Losing It?

Everyone keeps saying that the transition from Fidel to Raul has gone off smoothly and without a hitch-thwarting the best laid plans of the US and the Cuban-American Exile community.

That may be. So far it has been a “stable” year with no mass exodus, round-ups or bloodshed. When it comes to the revolution success has always had a very low bar.

But this is only a façade.

Raul isn’t as entrenched in power as they would have you think.

And who is ruining the transition?

Non other than the man who has ruined everything else: Fidel.

He has even been a failure at dying.

He has clung on to life for so long that the changes people expected to occur when he was no longer in the picture, haven’t begun to materialize creating an atmosphere of more desperation, anxiety and pressure-probably ruining his designated dictator brother’s chances of running the island successfully once he finally dies

The Cuban nomenklatura realize this and they are all busy devising exit strategies, Plan B’s. Even as Che’s daughter gets Argentinian citizenship, some in the Castro clan are scrambling to get Spanish citizenship.

The “state secret” illness of Fidel, isn’t a state secret any more. Mexican newspaper reporters report on his medical condition with impunity and the regime doesn’t deny it. Because it can’t-since the source for the reports are high placed officials and Castro family members. They can’t even kick the reporter out, as much as they would love to, because then she would be free to spill the beans on all she knows. The leakage of information was so widespread that they had to cancel all the reporters Yahoo and Google accounts and confine them to Ramiro’s intranet.

But the rumors are flying even faster and more furious.

Last Friday, when Castro almost died from yet another surgical procedure, the media attention shifted to the real base of Cuban power- a restaurant in Little Havana. How pathetic.

Yesterday, Raul came out with a new “discipline regimen” designed to fight corruption. Cubans know that corruption in Cuba is inherent in the regime and this is just another crackdown designed to buy some time from the disaffected Cubans by pretending to do something. And it’s probably the just beginning of a Stalinist purge. Talk about re-arranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic!