End of Days for the Castro Brothers
"I am a soldier of ideas"
The clock ticks. . .
Fidel Castro will turn 86 in August. His brother, Cuban president Raul Castro, just marked his 81st birthday. His two top deputies are 81 and 80. The Castros' oldest sister, Angela, died in February at age 88. In September, the president lost his longtime confidant and presumed successor, Defense Minister Julio Casas Regueiro. "Casas' death I think took his breath away, because Casas died instantly and Casas really was his right hand," said Ann Louise Bardach, a Cuba expert. "He had a heart attack and was gone, and at 75 he was their young spring chicken," Bardach told the Associated Press.
The Castro brothers' experiment in Caribbean communism is coming to an end.
Their continuing grip on power has merely delayed the inevitable. The future of Cuba is written on the wall of history: the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and Russia in the period 1989-91. Like those former regimes, the Castros failed to adapt, to change. Recent reforms are too little, too late. Had they followed in the footsteps of the pragmatic rulers of China and Vietnam, who instituted a capitalist economy under the aegis of their ruling communist parties, Fidel's revolution might have bought itself some time. But, like North Korea, it is a dysfunctional system lost in time, destined for the trash heap of history.
I have been seized by the Cuban drama both as a diplomat and as a writer. I worked both inside Castros' Cuba and at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo on special assignment. The place had gotten under my skin even as a child when my family sponsored as refugees a Cuban family my parents had befriended in Havana during the '50's. My diplomatic duties were varied. I traveled the length and breadth of the island to do human rights monitoring of returned asylum seekers; at GTMO, the base commander and I met monthly on "The Line" for discussions with Cuban military counterparts; in Washington, I participated in monthly Cuba policy reviews at the White House. My impression in a nutshell: a) the political system is bankrupt and the country is a wreck; b) the Cuban people have one eye on the clock, waiting for inevitable change; and c) there are elements within the professional military ranks with whom we would be able to work constructively in the post-Castro period.
So, I took it upon myself to write a book about Cuba's near future. I'm crashing on the last chapter now, which accounts for my absence from this blog of late. It's another political thriller and it lays out a scenario for the demise of Fidel's communist confection. The protagonist is a Cuban-American FBI agent, a thoughtful guy who bridges both cultures and who gets swept up in a new revolution in the land of his forebears. HAVANA QUEEN also delves into the daily lives of individual Cubans, their struggle to make do in a surreal system ensconced in a setting that is literally crumbling. The central icon of this novel is "La Reina" ("The Queen"), a majestic colonial-era hotel, now socialist apartment building crammed to the rafters with a variety of souls with dreams for the future. Eighty buildings collapse in Havana each year from rot and neglect. La Reina becomes one of them. Its crashing down spurs other events which spark a new revolution. I spent nine months engaged in intensive research for this novel, even though I'd worked and traveled in Cuba and had spent twenty-five years working national security issues in government. I've spent the past two years writing this novel. Particularly valuable resources were the University of Miami's Cuba Transition Project, the writings of veteran Cuba expert and former CIA analyst, Brian Latell, and the blogs of young Cuban activists such as Yoani Sanchez and Laritza Diversent.
After I polish up the manuscript, I will submit it to the U.S. State Department for security review, as required by the nondisclosure strictures to which I am bound (Why I am Censored). This customarily takes six months and, based on previous experience, I can probably expect to be compelled to redact and change text in HAVANA QUEEN. Once the book is cleared, I'll be working with a daughter of the Cuban family my parents helped so long ago to turn it into a screen play, have it translated and promote it to both English and Spanish speaking audiences. Given the countdown on the Castros' mortality, my book should be rather timely. There is precious little on Cuba in current English language popular fiction.
Surrounding HAVANA QUEEN's publication, I will devote regular postings in this blog on Cuba, based on my personal experiences as well as events and others' insightful analyses.
Until then -- Si yo me pierdo, que me busquen en…Cuba (Federico García Lorca).