Raul seen as the more adaptable Castro brother

Raul Castro (right) confers with his brother Fidel at a Communist Party Congress in Havana in April 2011
Raul Castro (right) confers with his brother Fidel at a Communist Party Congress in Havana in April 2011

Raul Castro, who has walked alongside his brother Fidel at practically every turn since the Cuban Revolution, now must march into the future alone.


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Raul Castro, 85, has been in the driver's seat since an ailing Fidel "temporarily" ceded power to the then-defense minister in July 2006 and then succeeded Fidel as president of the Council of State and president of Cuba's Council of Ministers on Feb. 24, 2008.

He navigated that transfer of power and embarked on a slow and steady stream of economic changes designed to ease the island's many economic problems.

The most dramatic change, however, came Dec. 17, 2014, when Raul Castro and President Barack Obama announced that Cuba and the United States would be resuming diplomatic ties after more than five decades of confrontational relations. The surprise announcement capped 18 months of secret talks facilitated by Canada, the Vatican and others that also resulted in a prisoner exchange, a Cuban pledge to release 53 political prisoners and a U.S. commitment to liberalizing trade and travel to the island.

Cuban analysts have said they doubt a move toward normalization would have been possible with Fidel Castro in control.

Under Raul Castro, the Cuban government has rolled out economic overhauls, including allowing worker-owned cooperatives, self-employment, the private sale of homes and autos and more free enterprise in agriculture, as well as shifting state-owned restaurants into private hands and revamping the foreign-investment law to woo international investors.

A major change that is extremely popular among Cubans is allowing most to travel abroad freely and remain outside the country for up to two years without losing citizenship rights.

But despite the more market-oriented overhauls, Raul steadfastly has said Cuba's political model will remain intact.

"We shouldn't expect that in order for relations to improve with the United States, Cuba is renouncing the ideas for which we have fought for more than a century and for which our people have spilled so much blood and run such great risks," he said at the closing session of the National Assembly in December 2014.

Despite the diplomatic breakthrough two years ago, Raul Castro has kept up a steady drumbeat against the U.S. embargo, which -- although weakened -- still remains in effect and can only be swept away by an act of Congress.

When it comes to economic change, Raul Castro's catchphrase has been "sin prisa per sin pausa" -- without haste but without pause. He "likes to experiment before moving forward and measure the results of the repercussions," said Domingo Amuchastegui, a former Cuban intelligence analyst.

Before assuming power, Raul Castro was viewed with both trepidation and hope. He was expected to be harsher than Fidel on the political and security sides, but more pragmatic on the economic side and more likely to seek better relations with Washington -- and that is how it has played out.

The regime's tight political control of the island did not unravel, and he maintained continuity and stability.

He and his team would have moved faster to implement economic overhauls had Fidel Castro not remained alive for so long, said Brian Latell, a former CIA Cuba specialist. Raul Castro is known to admire Chinese- and Vietnamese-style economic changes.

Castro, five years younger than his brother, governed first as an interim leader and then as Cuba's president without the flair and bombast of Fidel. He lacked the legendary magnetic personality his brother used to rule Cuba for almost 50 years.

Virtually everyone who knows Raul Castro says his key personality trait is a capacity for organization, which makes him more flexible than the headstrong Fidel by allowing him to seek consensus and understand what's doable -- and what's not.

After the triumph of the Castro revolution in 1959, Raul Castro used Soviet aid to build Cuba's armed forces into a powerful force that fought well in Angola, Ethiopia and several other foreign wars. And when the end of Soviet subsidies dramatically weakened the military in the early 1990s, Raul turned Cuba into an economic powerhouse, running tourist hotels, managing imports and exports and eventually controlling an estimated 60 percent of the island's economy.

Analysts of the Cuban leadership concluded that, in times of trouble, Fidel always turned to Raul to make the tough decisions that ensured survival of the revolution.

Raul Castro, who once called himself "Raul the Terrible," also has a colder side, observers said.

Within days of Fulgencio Batista's ouster from power in January 1959, while Fidel Castro enjoyed the adoration of crowds, troops in eastern Oriente province under Raul's command summarily executed about 100 Batista followers.

Armando Lago, a late Cuban exile economist who had made it his life's work to compile a list of every person killed in the name of the Cuban revolution, once said that as governor of the former Oriente province, Raul Castro was personally responsible for 550 executions in 1959 alone -- about 100 of them without a trial.

It was also Raul Castro who ordered the arrest of Gen. Arnaldo Ochoa, one of Cuba's most decorated and popular military officers -- apparently on orders from Fidel, who suspected him of disloyalty. Ochoa was executed in 1989 after he was convicted of drug smuggling in a nationally televised trial.

But a former assistant to Raul Castro's family, now living in Miami, said there's more than one side to his former boss. "He is not the cold monster many people think he is," the former aide said.

Raul Castro likes to party and enjoys telling and hearing jokes, is friendly to employees and aides and is far better than Fidel at taking care of family matters, the former secretary said. While Fidel missed their mother's funeral, Raul was the one who consoled the rest of the relatives, and he seldom forgets a birthday.

A Section on 11/27/2016

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