Word: fidels
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...could ultimately create a cache of future voters for pols like Diaz-Balart and Ros-Lehtinen - a source that may only grow stronger as the ties between the Castros and Chávez grow warmer. Indeed, soon after he was first elected, the Venezuelan President asked then Cuban leader Fidel Castro for advice on how to transform his country into a socialist state for the 21st century. Chávez also began to refer to Castro as his "father." (Fidel, 82 and ailing, has since ceded power to his younger brother Raúl.) Today, oil-rich Venezuela sends Cuba...
Whatever differences might exist between former Cuban President Fidel Castro and his younger brother, President Raúl Castro, the most important is style. Fidel values a fiery belly full of political ideology; Raúl prizes a cooler head equipped with administrative acumen. The latter has been at the forefront ever since the ailing Fidel, 82, ceded power to Raúl, 77, last year. But this week Raúl's m.o. emerged in ways that could eventually facilitate the tentative but growing efforts in Washington and Havana to end 50 years of hemispheric cold war and thaw...
...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...