Since he became acting president after Fidel Castro fell ill and disappeared from public view in July 2006, Raúl Castro has sought to improve public transportation and shake up the state-controlled dairy monopoly. He also shocked people when he acknowledged that the average salary of about $19 a month was too little to live on. As he took office Sunday, he raised the possibility of revaluing the Cuban peso to give salary-earners greater buying power. Raúl Castro’s decision on Sunday to put his closest friends and loyalists in the major positions of vice president and defense minister also suggests that he has control of the government, even though he has promised to consult Fidel Castro on important matters. Despite such steps, many Cubans say they see few signs of real change. Some say they suspect that Fidel Castro will continue to rule from behind the scenes. Others see little ideological difference between the ex-president and his brother. Still others argue that the centralized bureaucratic apparatus of the state is too rusty to be reformed. A young man stood in Havana’s central park on Monday, scanning the faces of the new government leaders, his face scrunched up in puzzled concentration. When a reporter asked him what he thought of the new president, he muttered, “It’s good,” rattled the paper shut and marched quickly away, casting a furtive glance at a nearby police officer. “Everyone is afraid to talk,” said a student sitting on a park bench nearby who identified himself only as Alejandro. “This is the time when the people should go to the street, but they are afraid. My country is like a prison.” A few blocks away, José, a store clerk in his 30s, was waiting in line outside a post office in Old Havana to send an e-mail message to a family friend through a secure Internet connection that allows no other contact with the outside world. “There was no change,” he said, echoing the views of others. “Look, if you paint this tile here and you paint it with the same color, there is no change. The brothers think alike.”
Many experts on Cuba, however, say the two brothers often have not seen eye to eye. They have clashed over the years on everything from Fidel Castro’s short-lived flirtation with the American public in 1959 to the necessity of allowing some private enterprise during the economic crisis here in the 1990s. Fidel Castro, who is 81, was renowned for his ability to recall arcane details and second-guess his cabinet members, fostering an atmosphere in which even high-ranking officials were afraid to act without the president’s explicit approval. Raúl Castro, who spent much of his life at the head of Cuba’s military, has a reputation for delegating authority and demanding results from managers, people who know him say. “He once said to me after I had given a report at a meeting, ‘All right, this is your report, if one word of this is not true, I’m going to cut you in half,’ ” recalled Vladimiro Roca, a former fighter pilot who fell out with the authorities and has become a leading dissident. Fidel Castro often rambled on for hours in sometimes dull but occasionally stunning oratory. Raúl Castro gives short, precise speeches, always going directly to the heart of his subject. Where Fidel Castro sought the international limelight, his brother focuses more on bread-and-butter domestic issues.
In recent public speeches, Raúl Castro appears to have calculated for political reasons that he cannot distance himself too much from his brother, who, despite his long illness, continues to lead the Communist Party and to cast a large shadow over Cuban politics. For example, the new president made it clear in his first speech to the National Assembly over the weekend that he would continue to consult Fidel and even asked for a vote to authorize him to do so, drawing extended applause from party regulars. But the younger Castro’s actions show that he is willing to take Cuba in a different direction from that of his more dogmatic brother. Over the last year and a half, Raúl Castro has openly criticized state salaries as too low to live on, and speaking to the Congress, he raised the possibility of revaluing the Cuban peso to give salary-earners more buying power. Mr. Castro has taken steps to decentralize the production and distribution of milk. He has imported hundreds of buses from China to alleviate transportation woes and rid the streets of tractor-trailers fitted out for public transportation, eyesores known as camels. He has all but done away with the obligatory mass demonstrations Fidel Castro often organized to rally people against the United States. The younger Castro has even encouraged a measure of public debate about government programs, something his brother rarely allowed. Last fall, he authorized town hall meetings across the island to let people vent their frustrations with the system, though he made it clear that decisions about changes would rest with the ruling party.
Indeed, one of the two state newspapers, Juventud Rebelde, has done exposes on the filching of goods and food from state-run businesses that has become part of life here. Leading cultural figures, meanwhile, have called for dropping onerous visa requirements and other limits on personal freedom. Raúl Castro seems firmly in control of the Council of State, the main governing body. He named his old friends and military comrades — José Ramón Machado Ventura and Gen. Julio Casas Reguiero — as first vice president and defense minister, respectively. The upper echelon of the council is stacked with other military leaders who are considered close to the new president, among them Gen. Abelardo Colomé Ibarra and Juan Almeida Bosque. “This is Raúl’s team, the group of vice presidents,” said Brian Latell, a former C.I.A. analyst who wrote the book “After Fidel” and has studied the brothers for years. “I do think that Raúl is in charge. He’s going to pay proper homage to Fidel but not obeisance.” What is more, Raúl Castro says he will not officially appoint the rest of his cabinet until December at the earliest. Some political analysts says this gives him time to purge the cabinet members considered to be more loyal to his brother than to him if he wishes.
Still, after 49 years of living under Fidel Castro, many Cubans are skeptical of their new leader’s ability to get things done. They are waiting for Raúl Castro to do something concrete to improve their lives, like raise salaries. “His speech sounded more or less like more of the same,” said Alberto, a veteran driver for the official government taxi service. “There is a big gap between what is said and what is done.” Yoani Sánchez, who writes a political blog, said: “In general there is a sense of frustration because we had expected more. There is talk of changes, but he puts off defining those changes.” Still, many Cubans took heart that Mr. Castro had promised in his speech to lift some regulations and restrictions that stifle economic growth. For starters, he said it was time to revalue the Cuban peso, a step toward getting rid of the dual-currency system that has impoverished millions of Cubans. For years, the government has used a nearly worthless peso to pay government salaries while restricting the distribution of a so-called convertible peso that can be exchanged for foreign currency. The system has led to a kind of economic apartheid. Cubans with access to convertible pesos live far better than their compatriots. Those who live solely on government salaries can barely survive, even with free health care and subsidized rations of some basic foodstuffs and tobacco. Restrictions on travel and access to the Internet also rankle many Cubans, who believe the rules are virtually imprisoning them on their island. University students recently clashed with the president of the National Assembly over travel rights, a scene that was filmed and distributed clandestinely. Some Cubans expect Mr. Castro might lift some travel restrictions as a crowd-pleaser. Others said they hoped they would be allowed to own cellphones and to stay at tourist hotels, small but symbolically important steps. In the long run, however, his biggest challenge is revamping Cuba’s centralized economy. Raúl Castro said in his first speech to Parliament that the government needed to be streamlined and decentralized. No institution was safe from reforms, he said.
Yet his appointees are themselves members of the old guard, mostly men in their 70s. That disappointed some here who had hoped a younger generation of technocrats might rise. In some circles there is a feeling the veterans of the revolution can never dismantle the current economic system, which offers people little incentive to work. “Raúl has to make the country more efficient and give incentives to for work because really no one works in Cuba now,” said Juan, a man in his forties who acts as a consultant to importers. “How to you put a country to work that isn’t used to working? That is the trick.”
By James C. Mckinley Jr.
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