Cuba: Castro's image to endure, but his policies? Unlikely.

Castro's image to endure, but his policies? Unlikely.
By Anthony DePalma The New York Times

Published: August 6, 2006
Even from his sickbed - or what delirious crowds in Miami on July 31 had
believed was his deathbed - Fidel Castro was obsessed with how history
would judge him. In a statement outlining a new provisional government
headed by his brother Raúl, he exhorted Cubans to continue the long
revolutionary struggle during his absence, repeating, as always, that
"imperialism will never vanquish Cuba."

With his bushy beard and his booming anti-American rhetoric, Castro, who
turns 80 on Sunday, will linger in the Cuban imagination far into the
future as a double image - one, the romantic revolutionary of 1958,
promising Cuba equality, prosperity and independence; the other, the
prisoner of a half-century of confrontation with the United States that
kept Cuba from evolving in a way that could deliver on the promises.

Today, many experts say that any successor loyal to the Castro
revolution may have to chip away at his legacy in order to save it.

The Cuban people may revere his memory, but they will also demand change.

Hard-liners within the regime remain. But rank-and-file soldiers, long
deprived of promotions and mobility, will want the military to stop
running hotels and resorts and return to the role of a traditional
military. Small-scale entrepreneurs, who tasted free enterprise with
their small restaurants and fruit stands, will want a freer economy.
Intellectuals will want the state security apparatus dismantled. And the
majority of Cubans - poor and powerless - will demand a chance for a
better life than they have known under Fidel.

Cuba has survived all these years on the largess of "padrones" who
shared Fidel Castro's disdain for Washington - first the Soviet Union
with its sugar subsidies, now Venezuela with its cheap oil. But counting
on such friends for the long term, rather than reforming Cuba's economy
and entering the global markets for trade and capital, seems a risky bet
at best. And without Fidel Castro's mythic presence to draw them, those
friends might be tempted to wander.

Over the weekend, news agencies quoted Cuba's vice president, Vice
President Carlos Lage, as saying that Castro was "recuperating
favorably" after surgery and "does not have stomach cancer," as some
reports had seemed to suggest.

But last week, as Castro lay in a hospital recovering from intestinal
surgery, it seemed entirely possible that he would never resume the same
tight-fisted control of the government, and that a long-awaited
transition had begun.

But change will have to be done carefully. Most of the 11 million Cubans
on the island today were born after Castro came to power and have known
only his communism. So despite the decrepit housing, the wasting food
shortages and a repressive security system that can make a whispered
complaint the basis of a jail sentence, Fidel Castro remains an admired
figure to them. He has allowed no statues of himself, but his visage on
posters, billboards, television and newspapers is as familiar to Cubans
as the sky.

Every action that Raúl Castro, 75, or any other successor takes will be
measured against a simple standard: Does it honor Fidel Castro's popular
legacy, or tear it down? One Cuba expert, Marifeli Pérez-Stable, a
scholar at the Inter- American Dialogue in Washington, says that a
successor will have to do both.

As a hero of the revolution himself, and a prominent figure since, Raúl
Castro is one of the few people who could change the country's course.
But even for him, it would not be easy.

Pérez-Stable says, for example, that any successor will face what she
calls a straitjacket if they want to start reforming the economy.

"Whatever is left of Fidel's revolution," she said, "will constrain the
future of any successor."

The most powerful constraints that remain are virulent anti-Americanism
and a centralized economy run on an ideology that broke down long ago.

Castro used anti-Americanism to build his political power at home, his
reputation in Latin America, and his strategic alliance with the Soviet
Union during the Cold War, as well as to form his current bonds with
Venezuela's Hugo Chávez.

But the U.S. embargo that followed the rebels' triumph froze Cuba out of
any hope of building a future based on trade with the biggest economy in
the Americas.

Canada, Mexico and many other countries continued to do business with
Cuba, asserting that the way to deal with Castro was to engage him, not
isolate him. Appreciating his defiance of the economic giant in whose
shadow they also lived, they kept trading with him even when he could
not pay his bills.

But with Castro out of the picture, that degree of enthusiasm could
easily dry up, leaving a potential successor with only more difficult
options.

One option lies in China. Raúl Castro has visited there and expressed
admiration for that country's ability to meld economic openings with
preservation of Communist power. It could be a model for Cuba, but
ideological hard-liners in the government would object.

Cuba could continue to rely on Venezuela's revolutionary solidarity and
its oil, but that would leave Cuba at the mercy of Chávez - and
dependent on his longevity in office.

Or, in what may be the most problematic solution, Cuba could accept some
form of cooperation with the United States. But any Cuban leader who did
that might be accused of making Fidel Castro turn in his grave.

Moreover, in recent years Castro has placed young "Fidelistas" in
important political, ideological and economic positions within the
government. They would try to keep a successor from straying too far
from Castro's devotion to the cause of anti-imperialism.

After all, Cuban resentment of the United States as an interventionist
power predates Castro, just as his own anti-Americanism predated his
communism, and it was Castro's titanic talent for getting under the skin
of U.S. presidents that made him a hero through much of the developing
world.

Even today, that popularity survives in large parts of Latin America -
as reflected in the recent successes of Chávez in Venezuela and of Evo
Morales in Bolivia - and it provides the most likely scenario for
immediate support for a Castro loyalist to keep Cuba going.

In lands where free trade and open economies - the methods favored by
Washington - have not delivered a better standard of living, attacking
Washington is a popular political stand, and Castro's own economic
failures do not seem to matter. So continued support from Chávez, in
particular, could give any successor a way to keep Cuba afloat without
change for some time.

China, with its keen interest in Cuban nickel, could continue to develop
its Cuban market ties at the same time. But China also offers any
successor of Fidel Castro a game plan for change and political survival.

William Ratliff, an expert on Cuba and China and a research fellow at
the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California, said that
despite the brutal repressions of Mao Zedong's rule, most Chinese
continue to admire Mao.

Ratliff said China's ability to honor Mao, even as it tears down the
economy he set in place, could provide a model for Cuba. "Maybe Raúl's
next trip to China should be to study image-making," he said.

Even from his sickbed - or what delirious crowds in Miami on July 31 had
believed was his deathbed - Fidel Castro was obsessed with how history
would judge him. In a statement outlining a new provisional government
headed by his brother Raúl, he exhorted Cubans to continue the long
revolutionary struggle during his absence, repeating, as always, that
"imperialism will never vanquish Cuba."