Hope fizzles in post-Fidel Cuba

Hints of anger surface as reform appears unlikely. Unrest or mass migration may be coming, analysts say.
By Carol J. Williams
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

March 5, 2008

MIAMI — With little prospect for change in Cuba on the horizon, inklings of discontent have begun to surface on the communist-ruled island that analysts say could spread unrest or incite mass migration.

No interpretation of the parliamentary decisions following the resignation of Fidel Castro signals a likelihood of more economic opportunity or personal freedom -- the two greatest sources of young Cubans' dissatisfaction.

Coupled with newly named President Raul Castro's call for his fellow Cubans to speak candidly about the nation's problems, the unmet expectation that reformers would succeed Fidel Castro could unleash despair among Cubans over the likelihood of continued poverty and isolation.

Fidel Castro's Cuba never experienced a military coup attempt or a major clash between its armed forces and the people. Demonstrations by the discontented were usually thwarted beforehand by secret police arrests of known instigators.

But frustration with the status quo has been building in the 19 months since Castro began his departure from leadership.

Cubans interviewed on the streets of Havana before and after the leadership shuffle expressed resentment over their inability to travel abroad, access the Internet or use facilities and services reserved for foreigners, even if they have dollars.

"Why can't the people of Cuba go to hotels or travel to other parts of the world?" Eliecer Avila, a student at an elite computer science school outside the Cuban capital, asked National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcon six weeks ago in a now-infamous exchange that visibly rattled the parliamentary leader.

Clandestine video of that exchange has been circulating throughout Cuba, instigating discussion and discontent among young Cubans.

In Santiago de Cuba, several hundred students marched in protest of a university regent's handling of a sexual assault incident last month, the largest known defiance of an authority figure since the early 1990s. Smaller protests have been waged recently during soccer and baseball matches.

"People are up to here with waiting," a young taxi driver said of the desire for better living conditions, tapping his forehead with a leveled hand.

Hopes that a post-Fidel leadership would embrace more economic reforms began swelling in July 2006, when the longtime leader temporarily ceded the reins of government to Raul. As it became clear that Fidel's departure would prove permanent, but not be the catalyst for major change, Cubans became increasingly impatient and cynical.

One senior government official wrote to an exile friend in Miami in early February to complain that the island was consumed by inmovilismo -- stagnation -- as Cubans gradually ceased expecting significant change.

Beyond the appointment of Communist Party hard-liner Jose Ramon Machado as next in line to Raul Castro in the hierarchy, the parliamentary session elevated other old-guard stalwarts in the 31-member Council of State.

The council was packed with "Raulistas" -- loyalists of the longtime defense minister and men with personal wealth and power at stake should the country open the economic playing field to a wider sphere of Cubans. Two three-star generals of the Revolutionary Armed Forces were added to the council, joining two others who have served there for decades, along with Raul, the country's only four-star general.

"There's been no rejuvenation of the top leadership in Cuba. The average age of Raul Castro and the six vice presidents is a little more than 70. It's a gerontocracy," said Brian Latell, a former CIA Cuba analyst and author of a rare biography of the younger Castro, "After Fidel."

"These old men will be dealing with the possibility of upheaval, levels of instability among younger generations of Cubans," he said. "That may be the most important problem they are going to be facing."

Andy Gomez, an assistant provost at the University of Miami and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said he had heard from Cuban contacts by phone that young people had been arrested "for no reason except [regime] fear they might take to the streets and protest."

He said the testy exchange between the students and Alarcon showed that appeals for Cubans to speak up about the country's shortcomings had been taken literally, and hard-liners have gained strength in a figurative circling of the revolutionary wagons.

In the last two years, more than 70,000 Cubans have migrated, about half of them illegally, to the United States, Gomez said.

Analysts fear that without prospects for change in Cuba, the number will continue rising, perhaps presenting the U.S. government with another migration crisis in the midst of a presidential election campaign. The 1980 Mariel boatlift sent 125,000 Cubans to Florida, and tens of thousands more took to the seas in 1994, in the depths of post-Soviet hardships.

"I can see an increase in some instability, demonstrations, a continuation of the out-migration. The outlook is not very optimistic for the future of Cuba," said Jaime Suchlicki, head of the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami.

He cited Raul Castro's naming of Machado, whom he described as "an unusually hard-line member of the Cuban Communist Party," as an indication that there would be no relaxation of the party and military control of the population, never mind market economic reforms to allow Cubans to boost their paltry incomes.

Popular pressure is building and the government can no longer ignore it, said a senior government engineer in Havana, because the influx of dollars to Cuban citizens from relatives abroad and foreign tourists has made people without access to hard currency bitterly aware of their second-class status.

"Change is inevitable and unavoidable, though it won't be like an off-on switch," said the engineer, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Jorge Salazar-Carrillo, an economic analyst of Cuba from Florida International University, believes Cubans will be too frightened of their powerful military to brave the kind of massive street protests that brought democratic governments to power in Eastern Europe two decades ago.

"Why don't people revolt? They tell me that the boot they have on top of the people is so strong and so hard. They are completely compressed by that weight," the economics professor said. "People are scared to death."

carol.williams@latimes.com

A Times staff writer in Havana contributed to this report.

Fidel Castro Says Raul in Charge of Cuba

By ANITA SNOW
Associated Press Writer

6:55 AM PST, February 29, 2008

HAVANA — Fidel Castro said Friday that his younger brother was fully in charge as Cuba's new president, apparently trying to dispel speculation that he was directing Raul from behind the scenes.

The elder Castro's comments, published in the online edition of the Communist Party newspaper Granma, were his first since parliament named Raul to the country's top post last weekend.

Raul Castro has "all legal and constitutional faculties and prerogatives" to lead Cuba," Fidel Castro wrote.

The 81-year-old Fidel announced last week that he was would not seek a new presidential term, acknowledging he was too ill to govern the communist country after 49 years at the helm.

Raul Castro, 76, already had been governing provisionally for 19 months, taking over when Fidel announced he had undergone intestinal surgery and was temporarily stepping aside. But even during that period, Fidel Castro remained Cuba's uncontested leader.

On Sunday, Raul requested -- and received -- permission from lawmakers to consult with Fidel on "the decisions of special transcendence for the future of our nation" especially those involving "defense, foreign policy and socio-economic development."

In his comments, Fidel Castro also dismissed concerns about the ages of many of the new members of the Council of State, Cuba's supreme governing authority, who were elected Sunday by Parliament.

He noted that two key generals, Leopoldo Cintra Frias and Alvaro Lopez Miera, are both younger than U.S. Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who is 71. Cintra Frias is 66. Alvaro Lopez's age was not immediately available, but he appears to be in his 60s.

The two generals are "much younger than McCain and have much more experience as military chiefs," Castro said.

In his Friday essay, Fidel also referred to the parliament's selection of 77-year-old Communist Party ideologue Jose Ramon Machado Ventura as the government's No. 2 man.

Many Cubans had expected the parliament to chose a much younger successor for Raul, and were stunned by the naming of a man known as a political hard liner.

"You can now hear the howls of the wolves trapped by their tails," Fidel wrote. "What rabidness is provoked especially by the election of Machadito as first vice president" of the Council of State.

Fidel has not been seen in public since falling ill in July 2006, but he had regularly published columns under the title "Reflections of the Commander in Chief." He wrote Friday's column under the title "Reflections of Comrade Fidel," as he had said he would in his resignation letter last week.

After Fidel: A Guide to the Players

By Tim Padgett and Dolly Mascarenas

There's rarely anything newsworthy in the stultifying proceedings of Cuba's rubber-stamp National Assembly. But, perhaps for the first time in half a century, this Sunday's session actually packs some drama. The ailing, 81-year-old Fidel Castro this week announced his resignation after 49 years as President, declaring on Friday that he has promised himself a vacation. Now, the Assembly is expected to select his younger brother, Raul Castro, 76, as his successor. (Raul has served as interim President since the summer of 2006, when major intestinal surgery sidelined Fidel.)

But just as important as Raul's ascent is the question of which figures in Cuba's opaque leadership structure will rise with him — and who looks set to fade along with Fidel. To signal the passing of the revolutionary torch from old guard to new, the Assembly may select economy czar Carlos Lage, 56 — who shares Raul's visions of more capitalist, China-style reforms — as the First Vice President, making him the No. 2 man in Havana. Or the post could go to someone loyal to Fidel's more orthodox socialism, such as National Assembly Speaker Ricardo Alarcon, 70. That combination would strike a balance between the Raulistas and the Fidelistas while Fidel is still alive, but would also dull the prospects for meaningful political reform, at least until he dies.

Either way, most analysts predict the theme of the Assembly session will be youth — such as it is at the top of Cuba's communist power structure — especially the promotion of younger generals in the armed forces, which are still run by Raul and which control much of the economy.

Whatever emerges at the Assembly, Fidel Castro's resignation has opened up an unprecedented moment of political uncertainty — and competition — within the ranks of the ruling Communist Party. Herewith, TIME.com's guide to those among the Cuban elite worth watching on Sunday and beyond:

Fidel Castro: He may be stepping down as president and in ill health, but he's still a charismatic factor and still holds an important position in Cuba as head of the Communist Party. He retains a following on the island and is almost certainly pressing Raul to include some of his loyalists in the future government.

Raul Castro: Sunday's session is his coming-out party as Fidel's replacement as President of the Council of State, and perhaps also as President of the Council of Ministers (Cuba's Prime Minister). But despite 49 years as Fidel's No. 2 and military chief, Raul is a pragmatist who possesses none of his brother's bearded magnetism. Forging a legitimate bond with Cuba's 11 million people, as a result, is his toughest task — and how he orchestrates the new state hierarchy this weekend will be his first test.

Ramiro Valdes: Valdes is the most powerful Fidelista with whom Raul will have to deal. The 75-year-old former Interior Minister has been at Fidel's side since the Cuban Revolution was launched in 1953. He and Raul do not see eye to eye regarding reform, but they have to work with each other. Valdes is the Information and Communications Minister, whose purview includes control of the Internet in Cuba — a fairly important job in any modern totalitarian state.

Carlos Lage: The pediatrician-turned-economist and a Vice President of the Council of State, he is the architect and ambassador of Raul's more market-oriented economic blueprint. "He projects the image of a younger, more collegial, civilian and modern leadership," says University of Miami Cuba expert Brian Latell, author of After Fidel. Widely expected to receive the Council of State's First Vice President post.

Ricardo Alarcon: The leader of the National Assembly and former ambassador to the United Nations could be competition for Lage. But Alarcon's stature took a significant hit this month when a video surfaced showing him flummoxed by a university student publicly hectoring him with questions about Cuba's economic dysfunction. Alarcon may well be kicked upstairs to a largely ceremonial Vice President's post.

General Abelardo Colome: A Council of State Vice President and Interior Minister, Colome, 68, is a military hero and Raul's right-hand man. Like Valdes, he has served the Castro brothers since the early 1950s. Nicknamed "Furry," he may replace Raul as Defense Minister.

Felipe Perez Roque: Cuba's 42-year-old Foreign Minister is widely considered a Fidel pit bull — a leader of the young, ideologically zealous Fidelista cohort known as "los Taliban." But Raul is said to distrust, if not dislike, the electrical engineer. Still, as one of Fidel's favorites, Perez is likely to remain a player for now, and could win a Vice President's spot.

General Alvaro Lopez Miera: Like Colome, the 63-year-old armed forces chief of staff Lopez is a fiercely loyal Raulista. He is also widely touted as the next Defense Minister, particularly since he's relatively younger than other top generals.

Mariela Castro: Raul's daughter, 45, heads the National Sex Education Center and is a strong proponent of social liberalization in Cuba — for example, she favors reversing the official harassment of homosexuals that her Uncle Fidel long condoned. She is considered a critical link to Cuban youth.

Colonel Luis Alberto Rodriguez: Also in his 40s, Rodriguez is Raul's son-in-law (married to his eldest daughter Debora), and analysts believe he's being groomed to eventually take over GAESA, Cuba's multi-billion-dollar, military-run business conglomerate.

Abel Prieto: The popular, long-haired Culture Minister, 57, has positioned himself with Raul and become an outspoken backer of stepped-up public debate on Cuba's political system. Another key ally in charisma-challenged Raul's efforts to reach the island's youth.

General Julio Casas: As Raul's Defense Vice Minister, Casas, 72, runs GAESA, whose dealings with foreign investors have kept Cuba's post-Cold War economy afloat. He's Raul's second-in-command, but is said to be ill, and will probably stay atop GAESA rather than take over the Defense Ministry.

General Ulises Rosales: Another loyal Raulista, Rosales, 65, heads the sugar industry, one of Cuba's most vital operations. But he's considered a longshot Defense Minister candidate.

Esteban Lazo: One of the few Afro-Cubans in the top echelon, despite the fact that Cuba's black population is one of the revolution's most loyal constituencies. Lazo, 63, is a Vice President responsible for education policy. Considered a favorite of the Castro brothers because of his peasant roots, he is one of six officials listed by Fidel in 2006 to be in line to succeed him; but he's unlikely to rise much higher.

Jose Ramon Balaguer: A doctor who fought in the Sierra Maestra with the Castros in the 1950s, Balaguer, 75, is Health Minister and another of the six listed by Fidel. A Fidelista limited by his age.

Jose Ramon Machado: Even older than Balaguer, Machado, 77, a doctor and longtime Castro sidekick, shares education duties with Lazo and is another of the six listed by Fidel. (The other three are Lage, Perez and Francisco Soberon, below.) Part of Raul's inner circle, but like Balaguer he may be too old to be a factor anymore.

Francisco Soberon: One of Lage's most trusted fellow technocrats, Soberon, 63, is the Central Bank chief who in 2004 helped produced Cuba's first fiscal surplus in decades.

Otto Rivero and Hassan Perez: Young Communist leaders (both in their 30s) who may be even more crucial bridges to Cuba's youth than either Prieto or Mariela Castro. Fidel recently made Rivero a Council of State Vice President; Hassan Perez heads the University Students Federation. Their factional loyalties aren't as clear; nor are the posts they're likely to win from this National Assembly.

Jorge Bolanos: Cuba's de facto ambassador to the U.S., Bolanos, 71, is thought to represent Raul's less ideological foreign policy strategy — including hints at improving relations with Washington.

Fernando Remirez de Estenoz: Bolanos's predecessor in the U.S. is a doctor who heads international relations for the powerful Central Committee of Cuba's Communist Party. Speaks fluent English and, like Bolanos, is considered an important interlocutor with the U.S.

Cuba's National Assembly convenes to choose successor to Castro

BY FRANCES ROBLES
Ofelia Ortega Suárez is an evangelical church pastor from Matanzas. Juan Antonio Borrego Díaz is a young blogger and Sancti Spiritus newspaper editor, while Antonio Castañeda is a musician and Santeria priest from Havana.

The three are among the nearly 400 new faces in Cuba's National Assembly whose 614 members Sunday will choose Fidel Castro's successor as president. A full 72 percent are too young to have any recollection of capitalism. Only a third are incumbents.

This younger and more diverse National Assembly is likely, experts say, to elect Castro's brother and Cuba's Defense Minister Raúl Castro as president, clearing the way for the kinds of reforms Raúl has promised during his 19-month tenure as interim leader to address the island's myriad economic problems.

''For the next five years, they are the ones who are going to deal with changes and reforms,'' said Domingo Amuchástegui, a former member of the Cuban intelligence services who now lives in Miami. ``I think it's important to have that younger generation and people from different sectors. They bring to the National Assembly a different sense of what is needed to be done.

``They are closer to real life.''

Many Cuba observers dismiss the assembly, formed in 1976, as a rubber-stamp mockery of a legislature. Its members run unopposed, they meet only twice a year for a handful of days and they vote by consensus. No bill has ever been voted down.

Although there have been legislative shakeups before, most agree that the sweeping transformation last month of its composition represents a significant step toward inclusion, and shows that the Cuban government under Raúl is more willing to embrace change. And if Raúl, as many predict, really opens the communist system to more economic reforms and public debate, the assembly could gain a stronger voice.

About half of those elected in January had been nominated by government-controlled organizations such as the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, the Federation of Cuban Women and Cuba's lone labor union.

The other half were elected to the assembly in municipal votes, via a complicated process that began late last year with block-by-block nominations by show of hands.

The result: 42 percent are women and 39 percent are black or racially mixed, the government says. Sixty percent were born after the revolution, and another 12 percent were 10 or younger when Castro won power in 1959.

FRUSTRATED POPULACE

Their work has never been more important. The government faces a population frustrated over low wages and rising food prices. Many products can only be bought with Cuba's dual currency, the convertible peso that is out of reach for most.

Fidel Castro warned in a 2005 speech that the revolution could implode if the hearts and minds of young people are lost because of economic hardship.

''If you are from Las Tunas, a woman, who is black and young and raising children, you are going to be more in touch with the issues than the old guard,'' said Katrin Hansing, visiting associate director of Florida International University's Cuban Research Institute. ``That woman is more in touch precisely because she lives in the provinces, because she's young and because she's black.''

Although Raúl Castro is believed to have younger reform-minded supporters, such as Vice President Carlos Lage, hardline loyalists such as Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque remain in positions of power.

Peter Roman, author of People's Power: Cuba's Experience with Representative Government, says the key aspect of the new assembly is ''the representation of the municipalities,'' he said. ``That's the dynamic part.''

Roman, whose book praises the Cuban electoral process as street-level democracy, said it's true the assembly has never rejected a bill in its 20-year history, but that's because bills pass through a heated committee process. Amuchástegui, the former intelligence agent, also contends the legislature is no rubber stamp.

The University of Miami's Andy Gomez, a senior fellow at the Institute of Cuban and Cuban American Studies, said most laws are presented to the assembly for ratification from the highest levels of government.

''How much will they have in terms of power? None,'' Gomez said. ``But symbolically, having younger people in there is a message.''

The assembly's composition has never mattered before. While it has elected a new Council of State and a Council President -- in effect the country's president -- every five years, this is the first time that Fidel Castro will not be the surefire winner.

Castro, 81, who held the title of prime minister during his first 17 years in power, assumed the title of council president when the National Assembly was created. Raúl Castro, 76, has been at the helm since July 2006 when his brother fell victim to the unnamed illness that would lead him only last week to step down permanently.

And so the assembly -- whose members include Elián González's father Juan Miguel González and Magalí Llort, the mother of convicted Cuban spy Fernando González -- will gather at the Convention Palace in Havana at 10 a.m. Sunday to replace the man who has ruled Cuba for almost five decades.

A special nominating commission has spent the past month consulting all the members on their preferred nominees for leadership posts in the assembly and the Council of State.

''I have never witnessed anything like that before,'' Amuchástegui said.

Among those questioned were Matanzas representative Ortega, the first evangelical Presbyterian minister to serve in the legislature in a country that was officially atheist for 30 years. Castañeda is the assembly's first Santeria high priest.

But true democracy appears to remain a long way off. The leadership nominating committee reached its decision behind closed doors, and the assembly members are not expected to question the slates it will submit. Hansing also noted that the new members are no doubt government loyalists.

''These people have been supporters of the system forever,'' she said. ``They didn't just appear out of nowhere.''

ALLIES OF RAUL

Dissident journalist Guillermo Fariñas said he was struck by the number of assembly members who are viewed as closer to Raúl Castro than to his brother, among them Llort.

''What you see is series of generals and colonels and people very close to Raúl Castro,'' he said by telephone from Villa Clara.

A review of the biographies posted on a government website shows 19 of the military's high command are in the assembly, including its chief of intelligence.

''The only change you'll see Sunday is in the Council of State,'' Fariñas said. ``But who knows. There could be surprises.''

Castro's legacy: A changed Latin America

The Cuban leader lasted long enough to see the U.S. grip on the region weaken.
By Héctor Tobar
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

February 23, 2008

MEXICO CITY — When Fidel Castro and his band of bearded rebels entered Havana just after New Year's Day 1959, Dwight Eisenhower was president of the United States, and few questioned American hegemony in Latin America.

Castro soon declared himself a communist, and nearly every government in the region joined the United States in condemning his regime. Two generations and nine U.S. presidents later, Castro is finally stepping down -- widely admired, even if his policies are not widely emulated.

Castro did not win his battle against U.S. "imperialism," a struggle that has impoverished and isolated his people. But he did stick around long enough to see Washington's grip on the region weaken.

His revolution was, in many ways, the defining event of Latin American history in the 20th century, said Lorenzo Meyer, a professor at the College of Mexico here. "There is no other leader who was able to confront the United States for half a century and survive."

For decades, Latin America was one of the front lines in the Cold War confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. As Moscow's ally, Castro's Cuba stood at the opposite end from Washington in the ideological tug of war for the region.

Today, every Latin American government except Cuba's has a democratically elected head of state. Falling trade barriers allow cash and commodities to flow back and forth across the region as never before, and the dollar even circulates as the official currency in El Salvador and Ecuador.

But the United States is far from triumphant. In some places, new players have emerged to challenge its influence, including the oil-rich government of the firebrand Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

Even if they do not mirror Castro's policies, many of the region's leaders feel free to look elsewhere to ensure their countries' interests, and embrace the same defiant rhetoric that marked Castro's early career. It was a rhetoric that attacked an "oligarchy" servile to foreign interests, most famously expressed in a 1953 speech Castro made while on trial for a failed uprising against the dictator Fulgencio Batista.

"We were born in a free country that our parents bequeathed to us," Castro said. "And the island will first sink into the sea before we consent to being the slaves of anyone."

The improbable triumph of Castro's rebels over Batista less than six years laterinspired a generation of young men and women to mimic his guerrilla campaign. Cuba offered funding and training for their efforts, most of which were quixotic failures.

Castro's agents funded small guerrilla bands in Argentina, Peru and other countries that were quickly crushed. His closest collaborator, the Argentine doctor Ernesto "Che" Guevara, was killed in a disastrous attempt to launch a "continental revolution" in Bolivia.

Still, Castro's survival just across the Straits of Florida changed political calculations across the region.

"For Latin America, the steps taken by the Cuban Revolution were a clear example that change was possible," said Jose Gabriel Vazeilles, a Buenos Aires historian.

The Cuban regime, while imprisoning dissidents and constructing a one-party state, also built model education and health programs.

The Kennedy administration responded with the Alliance for Progress, a mini New Deal designed to address poverty and illiteracy and promote land reform. Billions of dollars in aid poured southward.

To stop the spread of Castro's "communist menace" to other countries, the U.S. backed some of the most violent dictatorships in the region's history, including the military government responsible for 10,000 deaths in Argentina in the 1970s and '80s. The CIA orchestrated a campaign to undermine the democratically elected leftist government of Salvador Allende in Chile, a Castro ally who was overthrown in a 1973 coup.

Chile's new military ruler, Augusto Pinochet, adopted free-market polices of the "Chicago school" of economics. By the time he left power in 1990, Chile had South America's most vibrant economy.

But other countries failed badly in attempts to implement the economic and political reforms backed by the U.S. and the International Monetary Fund. Argentina's economy collapse in 2001-02, and Bolivia's attempts to privatize its economy sparked popular uprisings that eventually brought to power to Evo Morales, an Aymara Indian with radical roots.

At the same time, the Soviet Union's collapse robbed Castro of money, power and influence, and in the early 1990s he had to implement modest economic reforms just to survive.

The United States unquestionably remains the most powerful force in the region, and some Latin American countries have sought to tie their economic fortunes directly to their northern neighbor. Mexico and Chile negotiated free-trade agreements with the U.S.; Panama, Colombia and other countries are seeking to do the same.

But for many others, railing against economic reforms urged by Washington, such as privatization of utilities, is simply good politics. Leaders with biographies much like the young Castro's have come to power through the democratic elections the U.S. has promoted.

Besides Venezuela, former leftist rabble-rousers are in power in Nicaragua, Brazil, Bolivia and other countries. Most of them are careful not to set themselves squarely against Washington. But with the U.S. largely preoccupied with the Middle East, they also are looking elsewhere.

Nicaragua returned the former leftist revolutionary Daniel Ortega to the presidency last year, and he now maintains good relations with the United States. But one of the first leaders to visit Ortega after he took office was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president.

Ahmadinejad also is a close ally of Venezuela's Chavez.

In January, the Iranians also sent a high-ranking delegation to the inauguration of Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom.

"In Latin America, every country is following its own path," said Colom, an engineer elected on a platform critical of U.S.-backed economic privatization and other policies. "There are lots of different flavors to choose from now, depending on your tastes."

China is also seeking to expand its influence in the region. It has contemplated building a canal through Central America to compete with the Panama Canal.

Given his age and his country's precarious economy, Castro is no longer feared much by the region's conservatives.

Instead, in his final years, he has been embraced -- even by center-left leaders such as former President Nestor Kirchner of Argentina -- as a grandfatherly symbol of Latin American independence.

"Fidel is the only living myth in the history of humanity," Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said this week. "The myth lives on."

In 2002, Castro visited Argentina, where he spoke one night to tens of thousands of people gathered outside the University of Buenos Aires law school. "Tell us about El Che!" several students yelled out, referring to Guevara. Castro, by then a frail man with a tremulous voice, obliged with 20 minutes of war stories and anecdotes about his old friend.

"There are millions of men like El Che among the masses of Latin America," Castro said, to loud cheers.

Even if that was more rhetoric than reality, critics of the Bush administration say the White House lacks an effective and unifying vision for Latin America. Elsa Falkenburger, an analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America think tank, said U.S. policy has focused on free trade as a catchall solution to the region's problems, at the expense of social investment.

"For a number of reasons," she said, "our influence over the region is dwindling away."

hector.tobar@latimes.com

Andrés D'Alessandro of The Times' Buenos Aires Bureau contributed to this report.

A Future to Wince At

Adiós
By ANTHONY DePALMA

HAVANA

A SIMPLE rule that correspondents follow is, “The bigger the news, the smaller the story.” In other words, to bring home the impact of a monumental event, tell how it touches ordinary people. In the last few days, on a trip to Cuba that was in every way supposed to be about the lives of ordinary people — my own family — the big news story found me.

The visit started as a reunion in Cuba of two sides of our family whom international politics had kept divided for decades.

My wife, Miriam, left behind much of her family when her grandmother whisked her out of Cuba in 1962. She and I had visited over the years, but she always was afraid to bring our three children, fearing they might somehow be snatched from her. But now that they are adults, she wanted them to know the grandmother they had never kissed, and the tragic homeland they had only seen in photos.

We arrived not at the fine new airport in Havana I’ve used many times as a correspondent, but at a smaller, more crowded one that Cuba uses for these family visits, as if to rebuke exiles for having left.

Our reunion was delayed, however, by the surprise announcement last Tuesday that Fidel Castro — whose revolution had torn the family apart — was too ill to return to power. Suddenly, I was at work.

When the Cuban National Assembly meets today to pick a president and commander in chief, it won’t be Fidel Castro. But nobody can be sure whether his vow to step aside offers a distant hope of mending the breach between Cuba and the United States, or is just a reminder of how difficult that would be.

Still, what most surprised us was how little Cubans clamored for drastic change. Dictator or hero, Mr. Castro’s grip on power was ending, and no one seemed to care. Miriam was disappointed that the streets of Matanzas, Havana, San Agustín and Guanabacoa, the working class city across Havana Bay where she grew up, were tranquil, as if nothing at all had happened.

Of course we understood that things are not always as they seem, and that became clear when the maid in our 133-year-old hotel came to mop up the mess caused by a leaking pipe. Hearing the lilt of Miriam’s Spanish put her at ease. After chatting for a few minutes, she poked her head into the hallway to check for supervisors and shut the door. Only then did she speak from the heart.

“Nobody says it, but everybody knows that someone new could be worse than what we have now,” she whispered. It was the kind of declaration I’ve learned to trust because it stems from neither fear nor a desire to curry favor.

Despite having plenty of motivation to demand change — the frequent shortages, the decrepit housing, the cruelty of having one currency for tourists and another with far less buying power for Cubans — she said she feared change more than she feared the status quo. Then she checked the hallway again.

Such skittishness might seem odd to Americans. After all, change seems to be on the lips of every candidate back home.

But just as Americans are debating what change means, and how to accomplish it, Cubans see change in many different ways. After Fidel’s announcement, the Communist Party newspapers and state-controlled television mockingly dismissed foreign news reports that change was suddenly in the air over Cuba. “They talk about a coming epoch of change, as if the revolution hasn’t been an epoch of change from the beginning,” Lázaro Barredo Medina, editor in chief of the party daily Granma, said in one broadcast.

Truth is, things have changed since my first trip to Cuba in 1978. The heavy presence of the Soviet Union then is a faint shadow now, reflected in blue-eyed Cubans named Yuri. There seem to be more new cars on the roads, more fast food on the street, and more buildings undergoing repair. There even seem to be more buses and fewer people waiting for them since Fidel’s younger brother and temporary replacement, Raúl, publicly demanded that something be done about the pitiful mass transit system when I was here just a year ago.

But much has not changed, or has gotten worse. More families live two or three generations in the same cramped apartments. Detention, interrogation and other troubles still descend on people who dissent in ways as small as wearing a plastic wrist band embossed with the word “cambio,” which means change. The press is still controlled, and disloyalty to the Communist Party still raises the suspicion of neighbors that can lead to the loss of a job or a house. Dissidents remain enemies of the state.

Still, many people we met shared a fear expressed by Miguel, a 62-year-old retired army lieutenant colonel who lives in Altamar, just outside Havana. He drives a 1958 Dodge with bad brakes and a top speed of about 37, which is the number of years he has owned it. He said he worried about only one thing after Mr. Castro: what he called the Americanization of Cuba.

By that he meant a savage capitalism that might take away from Cubans the best houses, the best land, the best factories. In short, if a transition means that the little they have managed to acquire might be taken away, he’d rather not change.

Cuba is not a country where change has ever come easily; when it has come, injustice and violence often were its companions. Cubans know that what the Cuban-American analyst Marifeli Pérez-Stable of the Inter-American Dialogue calls Cuba’s “long century” — the turbulent period that began with the wars of independence from Spain in the mid-19th century and continues today — has brought little peace.

The revolution itself has left many Cubans, including our relatives here, fed up with promises of change. They long ago tired of sacrificing for an ideal tomorrow; when we finally got together, three days after Fidel’s announcement, Miriam’s stepbrothers and sisters told me their main concerns are getting enough to eat, getting shoes for their children and getting to work on time each day.

Cuba’s leaders also fear sudden change because it would undermine the official legend of a triumphant socialist revolution. As the 50th anniversary of Fidel Castro’s Jan. 1, 1959, victory approaches, Cubans cannot escape the past. Film clips of Fidel fighting in the Sierra alongside Che Guevara are on TV every day. The 62-foot wooden pleasure boat “Granma” with which Castro and 81 insurgents launched their uprising in 1956 remains on display under glass in the center of Havana, a revolutionary Ark of the Covenant.

Of course, Fidel Castro has led the resistance to change, grasping power for so long that he has gone from fierce young rebel to doddering old man before the eyes of the world. Mostly bedridden for the last 19 months, he has stubbornly refused to step aside until now. But even a Maximum Leader cannot fend off time forever, or do anything to stop the impending loss of his friend and economic crutch, Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan leftist whose electorate has insisted that he abide by the country’s term limits.

There is growing evidence that Mr. Castro’s brother Raúl has grown impatient with his role as place holder and has been agitating for a permanent transfer of power. Although Raúl is considered the weaker of the two men, he has stood up to his older brother before. During Fidel’s first trip to the United States in 1959, Raúl met him in a Houston hotel and told him to stop touring like a rock star and get back to serious business in Havana. Fidel returned shortly and adopted a decidedly tougher stance toward the United States.

As head of the armed forces since 1959, Raúl Castro has kept the army one of the few functional institutions in Cuba. His reputation today as an efficient manager is as strong as his revolutionary reputation was as an efficient executioner.

Whatever form a new Cuban regime takes — Raúl as president with younger, post-revolutionary officials arrayed as vice presidents or some surprise variation — Fidel’s presence will continue to be felt, even if, as he has promised, he becomes a simple “soldier of ideas,” dedicated to thinking and writing.

Sitting at an old Havana cafe, a friend put it to me this way: Fidel is like a huge Airbus that leaves so much turbulence in its wake that other aircraft cannot take off or land behind it until the air clears. Even in his absence from power, Fidel will shape the actions of whoever comes after him.

When Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the Brazilian president, heard about Mr. Castro’s effective resignation he said: “Fidel is already a myth.” Alejandro Rodríguez, a columnist for the newspaper Juventud Rebelde (“Rebel Youth,” another name from revolutionary mythology) wrote last week that “Fidel is Cuba, because Juan, Pedro, Chico and Mariana are Fidel.”

No one would have expected our children, Aahren, Andrés and Laura Felice, to feel like part of Cuba or Fidel as they gingerly set foot in their mother’s homeland for the first time. They delighted in the beauty of the seacoast and the countryside, but grew upset as beggars and pimps tailed them in old Havana. The three peppered Miriam with questions, asking without fully realizing what they were saying, “What was it like when you were Cuban?” After bringing flowers to the tomb of the grandfather they never knew, squeezing into the sliver of a house where Miriam once lived, and peeking into the worn-out school that she had once attended, they simply fell silent.

When they finally got to meet their Cuban family, an expected initial awkwardness soon gave way to discoveries of points of concurrence: the boredom of school, the frustration of seeking a first job, planning for the future.

But that is where the reality of our two worlds imposed itself. Aahren, our oldest son, had just become a lawyer; his cousin Aidan and a friend had just figured out a way to grind up pork into ham that they smoke for 12 hours in a makeshift hothouse in the yard. Aahren is planning a full life ahead; Aidan dreams of taking to the sea.

“Cubans today are not like the Cubans of the 1950s,” Aidan said. He thinks that 50 years of worrying about getting enough to eat has beaten the heart out of them. Inside their refrigerator were the eight eggs per month they are rationed, and little else.

Given time it might be possible to bridge the gap between their dreams. But for that to happen, there will have to be change.

Their 81-year-old Cuban grandmother is ill now, and if she does not survive, our children will not be able to go back to Cuba unless American laws change; they do not now permit visits to see uncles and cousins.

Miriam, close to tears, told me she would never go back because too much has already changed.

Of course, there will shortly be new presidents in both Cuba and the United States. If that changes things, that would be big news, and I will be back.