Raul Castro - Flopping Aces

The author of After Fidel was interviewed yesterday by US News & World Report about Raul Castro and the likelihood that he will succeed Fidel:

Who is Raúl Castro, and how likely is it that he will retain the reins of power if Fidel abdicates or dies?

As I show in After Fidel, the first biography ever written about Raúl Castro, he lacks many of Fidel's leadership qualities. He doesn't do speeches very well, doesn't like to give speeches, doesn't have the same kind of direct contact with the Cuban people that Fidel has always had. He is not an intellectual like Fidel. He likes to stay in the background. But he has many other qualities that compensate. He is very, very smart, and he is powerful. He is the regime's best organizer, an experienced manager and organization man. He will run Cuba very differently, with a more collective leadership, sharing responsibilities–and titles–with other civilian and military officials. He won't be the constant center of attention, the single source of authority that Fidel has been all these years.

But I think it is likely that Raúl will retain power. He has the support of the three most powerful institutions in Cuba. He runs the military, the security and intelligence services, and is now the dominant force in the Communist Party.

There is also a fourth source of leverage. He controls, through military officers, a very large percentage of the Cuban economy, including a large part of the tourist industry. Once Raúl has gotten his feet wet in the new leadership capacity, I think he is going to want to pursue the China model, continuing to let the military be engaged in business but also allowing more private entrepreneurship and individual enterprise.

The big question here is that Raul is 75, so really how long will he be able to rule before he dies or becomes incapacitated?

He's 75; we don't know much about his health, but he drinks too much. We can't say how long he'll be there, but we can say this: There is no third man in the line of succession. That's another sign of the Castro brothers' political savvy. They've never wanted to have another person looming right behind them as a potential successor. They thought it would be threatening to them.

Peter Hitchens had this to say in a an article today:

The one who is left is, of course, the sinister Raúl, said to have had contacts with the KGB as long ago as 1955, a practitioner of the show trial, the firing squad and the mass grave. Nowadays he is on excellent terms with China's elite, who have managed to abandon the old ideology while continuing to employ the labour camp and the bullet in the back of the head to stay in power. Raúl, 75, may also have learnt from the Chinese the art of using a communist military apparatus to milk tourism for dollars. It would be optimistic to conclude from any of this that he will offer any significant change. The ridiculous Cuban constitution, which pretends to be Marxist yet provides for a succession by horizontal bloodline, was presumably intended to prevent such change, not to prepare for it. The illness of the older Castro brother, long expected, will now test this plan. It may work, but not for very long. Quite soon, the strange, cruel, idealist fantasy of Castro's Cuba must end. But, after the disappointments and paradoxes which followed the collapse of European Bolshevism, it is hard to imagine any joyous outcome.

Cuba's economy is in shambles, their vaunted health care is in even worse shape and it looks like it may continue….for awhile.