Cuba's Future Is Already Here

Fiercely implacable exiles in Miami, perennially outfoxed bureaucrats in Washington and salivating real estate developers around the world have spent years trying to predict what will happen in Cuba the day after Fidel Castro dies. Now I think everyone knows the answer: nada.

That chuckling you hear is Fidel, in his hospital room, having the last laugh.

The 80-year-old revolutionary icon, evidently at death's door, appears to have engineered a seamless transition to the post-Fidel era. Brother Ra?l presided over last week's 50th-anniversary shindig with none of Fidel's charisma but all of his authority. If any lingering doubts about the de facto succession needed to be dispelled, Havana's biggest military parade in years on Saturday reminded everyone that Ra?l has been running the Cuban armed forces since Day One.

Fidel's absence from the festivities marking the 50th anniversary of the Cuban revolution pretty much ended any uncertainty about his health. Government officials say he's recovering like a champ and will be back on the job any day, and they sound so sincerely optimistic that you could almost look past the images of a gaunt, frail old man that were released a few weeks ago. But I doubt that anything except the looming hand of death could have kept Fidel Castro away from a cheering, flag-waving crowd of millions -- Fidel's people, filling the vast plaza named for Fidel's revolution, hoping for a last glimpse of the only leader most Cubans have ever known.

We have to assume that Fidel is not long for this world. We also have to assume that a day, a month or even a year after he dies, Cuba will be essentially unaltered.

A year isn't forever, and some kind of change will eventually come. But the Bush administration has been even more idiotic than its predecessors in its policies toward Cuba, which means that the United States is perfectly positioned to have little or no influence over what kind of Cuba finally evolves.

About all this administration can do is make things worse. Julia E. Sweig of the Council on Foreign Relations, a leading Cuba expert, writes in the current issue of the journal Foreign Affairs that by "continuing the current course and making threats about what kind of change is and is not acceptable after Fidel, Washington will only slow the pace of liberalization and political reform in Cuba and guarantee many more years of hostility between the two countries."

In the article, Sweig points out what any visitor to Cuba who is not wearing ideological blinkers quickly realizes: that the Cuban government's hold on power does not derive from repression alone. In my visits to the island, I've been struck by how Cubans can be bitterly critical of the hard-line restrictions the regime imposes on speech, assembly, movement, commerce and other activities, and in the next breath speak with pride of the government's achievements in providing free health care and education.

In Washington and Miami, the prediction was that when the Soviet Union and the East Bloc dissolved, Fidel Castro's regime would soon follow. But Ra?l Castro and a group of pragmatic-minded young officials -- basically, the people who are running the country now -- opened the spigot and allowed just enough economic reform to keep the place going. Now, with Ra?l's armed forces functioning essentially as the island's biggest business conglomerate, and with Venezuelan President Hugo Ch?vez shipping his mentor Fidel all the oil he needs, the government seems increasingly secure.

That security hardly looks permanent. Many Cubans are indeed restless for change. There are focal points around which a kind of civil society has started to coalesce -- the black-market economy, the Catholic Church, the Afro-Cuban faiths, the arts -- and the government has had little success in co-opting these independent movements.

Ra?l Castro is 75, so his time in the driver's seat will be brief. Maybe he will try to move Cuba toward the Chinese model of continued one-party rule in exchange for free-market liberalization of the economy -- something Fidel would never abide. Lacking his older brother's presence and oratorical skills, maybe Ra?l will have to be oppressively heavy-handed in using the army he built to maintain order.

For now, though, the Cuban regime has accomplished something that the Bush administration had pledged to thwart: an uneventful transition that leaves the Cuban Communist Party still comfortably in charge. The handover of power took place in August, when Fidel's illness was announced and power was transferred "temporarily" to Ra?l and other party leaders.

Fidel's revolution won't survive forever -- the tide of history is flowing in the opposite direction. But surely it will survive the old man's death.