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Without Fidel -- Now What?

Fidel leaves, but he stays. The first decision his brother Raúl made as brand-new president of Cuba was to delegate his powers and consult with Fidel on all the important issues. Parliament supported that proposal unanimously. There is a reason why these hapless deputies are known as ''the Havana Choir Boys.'' They form a puerile, pliant and well-tuned choir. They've been obeying for half a century and know nothing else. Surely, that was the condition demanded from Raúl so he could formally occupy the country's presidency.

Fidel has reserved the veto power for himself. He will continue to govern until his death.

That's what this new play is all about. Fidel is in very ill health and wants to continue to rule from the Great Beyond. The Brazilians, who are the most reliable and indiscreet source on Fidel's health (especially Lula's entourage), say so in private: What's amazing is that Fidel is still alive. They've even reiterated to me, sotto voce, the first diagnosis they first divulged and later recanted: What he really has is cancer. They've returned from Havana with that old-new news. And if Fidel now relinquishes command, even though he retains the authority and ability to thwart any reform, it's because he knows that he has little time left in this vale of tears.

Before giving Raúl the key to the dictatorship, Fidel swept from the Council of State all reformers willing to coexist with the democrats in the opposition. Absent are, for example, Abel Prieto and Eusebio Leal, two sweetly reasonable high-ranking officials. Fidel removed Carlos Lage -- the presumptive transitional figure in all the betting pools -- from the line of succession. In his place, he installed José Ramón Machado Ventura as Raúl's eventual replacement, an elderly apparatchik, organized and inflexible. His job will be to discipline the devitalized Communist Party, a zombie structure with 800,000 members who joined it out of inertia, not conviction. Not at all a surprising phenomenon, if we recall that the Soviet Communist Party had 20 million members and that it was dissolved by decree without a single street protest.

Raúl intends to solve the most urgent material issues inherited from the devastating Fidelista era. He is convinced that what the Cubans really want is not freedoms but bread and butter. He believes that if the government improves the supply of food and the people live a little better, they will cheerfully accept what they now accept out of resignation and impotence. It's a hard and cynical way of looking at things, but that's his style. When Raúl dreams about the future of Cuba, he envisions three successive panoramas.

• Short-term (12 months, but with the first changes made before summer), he foresees a country that's more productive and less hungry than the one he received.

• Medium-term (36 months), he imagines a less-rigid society, with broader spaces for opinion. The recent publication of a speech by Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican secretary of state who recently finished a six-day visit to the island, and a more hospitable attitude toward the church are a preview of that.

• Long-term (60 to 72 months), he dreams of reproducing in Cuba a model that resembles Putin's Russia more than today's China. There the capitalism is controlled by his old chums in the party, military and Interior Ministry, who hold all the reins of political and economic power, guaranteeing the survival of a self-renewable elite that will manipulate the country for several generations until the historical anomaly of communism dissolves without trauma into an acceptable Latin American normality.

Raúl's role

Raúl is wrong. His basic premises are wrong. The party cannot be revitalized because almost no one believes in collectivism or the Marxist poppycock, as even the children of the nomenklatura admit. (If Raúl doubts that, let him talk to the children of Juan Almeida, Carlos Lage, Machado Ventura, Juan Escalona or his own brother Ramón.) The armed forces are not a monolithic bloc, either. They remain united out of loyalty to Fidel and because they are closer to the spirit of a gang than to military discipline. But they broke away from the revolutionary discourse a long time ago, both ideologically and emotionally. One doesn't choose a military career to manage hotels or serve food to Canadian tourists.

The Cubans want more than just bread and butter; they want freedoms. They want to open up businesses, own property, leave and reenter their country freely, have various political options, read and be informed however they wish and regain control over their lives, kidnapped by the revolution half a century ago.

What Raúl needs to understand is that fate has placed him in his post not to save a revolution that scuttled the nation and almost no one wants, but to give it a decent burial. That's his best role.

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