It’s Raul’s Cuba, and has been for years

Raul Castro has been running the show for a long time, as he’s guided his country away from its communist roots.

But by the time the elder Mr. Castro died on Friday night, Raúl Castro, who assumed presidential powers in 2006 before getting the official title in 2008, had transformed Cuba into a country that was unrecognizable in many ways — and yet remarkably the same.

Raúl discarded some of the precepts that Fidel had considered sacred, chipping away at the Communist scaffold his brother had built. And in a stunning embrace that caught the world off guard, he negotiated an end to the 50-year diplomatic standoff with the United States that Fidel had fiercely maintained.

It is now solidly Raúl’s Cuba, an island where millennials talk to their cousins on Skype, where restaurant owners hustle for zucchini at privately run farms and where Americans clog the streets of Old Havana…

With Fidel gone, a lingering question may now be answered: Did the weight of his legacy hold Raúl back, preventing him from substantially dismantling the cherished system his brother had constructed, or were the slow, halting steps toward change a reflection of Raúl’s own desire to insert new life into the ailing Cuban economy — without weakening the structures of state power?

Roberto Veiga, the director of Cuba Posible, an organization in Havana that promotes political dialogue, said that Fidel’s passing would “deeply affect people” on the island, but that it would not change the course of the country.

“It will have an emotional impact,” Mr. Veiga said. “It will have a political impact. But it won’t have any impact on how the country is governed.”

“It’s a long time since Fidel was in the presidency,” he added. “Raul Castro has been leading the country for years. He has a team. There’s stability.”

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.