Word: fideles
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...Fidel is so overpowering. When you talk to him he looks at you directly, into your eyes. He makes good use of his pale, long fingers, very much like a pianist's, touching you to make a point. He speaks in a circular way, taking you on a fact-filled detour and then back to the main point. Once when I was interviewing him, he turned to his secretary and said, "She is from Galicia, but from a very different background from mine." He then started telling the story of Galicia--the Spanish region from which his father came...
...extracts. At another it was special-operations training. He ate with the men and joked with them. He is a fine yarn teller, never too self-conscious to act a story out. He turns his head sideways when he listens to you and looks at you, not intensively like Fidel but more quizzically. Unlike Fidel, who takes no breaks from work for simple pleasures, Raúl likes a good time, enjoying cockfights and horses...
...always respected the family. Even though he is the fifth of seven children and the third and youngest male (Ramón, 81 and an agricultural adviser, is older than Fidel), Raúl has always been the clan's peacekeeper. When Fidel in the 1960s expropriated Cuba's ranches, including his family compound in Birán, where his mother Lina Ruz still lived, she met the revolutionaries at the door with a Winchester rifle, which she knew how to use. It was Raúl who convinced her of the merits of the reform. Lina continued to live on the compound after the state...
...visible. Raúl has played a major role in recent government battles--for instance, to get Elián González back from the U.S. in 2000 and to win the release of five Cubans convicted of spying in America the following year. When Elián was returned, however, it was Fidel who took center stage...
...wonder, a little, though, about the effects of living for four decades so close to a brother whose name doesn't even have to be invoked for people to know whom you're talking about; Cubans will just make the gesture of stroking a beard to refer to Fidel. Among the many photographs at the family house in Birán is one of a young boy in a cart. The official caption says the picture is of Fidel. On the print itself, someone has written in pen: "Soy yo, Raúl." "It is me, Raúl...