Adiós Fidel–or maybe it’s only hasta luego

In late February, Fidel Castro announced that he was permanently stepping down as Cuban president. Fidel’s brother, Raúl, was chosen to take his place. Nothing surprising there–Raúl had been running an interim government for over a year and a half. What is surprising is the amount of commentary in the U.S. and elsewhere claiming that finally things are going to change for the better in Cuba. Don’t bet on it.

In the nearly fifty years since Fidel came to power, far too much attention has been paid to him. He’s been treated like a rock star (whether he’s the bad-boy Keith Richards type or a do-gooder like Bono is a matter of opinion). In fact, inside Cuba, Fidel had his main impact in the long-forgotten 1960s, when he set up the state apparatus that runs things on the island.

One of the best books written on Castro’s Cuba is Tom Miller’s Trading with the Enemy. It’s part travelogue, part political expose, and thoroughly funny and engaging. As Miller describes it, the Communist Party has a throttlehold on every detail of Cuban life, from the media and the military to food prices and the electric supply. Cubans are careful when they talk outside the home. They’re wary not just of the Secret Police, but also of their neighbors. Each neighborhood has a block captain who watches over the local flock, making sure no one is selling state secrets–or telling anticommunist jokes.

The old guard–Fidel, Raúl, and the other boys of the revolution–will not be with us much longer. What then for Cuba? Inevitably things will change, perhaps quickly (as in the Soviet Union) or maybe more slowly (as is happening in China). Still, the legacy of the communist system will remain. In Russia today it is difficult to get a leaky faucet fixed, much less build a house or start a business, without "finagling." This often means paying a fee to the local mafia clan, which in turn will bribe the proper corporate and government officials. These same clans deal drugs and guns, run prostitution and gambling rings. It’s all a bit, well, unsavory. But something, or someone, needed to take on the role of the old apparatchik bureaucracy, to be the axle grease that keeps Russian society rolling.

Cuba may be headed down the same road as Russia, where government control morphs into shady private enterprise. It would make a great backdrop for a novel. Suppose the U.S. trade embargo ends. A Cuban-American protagonist is drawn back to the island–a family crisis, a government assignment, something. He finds the place totally out of tune with what he expected, and much more sinister. Add in a strong-willed Cuban love interest, a little timba music . . . I can almost feel the sea breeze wafting down the Malecón from Havana Bay.