Cuba Libre

In early 2002, as U.S. military officials prepped their base at Guantánamo Bay for the arrival of captured al Qaeda fighters, the Cuban defense minister made a startling announcement: Should any of the detainees escape into Cuban territory, they would be promptly returned to Gitmo. This from a regime that had spent the previous four decades offering safe haven and support to a sundry gaggle of terrorists and anti-American radicals, including one man (Victor Manuel Gerena) currently on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.

The Cuban military chief also spoke with unusual authority: Not only was he Fidel Castro’s brother, he was also his designated successor. Raúl Castro, who became head of the armed forces in 1959, has long been a mystery to foreign journalists and Cuba watchers. Yet according to former CIA officer Brian Latell, Raúl has been “indispensable” to Cuban communism. As an erstwhile Cuban intelligence agent told him, “If the Cuban Revolution can be considered an ongoing drama, then Fidel must be thought of as its director and Raúl its producer.”

That arrangement changed this summer, when Fidel Castro “temporarily” relinquished power to his brother while undergoing treatment for intestinal bleeding. (That was the official word, anyway.) Raúl Castro’s public debut as el jefe came on August 13, Fidel’s 80th birthday, when he greeted Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez in Havana. Cuban television aired footage of the two men chumming around in a hospital room with Fidel, who released a statement warning Cubans to gird for adverse news about his health.

As the past five decades have taught us, prognosticating about Fidel Castro’s expiration date can be a risky business. But it seems likely that a transition has gradually begun, with 75-year-old Raúl at the helm. And that makes this book–the first ever Raúl Castro biography–essential reading.

Latell was uniquely positioned to write it. He arrived at the CIA’s Cuba desk in 1964, and later served as national intelligence officer for Latin America. After Fidel represents a lifetime of studying the Castros. When it was first published last fall, the book spurred some chatter among the South Florida exiles; now Latell is ubiquitous in the “post-Fidel” media frenzy.

This past February, in Coral Gables, I watched Latell play the part of Raúl in a simulated exercise of what might happen when Fidel dies. Describing his performance afterwards, he said that Raúl would be “torn between soft and hard lines.” Raúl wants to preserve the revolution, but is also drawn to the Chinese model of mixing Lenin with Adam Smith. He is wary of embracing the Americans, but recognizes the benefits of U.S.-Cuba détente. He hopes to consolidate power with the generals and maintain order, but may hesitate before sending out the military to crush protesters (as happened in Beijing in 1989).

Latell cites that 2002 Guantánamo policy as proof that Raúl would almost surely be more flexible than Fidel: He quotes Alina Fernández, Fidel’s daughter who defected from Cuba in 1993, as saying that Raúl “is the practical brother.” The irony is that, when they first seized power in 1959, Raúl was thought to be the Stalinist ideologue and Fidel the more cautious one. “Behind me come others more radical than me,” Fidel warned just weeks after the revolution triumphed, referring to his brother. But as the Cold War ended, Raúl began pushing for Chinese-style market reforms while Fidel sounded like a Soviet dinosaur.

How did that shift come about? After Fidel opens in late April 1959, with the two brothers arguing furiously in a Houston hotel room. It had been only a few months since Fulgencio Batista fled the island and the Castro-led guerrillas rode into Havana. Fidel was now on his American PR tour, assuring reporters that he would hold free elections, reinstate the 1940 Cuban constitution, and maintain warm relations with Washington. Most of all, Fidel wanted it known that he was not a Communist.

But thanks to Raúl, his message was losing credibility. Not only was the younger Castro fomenting revolution across Latin America, he was also showing his true Marxist-Leninist colors, howling about “the yoke of imperialism” in an interview with the American Communist party’s official newspaper. This incensed Fidel, who knew that American opinion would recoil from an overtly red revolution. Raúl feared that his brother had gone wobbly.

Yet as Latell puts it, “Raúl really had nothing to worry about.” Despite his crafty efforts to manipulate American goodwill and appease U.S. economic interests, “Fidel was pathologically hostile to the United States.” Historians have long bickered over precisely when he went Communist and decided to cast his lot with the Soviets. Castro once told his biographer Lionel Martin that he “already had a Marxist-Leninist formation” by the time he left the University of Havana in 1950. Latell makes a persuasive case that Fidel brought Raúl into the fold during the years prior to their July 1953 assault on the Moncada barracks.

He also rejects the notion that U.S. diplomats somehow missed an opportunity to befriend Castro. Fidel was “implacably anti-American,” with a diehard antipathy molded during his rural childhood and university days. Fashioning himself a latter-day incarnation of Jose Martí, Fidel believed confrontation with el Norte was his destiny. But in deference to the island’s pro-American populace, he concealed the ferocity of these beliefs until after he toppled Batista.

The mission of Philip Bonsal, the last American ambassador to Cuba, was thus a Sisyphean task. Bonsal epitomized the liberal career diplomat, the sort of chap who tended to give Castro the benefit of the doubt. During his tenure in Havana, he “bent over backwards to establish a good working relationship with the revolutionary leadership.” But his cajoling proved futile. “In the end,” writes Latell, Bonsal “concluded that Fidel was determined to free Cuba of the American presence because he regarded the United States ‘as his major competitor.'” This invariably meant aligning with Moscow, though it seems Fidel’s anti-Americanism was always stronger than his leftism. He formally announced his Marxist-Leninist orientation in December 1961.

By that time, Raúl had already become his emissary to the Communists, both in Cuba and in Moscow. A lover of all things Soviet (he even vacationed there!), Raúl first requested military and intelligence aid from the Kremlin in April 1959. “During that chaotic early stage of the revolution,” writes Latell, “it was the Jacobin Raúl who did the most to inflict a reign of terror on its enemies. And curiously, it was his own brother who did more than any other individual to promote Raúl’s early reputation as Cuba’s Robespierre.”

The younger Castro served as executioner-in-chief, sometimes pulling the trigger himself. He had matured in this role while fighting Batista’s troops. “A hundred or more of Raúl’s prisoners were summarily shot in the final days of the guerrilla war at the end of 1958,” Latell notes, “and according to a regime insider, he continued mandating executions even after being directed by his brother to desist.” In terms of brutality, Raúl’s only apparent rival was Che Guevara, the Argentine Stalinist-cum-Castroite, whom Raúl had introduced to Fidel in Mexico.

Given all this history, why should we trust that Raúl is now the less dogmatic of the two Castros? Actually there is a slew of evidence. It seems that the fall of the Soviet empire and the growth of Chinese capitalism jolted Raúl’s worldview more than they did Fidel’s. It was Raúl who favored market reforms in the early 1990s, many of which Fidel has reversed. It was Raúl who, as the New York Times reports, “sent [military] officers to business schools in Europe to learn capitalist management techniques.” It was Raúl who supported increased contacts with the Pentagon. And it was Raúl who pledged to return runaway terrorists to Gitmo.

Fidel, by contrast, remains an ideological relic who cannot adjust course lest he cast doubt on his entire career. A few years ago he traveled to China, where he witnessed firsthand the fusion of private enterprise and one-party politics. He was reportedly astonished, and disavowed any such path for Cuba. After Fidel dies, Raúl may feel pressure to go that route.

On the other hand, foreign tourism, remittances, European and Chinese trade and investment, and Venezuelan oil have stabilized the regime since its initial post-Soviet crisis. Under Chávez, Venezuela has picked up where Moscow left off as Cuba’s chief patron, shipping nearly 100,000 barrels of low-cost petroleum products to the island each day, which can also be sold for hard currency. A Raúl-led government–propped up by such aid and wary of loosening its grip–may conclude that reforms of the Deng Xiao ping variety are more trouble than they’re worth.

Much will depend on who surrounds Raúl at the top. Cuba has already evolved into a military-civilian junta of sorts, with the armed forces running (and profiting from) large portions of the economy. “The military is the most powerful, competent, and influential institution in Cuba,” writes Latell. “The Communist Party and popular organizations are hollow shells that have been allowed by the Castros to fade in importance.” Prominent civilian leaders include Carlos Lage, who has become Cuba’s de facto global envoy, Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque, and Francisco Soberón, the central bank president. Though all will seek to perpetuate the regime, Lage is said to be a moderate, the architect of economic reforms in the early 1990s. The latter two are hardliners, who may resist tinkering too abruptly with Cuban communism.

Raúl will face many challenges. Cuba’s infrastructure lies in shambles–one study estimated that around 300 buildings collapse each year in Havana–while gross inequality fuels social tensions. Though Latell stresses the “duality” of Raúl–who can be both “kind and cruel”–old memories of Raúl the Terrible will be hard to dispel. Most Cubans consider him a charmless brute; many whisper rumors that he is not really Fidel’s brother. Nor does he boast a clean bill of health: Only five years younger than Fidel, he is known to be an “unreformed alcoholic.” All the more reason for Cuba to preserve a collective leadership of the type that has recently taken shape. Latell does not expect that leadership to include democrats or dissidents anytime soon, but he thinks their ranks will swell once Fidel dies. (Of course, the “nightmare scenario” for U.S. policymakers is a “breakdown of law and order on the island” that sparks a “massive seaborne migration to Florida.”)

The bulk of After Fidel stems from intelligence reports, personal interviews, and secondary literature. Latell’s prose is highly readable and commendably nuanced, razing many of the enduring myths about modern Cuba. As good as it is, the book still leaves room for a few complaints.

First, Latell barely discusses the 1962 missile crisis, which would have buttressed his thesis about Fidel’s anti-U.S. fanaticism and also helped frame his portrait of Raúl. He neglects the 1955 amnesty debate, which led to Castro’s release from prison, where he and his comrades had served less than two years for the Moncada attack. And there is no mention of the role that oil-rich Venezuela has played (and will play) in buoying the regime and shaping its post-Fidel ideology. Latell also commits a few errors. He lists Fidel’s birthday as August 26 (it’s August 13) and he writes of an anti-dissident crackdown launched “in the spring of 2004” that jailed some 75 independent activists. In fact, that crackdown came a year earlier, in March-April 2003, coinciding with the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq.

But these are minor nitpicks. Brian Latell has done a worthwhile service in demystifying Raúl Castro, and ends on a note of optimism: “Perhaps in his own twilight years,” he writes, “this complex, repressed younger brother will find his own independent political persona.” If so, “perhaps . . . Fidel’s death will be Raúl’s catharsis.” We may soon find out.

Duncan Currie is a reporter at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.