If Castro dies, what happens?
This is an old question with a variety of vague answers.
In Cuba, its likely that Raul, Fidel’s brother, takes over. He’s a spry....75? Even if Raul maintains "business as usual", we’re talking...what...ten more years? When the Castros are gone, what happens?
I have a friend who has done extensive anthropological research in Syria and Northern Africa. He was telling me about families in North Africa who have keys to ancestral family homes in the Iberian Peninsula. Homes their ancestors had to abandon back during the "re-conquest"...which is during the decades prior to 1492. In other words, there are families in North Africa that hold to keys to homes their ancestral family members had to leave nearly 600 years ago and they—from time to time—look forward to when they can reclaim their home.
I live in Hudson County NJ among the second largest Cuban community in the US. I know folks who still have the keys to homes the abandoned in Cuba in the early 1960s. Keys to the homes of their parents and grand parents or their own childhood/young adulthood homes. They intend on reclaiming those homes they had to leave 40-50 years ago.
Contrary to Bad Boys II, cocaine does not flow through Cuba. Cuba is not in the cocaine business. During the spring or 2001, I went to a lecture by some US officials and policy analysts. It was a disucussion on W’s Cuba policy, which had not really been that formed at the time. It was here that I learned that the US Coast Guard and its Cuban equivalent actually worked very well together in policing the Caribbean for narco-traffiking. I don’t know how this may have changed, I suspect that it actually has not very changed very much. Without Castro, does this change? Cuba’s climate may be real good for Cocaine cultivation.
So what happens when Castro dies? What does Maimi want? I know a number of young-ish Cuban-Americans my age (late 30s) who would love to go to Cuba, but wont until Fidel is dead. These guys wont talk about the complexities of Cuba or Castro. And they definitely wont listen to the perspectives of the other Cubans I know who are somewhat ambivalent about Castro. These guys don’t want to know that Cuba has gone through its own historical process over the last 48 years and it isn’t quite what their parents and grand parents remember.
Does the US invade? Does it re-invoke the Platt Amendment to justify a new occupation of Cuba? The Platt Amendment came about in 1903 as one of the many by products of the Spanish-American-Cuban war...which is what some folks in Latin America and Europe call it. With the Platt Amendment, the US gave itself permission to intervene with Cuba militarily whenever it deemed fit.
And then what? Tear down the Karl Marx Theater in Havana, or rename it the Freedom Theater? The MBNA Theater? Will there be an embargo until the people renounce Socialism? Or will the current embargo over the same thing be lifted selectively? Do we round up the people who still believe in the revolution and send them to....gee, Gitmo seems a bit out of place for this. Maybe an exchange program? Cubans to Abu Grab, Iraqis to Gitmo?
Do we prop up a dictator? WE DID THAT TO CUBA SEVERAL TIMES ALREADY. In fact, the powerful conservative right wing portion of the Cuban population in Miami is guilty of one major sin: White washing the Batista government. The Batista dictatorship. It often seems as though the impulse is to pretend like the last 50 years didn’t happen and that Cuba will return to its 1958 glory
A glory where segregation was commonplace. There are rumours...unfounded and likely to be quite wrong...that the Miami Cubans want to reinstate the legal racial segregation that existed in Cuba UNTIL 1959. Cubans say this in Cuba. While Im sure there are a few US-Cubans who would revert back to that status quo (just as there are USians who think slavery was good idea....they aint the majority at all), this is probably quite untrue. BUT international tourism to Cuba...European tourism...has actually affected Cuba in such a way that some beaches are segregated, segregated for tourists only, but it has its racial affect.
Cuba instituted something called The Family Code in 1975. It declared that men had to share in the house hold work that women do. Its been very far from perfect in establishing gender equality and ending gendered labor exploitation....but how are the fundies in the US going to respond to that one?
If Raul and Fidel die, who rewrites the Cuban constitution? Will Miami/The USA allow the Cubans who never left the island to do that?
Cuba has been struggling especially hard since the fall of the USSR. It has caused them to open Cuba up to tourism to such an extent that the segregation I mention above has come into being. But so has a major rise in Sex tourism. When the neoliberal flood gates open, then what happens?
Ive spent time in Beleize, traveled there some years ago with a good friend of mine who had grown up there. When she was growing up, she lived in a grass shack near the ocean and ate lobster and conch all the time and had a healthy diet. When we went to visit her family, they lived in a shanty town and everyone was hungry. There were only two weeks out of the year where one could harvest lobster and conch for personal use. While there, she saw that the Minister of Agriculture had given an Asian company exclusive rights to harvest lobster. This was going to put several local fishermen out of business. Is this Cuba’s future?
Is Cuba going to become more like a traditional country in the developing world? Will IMF loans be made available so that they can develop a neoliberal economy where the rich get richer and the poor even poorer? Will the world bank/IMF figure out a way to claim that Cuba still needs to pay the USA money it owed from some clause in a contract singed in 1947? Will populations be moved around the island so that the (often very white) Cubans can reclaim homes they left so many years ago?
Is Cuba going to become a resort island, a playground and whorehouse for the US? (Um...see the 50s, 19) Literacy rates are quite high in Cuba in comparison to the rest of Latin America, does this stay? Will medical supplies be given to hospitals starved of resources since the fall of the Soviet Unions? And will the very well trained Cuban Doctors be allowed to do their thing without interference? Or will some neocon impose a no smoking campaign first and foremost? On an island where the most unique and special commodity is a cigar.
Castro, Fidel and Raul, is a douche bag. He is a dictator. I do not defend him except to say that many Cubans...the ones who don’t white wash Batista...feel that he was the best thing for Cuba in 1959...but his he has vastly overstayed his welcome. Castro is not Sadaam. Castro is much more complicated. He is not the evil to the US’ good. He’s an asshole...but, hey, so is GWB.
When Castro dies, does the US invade? If the US invades, does Venezuela act to help Cuba? Does this create opening for a US invasion of Venezuela? How does Lula react in Brazil to a US invasion in South America?
I just want to have some sense of what will happen. If Castro dies...what happens next? Because my fear is that Cuba become like Haiti: Amazingly poor, amazingly exploited and often amazingly overlooked. I know folks whose families owned steel mills and fleets of taxi cabs in Cuba in the 50s. Their parents struggled here in the US and I understand their bitterness, but I also know that they turned out just fine here in the US. I don’t worry about them. They’ll get to go to Havana and maintain their lives here in New Jersey. But what about the people who love being in Cuba now? What about the masses for which Castro made a better life than what they had experienced under Batista and the dictators prior to him?
If Castro dies, who decides Cuba’s fate? The Cubans in Miami? The Cubans in Miami and Hudson County NJ? The US government? Or the Cubans who remain on the island and like it there? Because it’s not an "if" question....it is inevitable.
When Castro really does die, what happens?
And—since I mentioned it---when do we actually HELP Haiti to improve itself as well?