Brian Latell has been studying Fidel and Raul Castro ever since he joined the CIA’s Cuba desk as a young analyst in the summer of 1964. He rose through the ranks to become a national intelligence officer for Latin America in 1990, making Latell the premier analyst for Cuba and the rest of the region within the U.S. intelligence community. In 2005 he published the acclaimed book “After Fidel: The Inside Story of Castro’s Regime and Cuba’s Next Leader,” and he is currently a senior research associate at the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies. He spoke earlier this week with NEWSWEEK’s Latin America Regional Editor Joseph Contreras. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: Do you believe the official version coming out of Havana that Fidel is alive and recovering from major surgery or do you suspect he is in fact dead?
Brian Latell
Brian Latell: I don’t know which it is. We’re at the mercy of the Cuban-controlled media, they’re only telling us what they want us to know. He’s a man who is almost 80 years old, he’s been more feeble over the last year, so this kind of major surgery could be life-threatening. It certainly is possible that he has died and that this is a cover story. Such a hypothesis would be consistent with the way a lot of us think the Cuban government would be planning for this eventuality. They would want to have maximum time, at least a day, maybe two or three days, to prepare the security services, the undercover agents and the police for any possible opposition or demonstrations.
In 1997 he disappeared for some time and then appeared at a Communist Party congress looking not very well. Was that absence induced by a similar gastric or intestinal problem?
I don’t know, his health and condition have always been state secrets. The [account that he has] Parkinson’s disease is probably true, but that was not revealed by Cuban government sources. Fidel has suffered major health problems over the years, maybe he has undergone surgery for one serious ailment or another, but the Cuban government has never acknowledged it.
You describe Raul in your book as an unreformed alcoholic. How is his health as far as you can tell?
His health is even more of a mystery than Fidel’s, other than the alcoholism. At the age of 75, given the serious drinking that he’s been doing for decades, given the stress that he lives under, given the fact, too, that he probably does not deal with stress as well as Fidel does, I would think that Raul has had and probably still has some serious health problems.
In your book you trace the evolution of Raul from an ideological hard-liner who angrily confronted Fidel in a Houston hotel room in 1959 over the direction of the fledgling regime to a deferential deputy who became more open than his brother to proposals to encourage foreign investment in Cuba and allow local farmers to sell their produce at market prices in the 1990s. How do you explain this reversal of roles?
The Castro brothers are complicated individuals, both very powerful, ambitious men who have a very elaborate, Byzantine relationship. I think that Raul got on board after that confrontation in April 1959 because he got what he wanted—to be head of the defense ministry, to take control of the armed forces, to be confirmed again as second in the chain of command and first in the line of succession. The turning point for Raul [in the 1990s] was the disappearance of the Soviet Union, and he began to realize [Cuba] needed some other options.
Do you think he would carry through with that pragmatism and adopt the Chinese model after his brother has gone?
I think there’s a very good chance—and by the Chinese model I mean that he would continue to put a heavy emphasis on strict, rigorous political controls while gradually decentralizing the economy and allowing much greater private individual enterprise than Fidel has permitted.
What would happen to U.S.-Cuban relations under Raul?
There is good reason to believe that Raul will want to have better relations with the United States. One important item in the chain of evidence was when the U.S. Defense Department began imprisoning [suspected] Al Qaeda terrorists in cells at the American military base at Cuba’s Guantánamo Bay, and Raul publicly stated that if any of them escaped he would be sure that they were returned to American custody. Fidel never said anything like that.
Are there any parallels between the relationship the Castro brothers have and that of John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy in the early 1960s?
I’ve wondered about that myself. One major difference is that Jack and Bobby only really worked together on political campaigns for a relatively short number of years. The Castro brothers have been working together since 1953, and the Castro brothers are also closer in age. But in terms of powerful brothers and political performances, certainly these are similar.
In the concluding chapter of your book you suggest that Raul will have a hard time managing the animosities that will break out across social fault lines dividing those Cubans who have access to hard currency from those who don’t.
He’s going to be challenged. He does not have the same kind of titanic presence and legitimacy that Fidel does. I think he realizes he’s going to have to give people a better standard of living.
In the coming days, what will be the telltale signs that you’re going to be looking for to indicate whether Fidel is dead or is still with us?
If Fidel, in fact, is dead, or if he dies in the very short near term, the regime will have to come out and announce that at some point. I don’t think it’s going to be a secret for more than a few days. Raul himself would probably deliver the speech announcing that his brother is gone and that he’s taking over not provisionally but permanently at the head of a collective leadership. We would need to be alert to the possibility that there might be popular disturbances. If there were disturbances, there could be Cubans heading to the shores to get on boats and rafts to come toward south Florida.
And who comes after Raul?
My line on that is that there’s no third man and there never has been someone after Raul in the line of succession. Why not? Because that’s just another measure of the political astuteness of both Castro brothers. Neither one wanted someone in the line of succession right behind them who could potentially pose a threat.
