¿Quieres que te haga el cuento de la buena pipa?

The pro Raul propaganda is starting to stick.

A friend struck up a conversation with me yesterday to ask me if I thought Raul was going to “change” things in Cuba.

I said “yes, the newspaper articles”

For all the talks about changes I’ll I have seen is words no real actions.

For those of us who are Cuban, when we hear the regime talk about making changes to improve the lives of everyday Cubans, we hear “el cuento de la buena pipa”. It’s the same never ending story they’ve been telling for fifty years.

Obviously, now that Fidel is almost out of the way, it’s the perfect time to tell the story again.

The “new” leader, Raul, is now going to tell his version of the fairy tale.

The new guy, the reformer, the pragmatic. Where has he been for the last 50 yrs? In an undisclosed location? On the moon? The Soyuz space station? In a coma?-well maybe a drunken stupor.

Uh—NO.

The same people that are marketing Raul as the “new” reformer point to his prowess as the “old” manager of his older half-brother’s empire as proof of his more pragmatic and less radical management style. So while he was managing everything behind the scenes while Fidel strategerized ways of making the Cuban people’s life a little more miserable each day-all in the name of revolutionary sacrifice and austerity-pfft, Raul made it all run inefficiently and unproductively.

Well, some will argue that Raul was really a proponent of change, but didn’t have any sway over his half-brother’s despotic leadership. And now, that he’s in charge, we’ll see the real Raul. Raul the leader not the Raul the cowering little half-brother who didn’t have the gumption to stick to his beliefs and stand up to Fidel in his 50 year orgy of economic and social destruction.

So Raul is either a really bad manager, a terrible leader who couldn’t even stand up to his older half-brother, or an integral part of the repressive regime and suffocating dysfunctional Cuban economic system.

I vote for all of the above.