Coral Gables
“DO WE HAVE TO PUT tanks in the streets?” asks Raúl Castro, the new leader of the Cuban Communist party. It is just past 6 a.m. on February 14, 2008, a few hours after the death of Raúl’s brother Fidel, who ruled Cuba for nearly half a century. The younger Castro, Cuba’s longtime military chief, has convened a meeting of selected Politburo members to discuss the post-Fidel transition.
A lot is happening, and quickly. Riots have broken out in Guantánamo City. The U.S. Interests Section in Havana has requested permission to send a high-level American delegation to Fidel’s state funeral. Raúl must make his first crucial decisions–and he’s getting some wildly disparate advice.
This was the hypothetical scenario entertained earlier this month at the University of Miami by a group of Cuba experts, including several defectors, in a war-game-like simulated presentation, “Cuba Without Fidel Castro.” Each expert played the role of a senior Cuban Politburo official. For well over an hour the participants, sitting at a long conference table in front of two oversized photos of the Castro brothers, squabbled about a host of concerns: the rioters, the dissidents, the Yanquis, the economy, and more. At least a hundred people, including a number of media, made up the audience.
According to the introduction, Fidel died from complications related to Parkinson’s disease (a reasonable assumption, given recent reports). But even before his passing, “he had been unable to appear in public, or to speak intelligibly, since the previous July 26th,” when he sat awkwardly through Raúl’s speech at the annual commemoration of the 1953 Moncada Barracks assault.
In a sharp break with protocol, the Cuban government made no secret of Fidel’s failing health. After the Moncada ceremonies, Communist apparatchiks kept Cubans abreast of their leader’s condition. State-run media outlets also aired tributes to El Comandante and extolled his long career of revolutionary passion. According to our program, “these were intended to anesthetize the populace and to prepare them for the elaborately planned, month-long funeral celebrations to be held across the island. The calculation was that the chances of sudden violent outbursts once Fidel’s death was announced would therefore be reduced.”
Raúl Castro, Fidel’s designated successor, had essentially been running the show since his brother took a turn for the worse. Now he has formally been named Cuba’s president–and already he’s blundered. Rather than make an official announcement of Fidel’s death, Raúl orders a dirge to be broadcast around the island, thus alerting Cubans to the news. Riots quickly ensue in Guantánamo City.
“We rehearsed this situation a year ago,” declares José Ramón Machado Ventura (in the person of former Cuban diplomat Alcibíades Hidalgo). A veteran Politburo member charged with organizational duties, Machado reminds his comrades of the war games of 2007, in which the Communist party, the armed forces, and other state bodies prepped for a nationwide emergency that required immediate coordination against “counterrevolutionary” elements. But Raúl (who’s being played by ex-CIA officer Brian Latell) sounds a note of hesitation. “Can we refrain from large-scale arrests and detentions of dissidents and human-rights activists?” he asks. “I’m concerned that we not overreact.”
This is one of the few moments when Raúl finds himself in sync with Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada, the head of Cuba’s national assembly since 1993. Alarcón (former Cuban intelligence analyst Domingo Amuchastegui) warns that any violent action against the dissidents will be interpreted as a sign of weakness. “We don’t need to put them in jail,” he argues. Just “put them under observation” and “supervise every move they make.” Above all, Havana “must not convey . . . an indication of uncertainty.” Pretty much all the participants assume that Cuba’s democracy movement remains tiny and fractious: not even close to toppling a Raúl-led regime.
The rioters pose a pricklier dilemma. “We cannot have a Tiananmen Square in Cuba,” booms Raúl. “It would be the beginning of the end of my government.” State Council vice president Carlos Lage–actually Cuba researcher Eric Driggs–agrees. “It’s important that we don’t jump to conclusions,” he says. The Guantánamo unrest could in fact be “an economic uprising” rather than “a political challenge to the government.”
Cuba’s new boss may not want “tanks in the streets” or “soldiers killing civilians”–but he insists on being ready in case the turmoil spills over. “Let us cautiously surround Guantánamo City with all the appropriate security and military forces,” Raúl says. “No witnesses. No media.” And, perhaps most important, “no foreign observers.” Recalling that Fidel went to the scene of the melee during the 1994 riots along Cuba’s famous Malecón boardwalk, Raúl decides he will trek to Guantánamo and “try personally to calm the rioters.”
To keep a lid on news of the riots, he adds, Cuba will not tell the American forces stationed at Guantánamo Bay. Alarcón is skeptical the secret can be maintained. But Gen. Alvaro López Miera (portrayed by Jaime Suchlicki, the director of the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies) is wary of conducting any negotiations with the Bush administration, which has been nakedly hostile to the regime. “We should expect the Democrats to win in November,” he counsels. (Remember, it is February 2008.) “Then maybe we can make a deal with them [over Guantánamo].”
Raúl later receives Washington’s request for seats at the funeral. This prompts a fierce row between the pragmatists (Raúl and Lage) and the hardliners (Alarcón and Gen. López Miera). “We are not providing any concessions to the Americans,” López Miera says bluntly. “Let them unilaterally lift the travel ban and the embargo.” Alarcón says, “This administration is already a lame duck.” He firmly opposes welcoming any Bush officials–“in just a few months, they’ll be out”–and instead suggests inviting U.S. congressmen who have opposed the sanctions.
This insubordination gets Alarcón bounced from the meeting and stripped of his job. Raúl, we discover, favors hosting a senior U.S. contingent at the funeral, as does Lage. “I will not meet with them,” Raúl says, but “let them come.” Why? “We need better relations with the Americans,” he explains. “This has been my position for at least the last dozen years.” Raúl calls for improved ties with U.S. military officials, narcotics officials, immigration officials, and others.
He also shows his pragmatic streak when discussing Cuba’s troubled economy. In his big speech announcing Fidel’s death, Raúl recognizes he must give the Cuban people “hope.” Raúl notes that he has occasionally touted the benefits of free market policies and even sent Cuban authorities to study economics at Western universities. But he makes one thing abundantly clear: “I will not be another Gorbachev.”
That’s just what López Miera fears. He notes that perestroika hastened the downfall of the Soviet Union. “It was corruption that destroyed the Soviet Union, not perestroika,” Lage fires back. Moreover, structural economic changes “do not betray the revolution–they fulfill the revolution.” Ever the hardliner, López Miera scoffs at such thinking. “Power, my friend, comes from the barrel of a gun!” he thunders. “I do not think providing economic incentives is the way to gain the youth back.” Raúl finds the whole conversation “disturbing.” Would Fidel, he asks, have tolerated such brazen dissent?
When the (unrehearsed) presentation concludes–at the moment Alarcón is ejected from the meeting for disputing Fidel’s funeral details–the audience applauds and the participants step back out of character. “We hope that the scenario that we proposed tonight does not happen,” affirms Jaime Suchlicki. A neat and tidy, Eastern Europe-style democratic transition would of course be preferable to an autocratic succession. But at this point, the latter seems far more probable.
The audience members ask questions. Will Raúl eventually liberalize the economy within an authoritarian framework, as in China? “That’s a very likely model,” says Suchlicki. As Brian Latell puts it, citing his own performance in the simulation, Raúl is “torn between soft and hard lines.” If Cuba went the Chinese route, and Raúl offered to negotiate an end to U.S. sanctions, would America comply? “I think there would be a lot of sympathetic reaction” in Congress, predicts Latell. Once Fidel dies, will there be widespread reprisal killings among Cubans on the neighborhood level? If people see an opening, “there’s a possibility that that may happen,” says Eric Driggs.
Finally, and perhaps most curiously: What if Raúl dies first? Few Americans are better informed on that question than Latell, the CIA veteran and Cuba maven whose fascinating study of the Castro regime, After Fidel, was released last October. He believes maybe the best chance for a swift transition to Cuban democracy would come if the younger Castro passed away before his older brother. “Fidel would be very challenged to govern without Raúl,” Latell says. So, if Raúl dies first, “the revolution is then in its very, very last chapter.”
Duncan Currie is a reporter at The Weekly Standard.
