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Cuba's Backstage Man Is Expected To Step Forward

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By MANUEL ROIG-FRANZIA, The Washington Post

Published: February 20, 2008

MEXICO CITY - Raul Castro long has operated in the backstage of Cuban politics. His public record, which has emerged over his 19 months as interim president, suggests he might pursue reforms to allow more political and economic latitude on the island.

Rough-edged and uneasy in the spotlight, Castro, 76, appears to have been laying the groundwork for a larger reconfiguration of Cuba's economy since he took over from his ailing older brother in July 2006.

He publicly has mocked Cuban farmers for failing to cultivate rich farmland, held public forums for citizens to criticize the government and set in motion reforms to streamline the country's famously inefficient bureaucracies, especially those involved in distributing food to Cubans who face constant shortages.

If picked by Cuba's newly elected National Assembly in a presidential vote scheduled for Sunday, Castro is almost certain to preside over a government based more on a collective style of leadership - and less on personality - than his brother. A career military man, Castro is known more for his organizational skills than his charisma.

"He reminds me of an 82nd Airborne sergeant major," said retired U.S. Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who met with Castro in Havana in 2002. "He's gruff. Sure of himself. He's a soldier."

There is a slim chance the assembly could choose between two other favorites: the young, ideological foreign minister, Felipe Perez Roque, or the more cerebral and technocratic vice president, Carlos Lage. They have helped Castro run the country since his brother became ill.

In the past 12 years, with varying degrees of success, Castro has pushed reforms his brother had been reluctant to embrace until the fall of the country's biggest financial backer, the Soviet Union.

The younger Castro started slowly, first allowing private ownership of small food markets. Then Castro, who has been defense minister since 1959, shrank the military. He converted some of his top generals into businessmen so they could run the tourism empire he built after persuading his brother to allow more foreign investment. The military now presides over a lucrative tourist trade, cutting partnership deals with European hoteliers.

In another apparent break with his brother, Castro offered a surprise in 1994 when Cubans were fleeing the island. He took to the podium to calm a population struggling to feed itself after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

"Beans," he told a crowd in Havana, "are more important than cannons."

The concise slogan he delivered became his most memorable line. Suddenly, a country that had envisioned itself as under siege admitted that feeding its residents meant more than building its military.

As the new flow of tourism dollars eased the crisis, Castro generally slipped from the public spotlight again, remaining a mystery to outsiders and to the Cuban people he now leads: the island's great enigma. He is known as a practical joker, a family man, a guy's guy who drinks whiskey with his generals and dotes on their children; and he is, as he once described himself, "Raul the Terrible," the Cuban revolution's executioner in chief, the feared enforcer of the all-powerful Cuban state.

"I like to work in the shadows," Cuban author Norberto Fuentes remembers Castro telling him years ago. "I like to pull the threads of conspiracy."

Castro played a key role in building and leading the guerrilla force in the Sierra Maestra mountains that conquered Cuba in 1959. He was the more devout Marxist-Leninist of the Castro brothers and would later travel to the Soviet Union to handle many of the negotiations that brought nuclear weapons to the island and sparked the Cuban missile crisis.

While Fidel Castro was becoming an international political celebrity, Raul Castro was turning his mostly illiterate troops into Cuba's most efficient institution.

Although there may be changes with Fidel Castro out of power, Fuentes, the Cuban writer and a former close friend of the Castros, said one thing that would remain the same under Raul Castro is Cuba's animosity toward its long-avowed enemy, the United States.

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