Rumours of Raúl Castro’s death have raised expectations of possible changes in Cuba, but the island’s powerful network of political power controls forces us not to get our hopes up too high.
Raúl Castro has died on social media three times in the last two years. And, as happened with his older brother, Fidel Castro, for many Cubans, both in Cuba and in exile, his physical disappearance could mean the end of an era, with everyone hoping that this will be the turning point that the island needs to really advance towards that better and more prosperous country that Castroism promised in 1959, without being able to fulfill that promise in more than six decades.
The facts of the harsh reality that the Cuban people are experiencing today do not point to hope: Fidel Castro died in 2016 at the age of 90 and Castroism entrenched itself even more in its classic trench discourse led by the so-called “Historic Generation of the Centennial”, led by Raúl Castro, someone considered more pragmatic, with which many sectors of international public opinion considered that changes would come…
State military capitalism
And indeed, the only changes came: on the one hand, Raúl’s heirs and his entourage of loyal military men implemented a state military capitalism that allowed them to finally monopolize all economic and financial power; on the other hand, the infrastructure was created to allow large and medium-sized investments by a military and political caste, whose dangerous power had been limited until then by Fidel Castro, forcing them to be simple puppets of his conception of “I command and command” in the economy and finances; and in the broader political aspect, the concept was established within the nomenclature of the idea of what has been called “survival from the historical myth”, that is, resistance in the crisis by appealing to the ideological myth of Fidel Castro and his project for the country.
The result of these “changes” in the economic and social life of the island has been discouraging: the deepening of social classes, with more than 90 percent of the population living on the edge of extreme poverty, according to a recent study by the Cuban Observatory of Human Rights; the decline of the population on the island to less than 10 million inhabitants due to the largest and most sustained exodus of the last six decades, according to the official National Office of Statistics and Information (between October 2021 and April 2024 alone, some 738,680 Cubans arrived in the United States, a figure that does not include the exodus to Europe and Latin American countries); and an economic contraction together with such enormous inflation that they have forced the Government itself to declare itself in a “state of war economy,” which materializes, according to opposition sources on the island, in a clear message from the Government to the people: “We cannot solve any problem, but we must continue to resist.”
Now that Raúl Castro is dead, what changes?
In historical terms, the last leader of the generation that led the revolutionary victory of 1959 against dictator Fulgencio Batista would die. But his disappearance would not mean any real change in the current panorama of power on the island. That power has already been distributed with foresight to withstand the end of Castroism.
Raúl Castro has ceased to be a regular political presence and, just as happened before with Fidel Castro, has become a mythical reference point in the shadows of power. And the political movements that point to the intention of fully and definitively implementing neo-Castroism are evident, a tendency that has nothing to do with ideology, although it does manipulate the historical myth of the Cuban Revolution, its anti-imperialist struggle and its meaning for the international left with the sole objective of maintaining the economic and financial monopoly on the island in the hands of the heirs of Castroism.
In the very long term, one hope for change would be the growing uselessness of using this historical myth before the people and before the world to justify and endorse the political management of the Government in Cuba. Therefore, the only real hope for change would be if this dominant political structure loses control in the face of the inevitable redistribution of power that always occurs after the death of an autocratic leader when, as in the Cuban case, there is no other figure with such singular relevance and historical myth.
Political impunity
The nomenclature of power in Cuba, the one that today pulls the strings of its puppet, Miguel Díaz Canel, has inherited the political and social control that for decades has been preparing the ground to mutate in the face of any transition without losing power.
This preparation for the future occurred in all areas of society within the island, but also at a global level in a very intelligent and sustained penetration into international organizations, diplomacy, universities, the international press and political institutions of the universal left.
To this national and international framework, in which the current Cuban government moves comfortably and invulnerably, we must add what is happening in the international public sphere: a government in the United States that turns its back on the Cuban opposition on the island and in the diaspora; a European and North American business environment that, despite the Cuban economic disaster, is increasingly interested in having a presence in Cuba to stop Russian and Chinese economic expansionism; regional and international organizations incapable of managing a real solution to the attacks on human rights and freedoms by the allied regimes of Nicaragua and Venezuela; and the rebirth of old international alliances with Russia and China in the fight against the West and “the eternal enemy of the North, the United States.” This panorama makes Cuban leaders believe that they enjoy the most invulnerable of shields: political impunity.
Unfortunately, hope for change is now thousands of light years away from the island, even if Raúl Castro, who is already 93 years old, dies and the other two “revolutionary dinosaurs” who still enjoy a certain respect and power also disappear: Ramiro Valdés Menéndez, 92 years old, and Guillermo García Frías, 96 years old.
Unless a piece of the machinery that Fidel and Raúl Castro set up in that social project, so unsuccessful today that it forced even the singer-songwriter Silvio Rodríguez, a staunch defender of Castroism, to admit that “the Revolution has been an experiment,” comes loose.