Word: fideles
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RICARDO ALARCON, Cuba's National Assembly president, comparing the delayed public appearance of Raúl Castro, the ailing Fidel's younger brother and at least temporary successor, with the U.S. Vice President's tendency to slip away to undisclosed locations...
...politics have a record as long as Raúl Castro's, and yet rare is the leader as powerful as he who is as mysterious to the outside world. Raúl, who temporarily assumed charge of the Cuban presidency for the first time last week as Fidel recovered from abdominal surgery, has always been there. His brother's designated successor, he was beside Fidel from the moment the two, with Raúl's acquaintance Che Guevara, launched the revolution that overthrew the dictatorship of Cuba's Fulgencio Batista in 1959. Having joined the Socialist Youth as a university student, Raúl was red before...
...first time I met Raúl Castro, in 1972, I confess that I did not pay any attention to him at all. I was visiting revolutionary Cuba with a group of young "internationalists"; I was green and wanted to change the world. Fidel was the one that I wanted to see. First I met Vilma Espín, who had joined the revolution before marrying Raúl. That she was from a well-to-do family and had thrown away everything for the cause made her a dashing character in my eyes. She was then and remains today head of Cuba's Women...
...That is no doubt just how the impish Fidel wanted it. His stunning and sometimes brutal expropriation campaign seized homes, businesses, farms and factories from tens of thousands of Cubans and scores of U.S. corporations, assets whose combined worth was $9 billion in 1960 and perhaps more than $50 billion today. (It was, in fact, the single biggest grab of U.S.-owned property in history.) When Fidel offered little if any restitution, the U.S. retaliated with an economic embargo against Cuba in 1962, which remains in place today...
...especially since housing construction in impoverished Cuba is light-years behind the island's population growth. If Cuban-Americans show up in even a democratized Cuba demanding those dwellings, they're likely to face the wrath of Cubans who tend to resent imperious exiles as much as they disdain Fidel. Says the Pentagon analyst, "The Cubans say, Screw you. You're not getting this property back.'" Florida Senator Mel Martinez, an exile whose grandfather's soda bottling company was confiscated, agrees that while post-Castro Cuba must "honor property rights, people should not be thrown out of homes...