loyalty to the Castros trumps his art — he requested permission for his Internet oasis before opening it. Bruguera, however, is an artist who is answerable to no one. She had incensed authorities at the 2012 Biennial when she staged an impromptu pilot version of her performance piece — passing around a microphone to let Cubans air their grievances — which they did.
While gossip and complaining are revered national pastimes, voicing grievances publically is crossing the line in the Cuban sand. For now, Bruguera’s international reputation has protected her from languishing in jail—much like dissident blogger Yoanni Sanchez, whose bravery garnered global renown before authorities could dispense with her. But that does not mean that all bodes well for Bruguera; she defied her ban from the recent Biennial by inviting one and all to hear her reading from Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism at her home. Should Bruguera, formerly a Cuban Brat Pack-er, be allowed to travel again, it could well be a one-way ticket.
* * *
While young Cubans have gleefully traded in socialismo for consumismo — consumerism — the pastime of Cuba’s older nomenklatura, the privileged set, is reading Raúl’s tea leaves.
Domingo Amuchastegui has been a fairly good prognosticator. In 2012, he told me that Luis Alberto Rodriguez Lopez-Callejas, married (though estranged) to Raúl’s daughter, Deborah, who heads up the military’s business wing, GAESA, would be promoted to general and step onto the Central Committee. All true. GAESA is the behemoth economic corporation of the Cuban Armed Forces — meaning it is the country’s CEO with a hand or a say in virtually every major business transaction and generates about half of the country’s hard currency.
Moreover, his son with Deborah Castro Espin is Raúl Guillermo, 30, who holds a crucially important post: handling Raúl’s personal security. “Raúlito is his favorite,” says Juan Juan Almeida, who recalled a child who was excitable or “hyper,” needing extra care. “All grandparents love all their grandchildren, but there is always one who is special and that is that boy.” The couple also have a 30-year-old daughter named Vilmita who is married to a painter and is active in the art world. Like so many Castro relations who have quietly visited the U.S. over the years, often staying with Aunt Juanita in Miami, Vilmita has traveled several times to the United States. Last year, she accompanied a Cuban artist to New York City.
Amuchestegui also believes that the most powerful voice in the years ahead will be Raúl’s son, Alejandro, whose ascent, he says, is just beginning. “Raúl has created this special position making Alejandro the uber-intelligence czar of Cuba — sort of a national security boss,” he explains, integrating MININT, Cuba’s intelligence apparatus, with the FAR, the Army. Moreover, he says that when General Abelardo Colomé Ibarra, 76, known as Furry, the longtime head of MININT, steps down due to failing health, “Alejandro could very well take over.”
It seems a sure bet that Alejandro, a colonel, will be promoted to brigadier general next April during the Seventh Congress of the Cuban Communist Party and awarded a crucial spot on the powerful Central Committee, thus burnishing his bona fides as a future leader for Cuba. Down the road, he’ll likely be upped to a general, the ultimate imprimatur for leadership in Cuba.
Despite her popularity, the influence of Raúl’s daughter Mariela Castro Espin will likely be limited to social and domestic issues. Nor will any other women be calling the shots in Cuba. Josefina Vidal, Cuba’s high-profile lead negotiator and top official for U.S. affairs, is a good bet for becoming Cuba’s ambassador to the U.S., but that likely will be her glass ceiling.

Despite Fidel and Raúl’s refrains over the years that “Cuba is not a dynasty,” there are only two non-Castro players primed to play lead roles in the future. Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez, 57, who attended the festivities in Washington in July, will continue in prominence, barring any missteps or showboating — as will Miguel Diaz-Canel, whom Raúl has steadily promoted. The latter is widely viewed as his successor in 2018.
But while Raúl has said he’ll relinquish the presidency in three years, he has not mentioned stepping down as head of the all-powerful Cuban Communist Party. In other words, it may be a smart chess move — not entirely unlike what Vladimir Putin did in Russia in handing the presidency temporarily to Dmitry Medvedev.
Indeed, in many ways, Cuba’s détente with the U.S. has only cemented the primacy and power of the Communist Party. Raúl’s mission, says Frank Mora, a former U.S. defense department official during the Obama administration, “is regime survival,” leading Cuba from “being less a country of caudillos [party bosses] and more a country of institutions,” namely the army and the party.
“As long as Raúl’s alive and healthy,” says the former Interests Section Chief John Caufield, “he’ll be the ultimate decider — Cuba’s ayatollah.”
* * *
How Cuba navigates the years ahead as it eases back into the global community remains an open question. And the Castro brothers haven’t always agreed on its path. In 1993, Renzoli told RAND analyst Edward Gonzalez that he had witnessed more than one argument between the siblings over economic reforms issues — with Raúl consistently favoring pro-market reforms and Fidel insisting on holding the line. “There were knock-down, dragged out fights that had Raúl in tears,” Renzoli told Gonzalez.
These days, Fidel — the ailing lion of the Cuban Revolution who just turned 89 on August 13 — represents an uber-sensitive topic. Many view Fidel as fully sidelined, pointing to the fact that Fidel responded to the diplomatic bombshell by voicing his reservations. “I don’t trust the policy of the United States,” Fidel wrote in a letter published in Granma, the state-controlled newspaper, “nor have I exchanged a word with them.”
Amuchastegui, who travels regularly to Cuba, believes that Raúl runs all major decisions by Fidel but not the day-to-day business of governing the country. Another Castro loyalist in Havana believes that to be impossible. “Fidel is simply not the same man” since his near-death in 2006 during abdominal surgery,” she says. “I think it was all the anesthesia they gave him for all his surgeries.” His once legendary computer-esque memory is no more, she says, and he is now heavily reliant on his wife, Dalia. Still, he has his good days when he will opine, host visitors and pose for photos.
His most faithful, reliable visitor, she says, is his brother Raúl. As Renzoli once told Gonzalez, “Raúl was totally loyal to Fidel. Nor did Fidel ever doubt his brother’s commitment to him.”
* * *
Among the diplomatic challenges Raúl faces in the years ahead is his country’s rapprochement with the Catholic Church, a historically fraught relationship, and one that illustrates the reversals of fortune all too common in Cuba. In 1966, a young Catholic priest named Jaime Ortega was arrested and interned in a UMAP forced labor camp for 10 months at a time when Cuba had generally declared war on the Church. Today, he is Cardinal Ortega and the archbishop of Havana, a power broker trusted by Raúl who ably assisted in the secret negotiations with the U.S. It was Ortega who collaborated with his old Argentine friend Jorge Bergoglio, aka Pope Francis, with the Vatican serving as a broker between the two sides. Francis, who had accompanied Pope John Paul to Havana in 1998,  even offered to host the two sides, providing a good deal of political cover for Obama.
The Castros began to loosen the screws on the Church in 1998 when they invited Pope John Paul II to visit. Millions of enthralled Cubans packed plazas and churches to hear Papa Juan Pablo, their fervor undiminished by 35 years of church suppression.

One day after his appointment as president in February 2008, Raúl Castro made clear the importance of the Church. His first meeting with a foreign official would be Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican’s secretary of state and pope’s right hand. Raúl even shed his general’s uniform for the occasion and donned a dark suit. More substantively, he promised more freedoms for the Church and laid the groundwork for Pope Benedict’s visit in 2012.
Pope Benedict had none of John Paul’s charisma, but he was able to persuade Raúl to reinstate Good Friday as a national holiday, just as John Paul II had rescued Christmas and Easter for Cubans.
One of the few people not surprised by the Raúl’s recent embrace of the Church is his sister, Juanita, who says she felt it was inevitable, given Raúl’s tie to their intensely devout mother. Both the youngest and eldest of the Castro clan siblings, Agustina, and Ramón (Mongo), also attend church regularly.
Juanita added that the Castro family had an extended private meeting with Pope John Paul II after his Havana mass — one that was memorialized on video and photographs for each family member. All the Castro siblings — with the exception of herself — were present, including a suited-up Raúl. Even younger sister Enma, who lives in Mexico, flew in for the occasion.
John Parke Wright, whose family once owned a large ranch in Cuba, frequently visits the island. When in Havana, Wright attends Sunday mass in the city’s magnificent cathedral, an 18th century ode to the supremacy to the Church — often accompanied by Agustina or Ramón Castro. “The family never abandoned their Catholic roots,” Wright says. Such a definitive statement is arguable, but it’s certainly true that Francis’s standing as the first Jesuit pope counts with the Castros. “He is a Jesuit, as you well know,” Raúl said pointedly after meeting the pope. “I am, too, in a certain sense because I was always in Jesuit schools.”
[If] the pope continues to talk as he does, I will start praying again and return to the Catholic Church. And I am not kidding — Raúl Castro
The pope, of course, has helped matters by saying all the right things — sounding very much like a liberation theologian. “[If] the pope continues to talk as he does,” Raúl said cheerfully, “I will start praying again and return to the Catholic Church. And I am not kidding.” Moreover, Raúl said he would be attending “all his Masses” when the pope visits the island on September 18. “And I will be happy to do so!”
Raúl’s olive branch belies the fact that the Church — which represents the largest NGO in Cuba — and its faithful face an array of stifling restrictions and obstacles. Cuba does not allow Catholic schools, despite the fact that all the Castro children attended them. Nor is the Church allowed a radio or television station or program. Simply put, the Castros remain suspicious of any organ other than the Communist Party that can command large groups — be it the Catholic Church, black social clubs, Google or the Freemasons.
Dissidents have traditionally found within the Church a degree of shelter, albeit limited. Most notably identified with Catholicism have been the Ladies in White — the wives and daughters of political prisoners who walk silently, dressed in white, down Havana’s Fifth Avenue, and the late Oswaldo Paya’s Christian Liberation Movement, which launched the popular Varela Project in 1998, advocating for basic liberties such as freedom of speech and religion, free elections, and amnesty for political prisoners.
Yet even as the Church heals its breach with the Castros, its relationship with dissidents has become a troubled one. There was anger that Pope Benedict did not meet with dissidents in 2012 — most of whom were barred from even attending his mass. And there is a quiet fury with Cardinal Ortega, who has facilitated many prison releases but who recently made the remarkable claim that there “were no political prisoners in Cuba, just common ones.”
Cuban negotiators have promised the Vatican that they will not restrict nor cherry-pick foreign reporters from covering Francis’ visit, scheduled for September 18th before his visit to the States. That remains to be seen. While Cuba has thrown down the red carpet for Americans tourists to unload their cash, many foreign reporters and exiles in the diaspora have faced rejection or insistent obstacles in securing visas to visit.
* * *
Santiago de Cuba, often called the cradle of the Revolution, underwent a massive restoration and facelift, for its 500th birthday, celebrated on July 25. It is the city that is most beloved by the Castro brothers — being close to their birthplace and regarded as the kick-starter of their Revolution. It is home to the Moncada Garrison where 62 years ago, Fidel and Raúl led an assault, however doomed, that made them famous throughout the island.
It is also where the venerable Santa Ifigenia Cemetery is located where the revered Cuban patriot Jose Marti is buried. The cemetery has recently been upgraded and renovated — some say, to be the final resting place of Fidel.
There will be no guessing with Raúl, who has been thinking about legacies: Cuba and his own. Raúl Castro has made another choice. He has seen to it that his name is already engraved on a plaque next to his late wife Vilma’s, mounted on an immense boulder ringed by the green palms of the Micara hills of Santiago province.
“He will go down as the guy who returned Cuba into the fold of the Western hemisphere,” says former U.S. top Cuba diplomat, Vicki Huddleston. “He rescued it from being this Communist anomaly where Cubans can potentially enjoy the perks of modern life.”
While Fidel Fatigue has been supplanted by Castro fatigue, “many Cubans are loving Raúl for breaking the impasse with the U.S.,” says Huddleston. “And they will love him a whole lot more if they ever get to enjoy better lives.”
While it’s unlikely that history will absolve Fidel Castro — it’s looking pretty good of late for Raúl.

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