After initially portraying himself as a reform-minded leader who intended to shake up Cuba’s staid bureaucracy, Raúl Castro ended his first year as president last week without having achieved much in the way of major changes.
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Then, at the end of the midday news broadcast on state television on Monday, the 77-year-old Mr. Castro surprised everyone.
The news anchor reported that the Council of State, the governing body that Mr. Castro controls, was ousting some of the government’s most familiar officials, including Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque and others with close ties to the former president, Mr. Castro’s older brother Fidel. The council also stripped Vice President Carlos Lage of his position as cabinet secretary and merged various ministries.
The actions seemed to suggest that Mr. Castro agreed with those who argued that his first year in office had been disappointing.
“Raúl promised more than he delivered in his first year, and you can view these cabinet changes as an explicit acknowledgment of that by Raúl himself,” said Daniel Erikson, director of Caribbean programs at the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington.
What the shuffling will mean in terms of policy changes or outreach to the Obama administration remains to be seen. Those who keep an eye on Cuba were trying to figure out who some of the new officials were. “At least half of them, I don’t know,” said Wayne Smith, who headed the United States Interests Section in Cuba during the Carter administration.
But what is already clear is that by firing some of his brother’s closest aides, including some considered top candidates to lead in a post-Castro Cuba, Mr. Castro had engineered the biggest shake-up of the Cuban government in decades.
To many people this had the air of a purge. Interestingly, to dispel that sort of speculation, Fidel Castro (Raul's brother) decided to blog (original here; English discussion here) that these changes did not represent any kind of repudiation of his legacy, and that he had not been kept in the dark, affixing an image of his signature (? - who knew, even retired dictators are blogging these days). The problem, of course, is that nobody but the people involved really knows.
Are politics in dictatorial states more opaque than in democratic states?
This article in The Journal of Democracy is a good introduction to the complexities of contemporary Cuban politics.
(Cross-posted at our other blog).
