Marifeli Perez-Stable

Published in The Times of India
June 3, 2008

HAVANA: Raul Castro, Cuba’s President, celebrates two anniversaries on Tuesday: his 77th birthday, and his first 100 days in power since formally taking over from his brother Fidel in February.

The latter milestone is the one, Cubans and much of the world are focusing on, as stock is taken of the changes he has thus far ushered in on the communist island state, speculation is mounting as to how much further he will go.

Cubans can now buy computers, own mobile telephones, hire cars and spend nights in hotels previously only accessible to foreigners.

Raul Castro has implemented agricultural reform to address the national repercussions of the world food crisis, giving farmers better pay and a freer hand to acquire machinery.

He has commuted 30 death sentences and freed some political prisoners, and signed human rights accords.

Intellectuals live less in fear of of decrying censorship, television has fewer taboos imposed, and even Granma, the venerable mouthpiece of Cuba’s Communist Party, has taken to publishing grievances from residents.

But the list of wanted transformations remains long, and includes: opening the country to private enterprise, permission to travel abroad, and an end to the double-currency system.

Raul Castro, who officially succeeded his brother on February 24, has been de facto ruler since July 31, 2006, when Fidel Castro, 81, left the political stage with serious health problems.

His reforms have been welcomed by many in Latin America, but Cuba’s greatest foe, the United States, has dismissed them as “cosmetic” and said they were insufficient for it to lift its economic embargo on the island.

Some Cubans agree more has to be done, and quickly. “It’s not enough for the measures to just knock at the door. They have to go inside the house and sit at the table, and quickly,” said a 22-year-old economy student, Pablo, who declined to give his full name.

“It’s still the same thing: repression,” said Elizardo Sanchez, head of the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, an opposition group that is banned but tolerated.

Still struggling economically, Cuba has grown to rely on the oil-funded largesse of Fidel Castro’s acolyte, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, but there is hope that sector too will be overhauled.

“With Raul, there is clearly a change of style and the possibility of economic reforms. There has to be a new government in Cuba soon, because in five years’ time, the current one will have been here for 82 years,” said a Cuban political analyst, Marifeli Perez Stable, with the Inter-American Dialogue think tank based in Washington.

That remains to be seen, however. Raul Castro has not cast free the hardline supporters of Fidel and the revolution, instead naming several of them to the State Council that decides many important national matters, and to the political bureau of the Communist Party.

“The anti-reformists, the hardliners, remain in the line of succession, which shows the refusal of the regime to further open the economy and its rejection of a political openness,” said Jaime Suchlicki, an expert at the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies in Miami.