Word: fideles
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Alberto Beguiristain was once ready to risk his life to regain what he lost in Cuba. In 1960, a year after Fidel Castro took power, the revolution confiscated Beguiristain's large Spanish colonial house and two sugar mills in Sagua la Grande, east of Havana. Beguiristain recalls the "restitution" Castro offered: "He said I could leave the island alive." So in 1961, working for the CIA, Beguiristain ran the first arms shipments from Florida to anti-Castro insurgents for their disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. He was captured and says he would have been executed had he not escaped...
...August 13 and is, say official communiques, recovering from major intestinal surgery, last week handed provisional power to his younger brother and defense minister, Raul Castro. At first, Miami's politically potent Cuban exiles exulted in the streets of Little Havana. But when the reality sunk in that Fidel is most likely still alive - and that his communist dictatorship may well endure under Raul even if he's not - it also reminded many Cuban-Americans that their once ardent hopes of reclaiming confiscated property could be, as one Pentagon analyst says, "a pipe dream." A report last month...
...analysts, not surprisingly, insist that this is too charitable a characterization of a man so long associated with an oppressive military and security apparatus, responsible for imprisoning and in many instances torturing thousands of dissidents. And a number of factors could keep Raul on the hard line even after Fidel dies. For one thing, the largesse of Fidel's left-wing and oil-rich ally, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, has helped significantly to keep Cuba's economy afloat, lessening the urgency of economic reforms that many had expected under Fidel in recent years. (Cuba may also be buoyed by recent...
...however, the Cuban government insists that Raul's hold of the reins is temporary, perhaps just a few weeks or months until Fidel is back on his feet. In all his 47 years in power, Fidel, who turns 80 on August 13, has never ceded power like this to anyone. And when asked why, if Fidel really is still alive, he would so uncharacteristically let aides make such an important announcement rather than do it himself, reliable official sources in Havana insist that convalescence from his intestinal surgery requires that he do absolutely nothing but lie still in the following...
...their succession plan," another U.S. intelligence official says. "And they're looking at how the Cuban people and the international community reacts to Raul in charge." Sources in Cuba, however, dispute that notion and suggest the surgery only took place Monday morning of this week. Either way, even if Fidel should die in the coming days, Raul seems to represent the kind of unchaotic transition in Cuba that both Fidel and, frankly, the nine U.S. Presidents he has tormented since 1959, would prefer. -With reporting by Douglas Waller/Washington