After Fidel

“I neither will aspire to nor will I accept–I repeat–I neither will aspire to nor will I accept, the position of president of the council of state and commander in chief,” wrote the Cuban dictator, who has been in power now for almost 50 years.

In the summer of 2006 the streets of Havana fell silent and the citizens of the island state headed for their homes in a mixture of curiousity and apprehension to listen to the official government-controlled television news broadcast. The subject: the surprise announcement that the Maximum Leader–Commandante Fidel Castro–had been hospitalized in order to undergo an elaborate surgical procedure brought on by severe gastrointestinal bleeding.

This was the first time since seizing power in 1959 that he temporarily stepped down from his posts as head of state, the communist party chief and Commander in Chief of the armed forces. The Commandante did not even attend his own 80th birthday celebration on 13 August as a result of this illness. Instead of celebrating a milestone in his rule the Cuban state began to slip into a state of crisis over the power vacuum that resulted from Fidel’s infirmity.

In the interim, power was been turned over to Raul Castro, Fidel’s brother and the island nation’s Defense Minister. Like most other senior officials in a communist dictatorship, Raul has numerous positions in government and party organizations–what political scientists refer to as “interlocking memberships”–that make him second in command on the Cuban Council of State.

As far as official titles are concerned, Raul has them in spades: he is Vice President of the Council of Ministers, First Vice President of the Council of State of Cuba, Vice-Secretary of the Politburo and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC), and Maximum General of the Armed Forces (Army, Navy, and Air Force)–the latter of which makes him second in rank only to the Commander in Chief, Fidel.

Raul has been the unofficially declared successor to his brother for many years so his temporary promotion during this crisis was not a surprise. But what makes many of those now watching events on the Caribbean island nation uneasy is that not much is known about the “No. 2 man in Cuba.” His personality is a blank slate, he shuns reporters as ardently as Fidel courts them, and he is the antithesis of his charismatic and dynamic brother.

Who Is Raul?

Anne Louise Bardach, a well-known Cuba watcher and author of numerous articles and books on the subject, describes Raul’s unique position of power as “the only member of the ruling cadre who is allowed to opt out of state receptions, meetings and even his brother’s interminable speeches. Such absences–and a vigilantly guarded personal life–have made Raul the mystery man of Cuba.”

And it is that uncertainty about Raul that gives cause for this anxiety. The Cuban military, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias (FAR), has–over the last thirty years–evolved from an expeditionary “internationalist” force dedicated to supporting Communist causes around the globe (i.e. the late 1970s-80s operations in Angola) to being a domestically-based force that was dedicated to “securing the gains of the revolution.” By 1993, according to Raul, the only Cuban military personnel left stationed abroad were ten military attachés posted to various Cuban diplomatic missions.

Since the last Russian military units were withdrawn from Cuba and the collapse of the massive economic subsidies provided for decades by the USSR, the FAR has had to go into not only the civil defence and internal security business, but also repairing infrastructure and acting in supporting roles in Cuba’s broken-down, centrally-planned economy.

A study of the FAR in the early 1990s by Richard L. Millett, an academic from Southern Illinois University, revealed that the military itself was being supplanted by other entities in its role at home as the chief organ responsible for national defense. “While the FAR has been increasingly involved in picking tomatoes, cleaning pipes and digging tunnels, the MTT (Territorial Militia Troops) and other sectors of the government and party have taken growing roles in defence exercises.”

Potential Military Instability

This has allowed the Cuban government to reduce the size of the FAR from its one time peak of over 200,000 active duty personnel down to around 60,000 today, but paradoxically it has not reduced the influence of the military in Cuba’s government and society. Not only does the army, as Bardach writes, “run most everything in Cuba that works,” but it is well-represented–almost overrepresented–in the upper ranks of the state apparatus. Military officers have run some of the key government ministries–such as transportation and communication–and they are increasing in their numbers in the top party organizations.

But as the upper ranks of the military increase their power and hold on the regime, the middle ranks of the officer corps become increasingly restless. Most of them did not sign up for a military career that called for being the commanders of an internal police force or construction battalion, or becoming an adjunct to the collective farm agricultural brigades. Many of them–especially within the air force–have been indoctrinated with some of the same ideas of the perestroika period that eventually brought down the USSR and are not at all happy with the manner in which the military is being utilized in Cuba.

Thus the country has an increasingly ideologically unreliable officer corps in a state where the military is probably the least indoctrinated of any communist regime, former or present. All of which makes for a situation that is ripe for civil strife and intra-military rebellion.

Raul himself is a wild card that is hard to divine. Profiles of the two brothers paint Raul as being unspoken and dispassionate about politics when compared with Fidel, but at the same time he has been described by his biographers as vacillating between two different, polar opposite personas: “Raul the Terrible, the man who is responsible for summary executions, and Raul the Compassionate, the family man who remembers everyone’s birthday.”

Third Party Candidates

Compounding the issue is the fact that waiting in the wings are other pretenders to the throne, including Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada, who served for 12 years as Cuba’s Ambassador to the UN and has been the President of the National Assembly since 1993. Outside of the country he is probably the best known and most articulate politician in all of Cuba after Castro. Other long-time Cuba watchers insist that the time for people of Raul and Alarcón’s generation has passed. If Fidel does soon end up “ha muerto,” his immediate successor is going to be a transitional leader at most. “The people who are going to lead Cuba after Fidel are the people who are in the 40s and 50s,” said one long time Miami-based Cuba watcher. “The difficulty is that no one really knows what these people think.”

The nervousness about such an unstable situation in Cuba is exceeded only by the fear of what could happen if the regime implodes with the exit of Castro. A rapid, accelerated downfall of the island nation’s dictatorship would cause what there is left of an economic system to collapse. The result could be a massive dislocation and immigration crisis, followed by the potential that Cuba could become a haven for criminal and drug trafficking interests.

Whatever happens in the weeks and months ahead, the ultimate challenge for the Bush administration will be to manage the decline of the regime in Havana in a way that if it unravels, it does so in a peaceful and measured manner–much as his father successfully managed damage control on the downfall of the USSR and Warsaw Pact. Given the slate of problems already on the White House’s daily menu, this task may be even more difficult than what Bush Senior was able to achieve at the beginning of the last decade.

Reuben F. Johnson is a regular contributor to THE DAILY STANDARD.