Word: cubans
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...would think a major policy shift was imminent, given the way the White House touted President Bush's Oct. 24 speech on Cuban-American relations. Yet, backed on a State Department stage by the emotional relatives of jailed Cuban dissidents, Bush simply gussied up some of the same old bromides--"The socialist paradise is a tropical gulag"--that have marked U.S.-Cuban relations for decades. Bush reiterated his hard stance against lifting the 45-year-old U.S. trade embargo against Cuba, and Fidel Castro was predictable as well, writing beforehand that Bush's speech reflected the U.S.'s desire...
...starting a democratic transition. "President Bush is right when he says this is a unique moment in Cuba, but he's missing that moment," says Jake Colvin, director of USA Engage in Washington, which favors moves like lifting the ban on U.S. travel to Cuba--something that even most Cuban Americans in Miami favor and many Cuba watchers suggest the Castros actually fear. Bush insisted that engaging Cuba now would just give "oxygen to a criminal regime." But, argues Colvin, "American citizens have always proven the best ambassadors of freedom and democracy...
...with gastrointestinal disease nearly 19 months ago, Fidel, 81, temporarily handed power to his 76-year-old brother Raúl, who is now widely expected to be named President of the Council of State when the National Assembly votes on February 24. With his close ties to the Cuban military, Raúl has thus far proved a stable ruler; little detectable reform has occurred under his watch. That consistency owes at least a partial debt to the control that Fidel has continued to exercise, even from his sickbed...
...proposed changes, but nothing's been done. Fidel is always there, monitoring him, tutoring him," says Luís Manuel García, editor of Encuentros, a Madrid-based magazine focused on Cuban affairs. "He's acted as a counterweight to his brother." Malamud expects that even now, that role will not change. "Fidel will continue to be the guardian of orthodoxy. He'll continue to block any change...
...more naturally open, a lot will hang, then, on how long Fidel survives. "On his own, I think he would want to make some timid economic reforms, some timid steps toward openness," says García. "Raúl has a greater awareness that there's paralysis in Cuban society today, a dangerous sense of immobility...