Word: fidelity
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...dumping Fidel loyalist Felipe Perez Roque as Foreign Minister and replacing him with a career diplomat, Raúl may be signaling a less political and more flexible tone for Cuba's foreign policy apparatus. Perez Roque, 43, a former personal aide to Fidel, is a pugnacious communist doctrinaire often referred to as Fidel's pit bull, more suited to El Comandante's policy of confrontation with Washington. (He once called himself part of the Cuban "Taliban.") His successor, Bruno Rodriguez, who had been Perez Roque's No. 2, is by contrast a more bookish foreign service veteran, a former...
...which he didn't. But the provisions reflect a movement among a growing number on Capitol Hill, most prominently Indiana Senator Richard Lugar, to acknowledge that the embargo has failed to dislodge the Castro regime and that it's time to open diplomatic channels. (See TIME articles about Fidel Castro...
...difficult to tell if it also indicates that Raúl is "preparing himself for the eventuality of Washington making more of these gestures." Rodriguez's appointment, as well as a host of others Raúl made this week to replace top officials often viewed as loyal to Fidel, "was more about streamlining bureaucracy" - an effort to make his government more responsive than it was perceived by most Cubans to be in his first year as President - "than any response to the Obama Administration." (See Fidel Castro at the height of power...
Indeed, Raúl, who until succeeding Fidel was Cuba's Defense Minister for almost five decades, placed numerous military brass loyal to him in key posts. They included General Jose Amado Ricardo Guerra as Secretary of the Council of Ministers, who replaces Carlos Lage, 57, a physician turned economics czar who is widely credited with seeing Cuba through the financially harrowing 1990s after the island lost its massive Soviet subsidies. Lage was often mentioned as a possible successor to Fidel...
Both Lage and Perez Roque are said to have fallen out of favor with Raúl. But Fidel, in an effort to dispel the widespread appearance of Raulismo vs. Fidelismo, published an essay in the state-run Cuba Debate a day after Raúl's changes in which he insisted that he had signed off on the ousters. In classic Fidel style - portraying fired officials as fallen communist angels - he wrote that Perez Roque and Lage were "liberated from their posts" not because they were Fidelistas but because "the honey of power" had infected them and "awakened...