The last of the Castro brothers, Raul, has ceded leadership of the Cuban Communist Party, passing power officially to a new generation of little-known functionaries and unofficially to a new generation of Castro family members who control economic and security matters behind the scenes.
Media coverage has focused on what his retirement might mean for the impoverished island’s future, which is understandable. More attention should be paid to the implications for Cuba’s past—specifically, the crimes and mistakes of the past 62 years of Castro rule.
Cuba’s transition moves 89-year-old Raul Castro nearer to the day that he, like his brother Fidel, who handed Raul full political control in 2011 and died at age 90 in 2016, may die without ever being held accountable for what he did in power.
This is surely Raul’s plan too; despite the grandfatherly image he has cultivated in later years, along with that of a would-be “reformer,” he has more than a little blood on his hands.
The trail begins in the Sierra Maestra, even before the Rebel Army ousted dictator Fulgencio Batista on Jan. 1, 1959. Photographs show Raul blindfolding a purported traitor moments before a firing squad takes the man’s life, one of many such killings in rebel ranks.
On Jan. 12 of that year, Raul supervised summary executions of about 70 alleged former Batista regime police and soldiers, their bodies dumped in a ditch outside the city of Santiago on the island’s eastern tip.
There was no such justification for the forced labor camps in which 35,000 Cubans, mostly gay men, Jehovah’s Witnesses and others deemed in need of re-education through work, were interned between 1965 and 1968. Conditions were brutal; about 70 died of torture and 180 committed suicide.
In 1989, Fidel and Raul turned the revolution’s guns on top members of the Cuban nomenklatura, executing four of them on trumped-up treason and drug trafficking charges. The accused’s real offense seems to have been defying the Castro brothers’ authority.
In 1996, Cuban military jets under Raul’s command shot down two U.S.-based Cessnas as they flew over international waters.
There is not enough space in this column for the thousands of Cubans and others who died, faced imprisonment or suffered in other ways, including Walterio Carbonell, a Black Marxist intellectual imprisoned in 1968 for insisting the revolution do more to fight racism.
Nor is it possible to disentangle Raul’s culpability from that of Fidel, his older dominant brother, who usually called the shots, but who relied throughout on Raul’s steadfast complicity.
Memory and truth may yet prevent Raul Castro and his dynastic successors from writing his page in history unopposed.
He doesn’t seem concerned, though, and hasn’t for some time. Two years ago, at the Russian Embassy in Havana, he was awarded the Order of Lenin by a representative of the Communist Party of Russia, successor to the Soviet party that Raúl first adhered to as a teen when he joined the youth wing of its Cuban affiliate.
Raul’s expression as he accepted the medal and embraced his old Russian comrade was relaxed and delighted. It was the look of a winner.
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Charles Lane is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a frequent panelist on Fox News’ “Special Report” and “Fox News Sunday.”