Cuba's Chance

By Tim Padgett / Miami

Raul Castro is a master of mixed signals. Cuba's interim President recently agreed to allow representatives from the United Nations Human Rights Council to visit the island next year to inspect its notorious prisons and address its dearth of free expression. It was a concession Fidel Castro had long sneered at, and to many it was a sign that Raul, who has ruled Cuba since major intestinal surgery sidelined his elder brother in 2006, might be willing to break with family tradition. But even as Raul reached out to the U.N., his state security agents were arresting and roughing up dozens of dissidents who had taken sanctuary in a church after a peaceful human-rights march in the southeastern city of Santiago.

Is Raul Castro a reformer or a reactionary? Now that Fidel, 81, has officially resigned as President, leaving Raul, 76, to most likely be named his successor, that question has gained greater significance than ever--in Havana, Miami and Washington. The elder Castro's exit barely registered in those cities; a half-century after he arrived on the world stage with a bang, Fidel left with a whimper. There was no overwhelming sense of sorrow in Cuba nor exultation across the Straits of Florida. There was only a collective shrug. "It's O.K.," said Yanelis, a young Cuban woman in Marianao, a suburb of Havana. "Fidel is an old person; he should rest."

But his departure is ramping up debate over whether the U.S. should free itself of torrid Cuban-exile politics, dismantle its 46-year-old trade embargo against Cuba and establish the kind of diplomatic relations Washington has with other ironfisted regimes, like those in China and Saudi Arabia. The Bush Administration has steadfastly refused to even consider ending the embargo, a policy that may sway elections in Florida but has failed utterly to dislodge the regime in Havana. If the U.S. hopes to get more results, the President who takes office next January will need to change course and engage Cuba, allowing Washington to exert some direct influence on the island's economy and politics.

With Raul in charge, there's reason for some cautious hope. Compared with the flamboyantly inflexible Fidel, the beardless and bespectacled Raul is an earthier, more pragmatic figure, who has nudged his country's ossified economy toward capitalism and encouraged some discussion about liberalizing its repressive politics. That's quite a turnaround for Raul, who has been Cuba's military chief since Fidel took power in 1959 and was known as his brother's political enforcer, a ruthless ideological hard-liner. But after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba's economic benefactor, it was Raul who persuaded Fidel to permit private agricultural markets and open the island to foreign investment in sectors like tourism, now a $2 billion-a-year industry in Cuba. "Beans are more important than cannon," he often said in the 1990s. As interim leader, he has made more of the right noises. At last summer's anniversary of the launch of the Cuban revolution, Raul spoke less about the glories of socialism and more about the economy's "deficiencies, errors and indolent bureaucratic attitudes."

He may now have the power to fix that dysfunction. Fidel's full-blown retirement "really does free Raul to do a lot more than he could in the provisional role," says Brian Latell, a Cuba expert at the University of Miami and author of After Fidel. "Now I think we'll see significant changes, not just in style but in policy." Bernardo Benes, a Miami banker and prominent Cuban exile who played soccer with Raul at the University of Havana and was an emissary to Cuba for Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, agrees: "I do expect him to free himself from the image of his older brother. I expect him to be his own man."

How the U.S. Can Help

Lacking the vast charisma that enabled his brother to hold on to power for nearly a half-century, Raul can go one of two ways to establish his legitimacy: he can return to his hard-line roots and use his security forces to crack down on dissent, or he can earn the affection of his beleaguered people by further loosening the economic and political screws--a path that may be easier to take if Washington drops the embargo. "If we don't," says Jake Colvin, director of the Washington-based USA*Engage, an arm of the National Foreign Trade Council, "the U.S. risks alienating another generation of Cubans and pushing the Cuban government further into the arms of countries like Venezuela and China."

That's one argument for easing the embargo. Here's another: failing to do so might risk buoying the very Fidelista hard-liners whose power Raul has worked to undermine in the past year and a half. Not so long ago, it seemed the next generation of Cuban leaders would be an ideological cohort fiercely loyal to Fidel, known as los Taliban and led by Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque, 42. But since Raul took over as interim President, the likes of Perez have seen their power checked while pragmatists like Vice President Carlos Lage, 56, who share Raul's less dogmatic economic-policy vision, have ascended. Also rising are younger army generals and other Raulistas like Raul's son-in-law Colonel Luis Alberto Rodriguez, who is being groomed to oversee the large business enterprises, like tourism, controlled by the Revolutionary Armed Forces.

Raul's faction is credited with leaking a recent video in which a notable Fidelista, National Assembly leader Ricardo Alarcon, is hectored during a visit to the University of Havana. In the video, an angry student peppers a visibly flummoxed Alarcon with the kind of questions that usually get Cubans tossed into jail: Why does a worker have to toil two or three days just to be able to buy a toothbrush? Why can't Cubans freely travel abroad?

Posed in a different way, that question could serve as a starting point for a new U.S. approach toward Cuba. Letting Americans travel freely to Cuba--which the embargo bans except in increasingly restricted cases for Cuban Americans with family on the island--would probably cultivate that kind of free speech and weaken the hard-liners. Even Cuban Americans, a traditionally and fervently pro-embargo group, agree. According to a Florida International University survey conducted last year, more than 55% of Cuban Americans in Miami now favor unrestricted travel to Cuba. The softening of sentiment may empower the next U.S. President to ease up a little. Barack Obama argued in an Op-Ed in the Miami Herald last summer that while a "democratic opening in Cuba is, and should be, the foremost objective of our policy ... Cuban-American connections to family in Cuba are not only a basic right in humanitarian terms, but also our best tool for helping to foster the beginnings of grass-roots democracy on the island." As a result, he wrote, if elected President, "I will grant Cuban Americans unrestricted rights to visit family and send remittances to the island." (John McCain and Hillary Clinton, like President Bush, oppose easing travel restrictions.)

Tellingly, many anti-Castro activists in Cuba have come to view the embargo as unhelpful. Shortly after Raul became interim President, the island's leading dissident, Oswaldo Paya, told TIME that while he thought ending the embargo was hardly the only solution, it could open the door to Cubans' winning "the right to trade, invest, travel, have a business." For the next U.S. President, that might be a gamble worth taking.

With reporting by With Reporting by Dolly Mascarenas / Mexico City, Siobhan Morrissey / Miami