Yours truly in the latest issue of American Spectator magazine:
The End of the Castros?
Raul Castro’s latest gestures cannot be taken at face value.
On the Friday of the last weekend in February, Cuban dictator Raul Castro caught the news agencies covering his island nation by surprise when he dropped a hint that he was thinking of retiring. Later that Sunday, at a meeting of Cuba’s communist National Assembly, Castro went much further and announced that he would step aside at the end of the five-year presidential term to which he had just been “elected.” Adding fuel to the fire was the announcement that Miguel Diaz-Canel, a relatively unknown 52-year-old communist party apparatchik, had been appointed Castro’s second in command—and would thus theoretically be next in line to take command after the aging dictator’s exit.
Naturally, journalists, analysts, and so-called Cuba experts immediately began to explore the possibilities and ramifications. Many of them proposed the Western Hemisphere’s bloodiest and longest-running dictatorship was now possibly just five years away from its end. Furthermore, Castro’s choice of a younger, more modern successor born after his brother’s revolution just had to be a sign that the island’s communist government was slowly but surely preparing to embrace a more democratic political system.
What many of these writers failed to do, however, was examine the latest political moves of the Cuban dictatorship through the prism of the regime’s history. Never in the past 53 years has anyone outside the Castro family possessed any real power in Cuba. Not only have the Castro brothers kept non-family members from positions of influence, they have summarily eliminated anyone who has posed or could possibly pose a threat to their authority. Therefore, it would be prudent to take Raul Castro’s retirement announcement and the appointment of Diaz-Canel with a proverbial grain of salt.
The victims (and alleged victims) of the Castros’ jealous grip on power are strewn all along the roadside of their half-century journey of absolute control in Cuba. One of the first was Camilo Cienfuegos, a charismatic and popular Cuban revolutionary leader who fought to overthrow the Batista government alongside the Castros and Argentine revolutionary Ché Guevara. In 1959, just months after Fidel took control, Cienfuegos disappeared in a mysterious plane crash. No wreckage was ever found and no bodies were recovered. Some speculate that it was no mere accident.
More recently, there are the cases of Roberto Robaina, Felipe Perez-Roque, and Carlos Lage. All three of these men were high-ranking, high-profile government officials, brimming with media savvy and touted as natural successors to the Castro brothers. And just as their popularity and standing peaked, all three men were unceremoniously removed from their positions. Last year, Ricardo Alarcon, another high-profile representative of the Castro government and supposed successor, was unexpectedly removed as president of the National Assembly, a position he’d held for 20 years. There were no announcements, no retirement parties, and no explanations. His name was simply dropped from the list of parliamentary candidates released in December.
The Castro dictatorship’s pattern of propping up replacements, only to knock them down before they get too powerful or too popular, is painfully evident. For that reason, it is hard to believe that Raul Castro’s latest political moves are anything more than another ruse to deflect attention away from the ruling family.
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