Ra\u00fal Castro is absent as Cuba celebrates the anniversary of a key revolutionary attack<\/a><\/p>\nThis week Miami is once again with abuzz with curtains-for-Castro talk, this time focused on speculation that 95-year-old Ra\u00fal is on his own deathbed.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, the Miami news outlet Diario de las Am\u00e9ricas published a report quoting anonymous sources that Ra\u00fal Castro is on hospital life support.<\/p>\n
But there’s been no confirmation from Cuba or Cuban officials to that effect.<\/p>\n
Ra\u00fal’s last public appearance was last month, at Havana’s Karl Marx Theater, to celebrate what would have been Fidel’s 100th birthday.<\/p>\n
In May, the U.S. indicted him for allegedly ordering Cuban fighter jets in 1996 to shoot down two small planes carrying four Cuban exiles near Cuba, killing all of them.<\/p>\n
Still, a big question is whether Cubans, on the island and in exile, are as gripped by rumors of Ra\u00fal’s deteriorating state as they were by the never-ending guessing game about Fidel, who led Cuba’s communist revolution and was the far more legendary figure of the two.<\/p>\n
Does the prospect of Ra\u00fal’s exit carry the same or at least approximate psychological weight?<\/p>\n
To Miami Cubans like playwright Carmen Pelaez, the answer is yes.<\/p>\n
“You have to remember that, especially for younger Cubans and more recently arrived Cuban exiles in Miami,” Pelaez told WLRN, “Ra\u00fal is their dictator. Ra\u00fal is their Fidel.”<\/p>\n
A third of the Cuban Revolution<\/p>\n
A big reason: Ra\u00fal has guided Cuba’s repressive regime since Fidel was sidelined in 2006, almost a third of the duration of the Cuban Revolution, which took power in 1959.<\/p>\n
Considered more pragmatic than his fiery brother, Ra\u00fal helped keep the cash-strapped revolution afloat in the 21st century by ushering in limited \u2014 but only limited \u2014 private enterprise.<\/p>\n
Although Ra\u00fal relinquished the presidency in 2018, when current President Miguel D\u00edaz-Canel took over, most Cuba watchers believe he has continued to be the island’s de facto leader. He is thought to have overseen the regime crackdown, which resulted in the imprisonment of hundreds of Cubans, after unprecedented mass anti-government protests in July 2021.<\/p>\n
As a result, said Pelaez, whose short film Colada was shown at this year’s Miami Film Festival, the rumor mill about Ra\u00fal’s condition will churn almost as emotionally.<\/p>\n
That may be the case particularly since Ra\u00fal Castro is one of the last of the revolution’s geriatric old guard, known as los hist\u00f3ricos. One key and especially feared hist\u00f3rico, Ramiro Vald\u00e9s, died in June at age 94.<\/p>\n
Cuban reformers hope their departure from the scene will give Cuba’s younger leadership more freedom to pursue the sort of democratic and capitalist liberalization the bankrupt country desperately needs \u2014 and which the Trump administration, which has further tightened the economic screws on the regime this year, is demanding.<\/p>\n
Between that U.S. pressure and the regime’s uncompromising incompetence, Cuba’s humanitarian crisis \u2014 including chronic blackouts, food shortages and other deprivations Cubans are suffering \u2014 is only worsening.<\/p>\n
But Pelaez fears post-hist\u00f3ricos reforms may be wishful thinking.<\/p>\n
“When those dinosaurs are gone, D\u00edaz-Canel and the younger leaders will only be trying to save themselves, not the Cuban people,” she said.<\/p>\n
“So just as Fidel’s death didn’t really mean that much in the end, I doubt Ra\u00fal’s will, either.”<\/p>\n
Even so, Ra\u00fal Castro’s passing would indeed be seismic hemispheric news \u2014 and a major blow to Cuba\u2019s crumbling communist revolution. <\/p>\n
For now, however, it\u2019s only the revolution \u2014 not Ra\u00fal \u2014 that can actually be confirmed to be on life support.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It took the late Cuban dictator Fidel Castro 10 years to die. Or rather, that’s how long the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":389846,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[123,125,124],"class_list":["post-389845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-miami","tag-miami","tag-miami-headlines","tag-miami-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=389845"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389845\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/389846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=389845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=389845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=389845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}