The temporary rise of Raul Castro to the top of Cuba's government may test the succession mechanism on the island, but may not foreshadow a political transition, which will be long and limited, experts said.
Cuba watchers describe Raul, Fidel's brother and defense minister who was temporarily elevated to Cuba's presidency late on Monday, as a pragmatic, efficient and extremely well organized man with a reputation for toughness.
All this gives the younger Castro, at 75, all the qualifications for leading the government in a crisis situation, particularly now that Fidel Castro, 79, announced his health problems of uncertain gravity.
In addition, Raul controls the armed forces, which in effect manage the Cuban economy.
However, observers also point out that Raul does not have either the charisma of his brother or the eloquence as Cuba's political system remains tailored to Fidel.
He may have created a split in the armed forces by prosecuting general Arnaldo Ochoa, a hero of the Cuban Revolution who was executed for corruption and drug trafficking in 1989.
His arrest was announced by Raul, who spoke on the matter for two hours during a military celebration.
"Surely, he will be handicapped, severely at first, because he will in no way resemble Fidel in power and because popular anxieties will be high. He will have little room for error," Brian Latell, a former CIA expert on Cuba, wrote in a recent article.
"Raul is a plodding, maladroit public speaker, and has never been able to sway a crowd or inspire an audience with his own uplifting visions," Latell pointed out.
Nelson Cunningham, a former adviser to president Bill Clinton on Latin America, said Raul will be a transitional leader in any event because of his advanced age.
"I think we have to view Raul as a transitional figure, even if Fidel does step down permanently," Cunningham opined. "Even if Raul does become the leader of Cuba, he's 75 years old. He will not have many years left. Inevitably, that would begin a period of real transition."
Jaime Suchlicki, a University of Miami academic who last February took part in an exercise that examined various scenarios in post-Castro Cuba, predicted that Cuba "will not undergo radical change" at this stage but rather "a long and difficult transition."
"I was the only one here who said after the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union, `Please buy the suitcases, but don't pack them just yet,'" Suchlicki recalled.
He said the same logic would apply to Cuba.
The academic said that Raul, sometimes described as a reformer in the Chinese or Vietnamese mold, "could introduce some reforms, but they would be small and take a long time to implement."
Local observers believe the Ochoa case could make it difficult for Raul to hold onto power for a long time. However, it remains unclear how deep the split within the military is.
The army has since been purged, and General Abelardo Colome, a Raul loyalist, now heads the general staff.
Moreover, political and ideological work within the military is supervised by the Communist Party.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs