Nine months after falling victim to an illness that many US analysts assumed would prove fatal, Fidel Castro appears to have come back from death's door to resume some leadership responsibilities and rein in Cuba's would-be reformers.
He's receiving visiting dignitaries, not just friends such as Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez but official delegations, including delegations by a senior figure in the Chinese Communist Party.
And, to the alarm of veteran Cuba-watchers who sensed a new degree of openness to economic change during Castro's absence, the apparently reinvigorated revolutionary is now believed to be blocking moves to let Cubans open small businesses.
Since July 31 last year when Raul Castro, the defence minister and first vice president, took over for his older brother, state-authorised media exposes on rampant corruption and the younger Castro's public criticism of shortages in food, transportation and housing have hinted at internal review of Cuba's political and economic system, said Phil Peters, vice president of the Lexington Institute near Washington and a veteran analyst of Cuban affairs.
Raul Castro has a reputation for pragmatism about private enterprise within the state-run economy, having inaugurated many of the island's most successful hard currency-earning joint ventures in tourism in the early 1990s, when the country was reeling from the sudden cutoff of Soviet aid.
After Fidel Castro was too sick even to make an appearance at the September summit in Havana of the Non-Aligned Movement or at his delayed 80th birthday celebrations the government said that a thorough review was underway to identify, and presumably correct, flaws in the communist ideology guiding the country. "Now it looks like cold water's getting poured over all that," Peters said. "That, to me, is the clearest sign that Fidel Castro is getting better and getting closer to coming back to office."
Hopes of an expansion in self-employment were buoyed last fall when Raul Castro began speaking out in interviews and speeches against the government's inability to properly provide for its 11.2 million citizens.
Those hopes were dashed, at least for the short term, when Cuban Vice President Carlos Lage, architect of the early 1990s reforms, parroted Fidel Castro's condemnation of "social distortions" in a speech to a Communist youth group. Cuban media also reported that the academic commission assigned to examine problems with state ownership wouldn't deliver its verdict for three years.
Damian J Fernandez, head of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University agrees that a Pandora's box of ideological debate has been opened that will eventually lead to change.
Although Cuba-watchers differ in their forecasts of whether Fidel Castro will resume full power, they agree he is making at least a partial leadership comeback.
Washington Post
