A Castro by any other Name…

Although many Western observers are already showing optimism over the semi-retirement of Raúl Castro and the rise to office of the previously obscure Miguel Díaz Canel, what just happened in Cuba is not a regime change. In fact, for the moment, it appears that very little will change in that island nation, including the severe restriction of human and civil rights with which Cubans have been living for the past six decades.

While it is true that Díaz Canel is the first person other than Fidel and Raúl Castro in nearly 60 years to ostensibly take charge of the country, he was handpicked by Raúl to ensure the continuation of a Castro dynasty that has been ensconced in power since the end of the Cuban Revolution in 1959. He has garnered Castro’s favor by eschewing personal power quests and adhering to the regime’s main political and economic lines in his most recent post as the country’s First Vice-President, after long years as a grassroots regime champion and enforcer.
The 58-year-old Díaz Canel may be a “fresh new face” compared to the geriatric Castro perennials who have been running the country, and although, in the wake of the Obama-era rapprochement, he has suggested that Cuba needed to take a more open approach to its economic affairs, should he be tempted to go rogue and take Cuba in an entirely new direction on his own, it wouldn’t be easy. Despite the fact that Raúl Castro is nearly 87 years old—his brother Fidel, the iconic leader of the Cuban Revolution died, aged 90, in 2016—he has made it clear that he is only semi-retiring. Observers say that he will remain in control, behind the scenes, of both state intelligence and the Army (which between them, in turn, control practically everything on the Cuban islands). He will also continue to hold the post of First Secretary of the only political organization permitted in Cuba, the Communist Party.
Nor is it as if the influence of the Castros will end with Raúl’s eventual death or incapacitation. His 52-year-old son, Colonel Alejandro Castro Espín, for instance, works out of the Interior Ministry and is believed to run the overall day-to-day operations of Cuba’s all-pervasive intelligence services, despite his doctorate in international relations. And he is not the only younger-generation Castro that Díaz Canel might have to contend with. Among others, there is Raúl Castro’s politician daughter, Mariela, and his grandson and chief bodyguard, Raúl Rodríguez Castro (son of another of the retiring leader’s daughters, Débora, and her ex-husband, General Luis Alberto Rodríguez, who heads up over a thousand Cuban companies owned by the country’s industrial-military complex).

While for now the Castros seem to want to avoid the impression of the Cuban regime’s being a family affair where power is inherited, there can be little doubt that they have no plans to relinquish the cumulative power that their two patriarchs have developed since the Revolution ended, or that the Castros have continued to make a great show of defending from ostensible enemies both foreign and domestic throughout their incredibly prolonged reign.
Fidel Castro held sway over the country and its people for more than half a century. Indeed, he was the world’s longest ruling non-royal leader in more than a hundred years. When his health began to fail, his younger brother Raúl, who had served as his political right hand since the revolution that brought them both to power, took his place as the head of state, a post which the younger Castro has held, both virtually and effectively for the past decade.

While the revolutionary hype of the Castro regime paints a picture of a Marxist-Leninist workers’ heaven, it has most often functioned as a cruel dictatorship. Many left-leaning thinkers, especially in Latin America, have defended the Castros far beyond justifiable levels because Fidel and Raúl have become iconic symbols of the Cuban Revolution, which is seen as a just uprising against a cruel, exploitative and corrupt dictatorship. But beyond the courageous and astute leadership of Fidel in the revolution as such and despite the early efforts of the Castros to reorganize the country once the previous regime had been conquered, it is hard not to notice that the Castro dynasty has become what it swore to wage war against—an iron-fisted dictatorship that has repressed and oppressed the Cuban people for more than half a century.
Clearly, then, while one may defend the Cuban Revolution as a triumph of the people of that nation over an authoritarian regime kept in power by international big business and organized crime at the expense of the rights and prosperity of the Cuban people, there is little difference between venerating the Castros and lauding similarly cruel former dictatorships like those of Pinochet in Chile, Gaddafi in Libya or Franco in Spain. Like these other strongmen, the Castros have used repression of dissent, summary executions, torture and arbitrary imprisonment as the grist for their “revolution”. But similarly, the US-backed sanctions that have haunted the Castros since their earliest years in power have been, perhaps, “the right thing to do” for all the wrong reasons, since they have been more about revenge for the nationalization of US and multinational business interests than about putting pressure on the regime to initiate a democratic opening and to respect the human rights of its citizens.

The rapprochement initiated by the administration of former US President Barack Obama was for all the right reasons, and provided the octogenarian Castro brothers with a golden opportunity to gracefully end their regime and herald a new, more progressive era in Cuba. With a more fundamentalist Fidel out of the way, Raúl Castro seized that opportunity and indeed began taking baby steps toward both economic and social reform, providing Cubans with somewhat increased freedom of movement and freedom to entertain their own small commercial enterprises, as the US government simultaneously lifted its ban on travel to Cuba and some of its restrictions on trade with the island nation. But the hopes for improvement in bilateral ties, which had begun to sketch the coming of a brighter era for the Cuban people, were quickly dashed in the first year of the Donald Trump administration in Washington, sparking a new hardening of the Castro regime’s stance.
No one in the Cuban government more than Díaz Canel had demonstrated enthusiasm for the possibility of expanding trade ties with that country’s closest and richest neighbor. And he quickly began talking about the need for economic reform. Now, as he takes over as the visible head of the Cuban government (though not of the regime) it is probable that he will have to wait for the end of the Trump era in Washington before he will be able to make good on any plans he may have to relax the government’s iron grip on the Cuban people and reinsert his country into its proper place in the world order.
Meanwhile, the only remaining question that Díaz Canel should be asking himself is whether the so-called “revolution” under the all-pervading influence of which the Cuban people continue to live—and which has functioned as a one-family autocracy ever since the real Revolution ended—be able to survive the deaths of its cynically charismatic and coldly ruthless founders. Or will Cubans finally rise up and demand a more democratic opening and long-awaited delivery on the Revolution’s promises of freedom, rights and equality and on which the Castro regime has failed to deliver for the past six decades?