Propiedades de los fluidos

When Raúl swore in as Cuba’s new President at the National Assembly, he made explicit his legal-rational solution to the succession, hence discarding his accession as a new charismatic leader. This time he resorted to the constitution to repeat his stance for which the successor of Fidel Castro could not be other than the Party:

Only the Communist Party […] can be the worthy heir of the trust deposited by the people in its leader. [The Party] is the utmost leading force of society and state, and this is established by Article 5 of our Constitution, which was approved in a referendum by exactly 97.7% of the voters. (R. Castro 2008c)

Almost immediately, a new political landscape started to unfold in Cuba since then, both in the leadership and style of government:

Raúl moved into a higher gear (after the hiatus of two years of relative inertia and following the 2008 National Assembly elections) and began to reshape the political structures and personnel to suit his agenda rather than the (by now embarrassingly inefficient and costly) Battle of Ideas. (Kapcia 2014, 174-75)

In this section I will focus on identifying what exactly was cut off from the top in order to prove that the charismatic character of the leadership (Fidelismo) was largely dismantled – a move that laid the ground for the subsequent introduction of a collegial style (Raulismo), which would be effectuated in the Sixth Party Congress. Raúl Castro soon revamped the top leadership by promoting revolutionary veterans to top-level posts and dismissing the leaders that rose through the Grupo de Apoyo caucus. These initiatives, introduced during a one-year timespan, not only indicated that a new chief was now firmly in power – they also bore witness to Raúl’s interpretation of what kind of leadership Cuba needed after Fidel (and himself). In Cuba, when the National Assembly elects the President it actually appoints the whole Council of State – the President being the head of this body. Therefore, when Fidel declined to this post in February 2008, it was not only imminent that Raúl Castro would take over at last, but also the speculation over who would be the new First Vice President was inevitable – i.e. the first one without a Castro last name. Marc Frank found in the excited atmosphere of the Havana-based community of foreign journalists and diplomats a sample of a general feeling: most observers were expecting the promotion of Carlos Lage to the post of second-in-command:

Among those who did follow such matters, there was a great deal of speculation over who would become the first vice president. Most people put their money on Carlos Lage. He was a relatively young man, apparently being groomed for the job, and his role for more than a decade as the highly visible executive secretary of the Council of Ministers in many ways resembled that of prime minister. (Frank 2013, 107)

In other words, nobody was expecting José Ramón Machado Ventura to get that job. A relatively unnoticed apparatchik, Machado was a member of the historic

generation known as an orthodox hardliner. Another major promotion the same day

Raúl was named President, was that of Julio Casas Regueiro, another revolutionary veteran whom then became vice president and new minister of the FAR – ergo, succeeding Raúl in the latter post. Overall, 12 of the 31 members of the new Council of State had participated in the 1959 revolution, and “the average age of the top eight positions was over seventy” (Frank 2013, 109).

In April 2008, some new promotions would come. Raúl Castro would propose, during a PCC Central Committee meeting, that general Ramiro Valdés (another histórico) and General Álvaro López Miera (known as Raúl’s protégée) joined the Politburo. According to an undisclosed source of journalist Marc Frank, catholic Cardinal Ortega asked Raúl Castro, during a visit to the Council of State in 2010, why he had promoted so many military members in his government: “Raúl said simply that the country was in crisis and he had turned to men he knew and trusted, and that this would change over time” (Frank 2013, 204). Although these nominations were made with a certain leadership’s project in mind, at that time it was not clear which project was that. For now it suffices to appreciate that Raúl’s promotions would soon prove to have been made in anticipation to the dismissals that would come next.

In short, the top leaders nurtured around the Grupo de Apoyo would be removed one by one. The first to fall from was Hassan Pérez in September 2008, who was a leading figure of the UJC at the time and then appointed teacher in a FAR college (Cubaencuentro 2008); one month later, Carlos Valenciaga, the last coordinator of the Grupo de Apoyo, was dismissed and assigned to the National Library (Hernández Busto 2008b, a). Vice president Otto Rivero would be sacked later. Speculation would thus arise concerning the fate of the most powerful ‘graduates’ of the Grupo de Apoyo, Felipe Pérez Roque and Carlos Lage. They would be dismissed in March 2009 – representing the ‘final touch’ of the restructuring of the cabinet started by Raúl thirteen months ago when his presidency kicked off.

In a Council of State meeting, Raúl Castro played video footage to the rest of the Council showing Lage talking to Valenciaga in a party also attended by Pérez Roque

held one year earlier, just the night before Raúl took over as President and announced the first changes to the cabinet. In that conversation Lage lamented he had not been promoted to first vice president, despite Castro’s orders to Politburo members to keep the new appointments a secret until they became officially announced. Raúl argued that the true purpose of that party was to celebrate Lage’s expected promotion, based on the confessions of a Spanish businessman that had been detained for being found to be working with Spain’s intelligence services. The businessman, of Cuban origin, had become a close friend of both Lage and Pérez Roque. Raúl managed to get rid of Pérez Roque and Lage charging them for having failed to respect their elder leaders and for causing intelligence breaches. Next day, the Consejo de Estado (2009) released the official announcement of the changes. A career diplomat, Bruno Rodríguez, substituted Pérez Roque. As for Lage, General José Amado Ricardo Guerra, then FAR’s chief secretary, would take over as secretary of the cabinet. Otto Rivero was also finally dismissed as the transfer of the programs under the (now all gone) Battle of Ideas to the relevant ministries had been completed and now handed over to the revolutionary veteran Ramiro Valdés. In toto, the whole top-leadership’s reshuffle in general, and the expulsion of the “test-tube leaders” in particular, “reflected Raúl Castro’s preference for trustworthy loyalists who respected institutional boundaries and rules” (Mujal-León 2011, 156). Far away from any model of transmission of charisma – either to the personal staff (Grupo de Apoyo) or by heredity (founding a Castro dynasty) – “Raúl Castro’s thesis that the answer to succession is institutionalization has carried the day”, leading to an overall regime transition “to a much more institutions-based model” (Hoffmann 2009, 239, 242). In orthodox Weberian terms, this proved that the charismatic claims to legitimacy of the regime had been discharged in favour of legal-rational ones. In the official note about the fall of the Talibanes, the dismissals were portrayed as a renewed effort towards institutionalisation, paraphrasing a point Raúl Castro made in his first address as new President: “institutionalisation is one of the pillars of the invulnerability of the Revolution in the political field, so we must work in its constant improvement” (Consejo de Estado 2009, np). There was nothing left of the Grupo de

Apoyo – its surviving remnants, a few low profiled staff members, would be fired in

May 2009 (Hernández Busto 2009, np). Fidel’s fast-track routes for handpicked talented youth to top leadership had been closed. Nonetheless, this qualitative change might have been obscured by the public support Fidel Castro gave to the fall of his former protégés – accusing them of having fallen prey to the “honey of power”, which caused “illusions” in the “external enemy” (F. Castro 2009a). Fidel even explicitly rejected the idea that the cabinet changes were a substitution of “Fidel’s men” by “Raúl’s men”. Equally noteworthy was Raúl’s spotless lack of criticism of Fidel while besieging the Fidelista style of leadership he had finally vanquished.

As Mujal-León has noted:

These talibanes had been Fidel Castro’s favourites, but in moving against them Raúl Castro never criticized his brother or undermined his image. Too much joined the two brothers. Not only was Raúl co-architect of the revolution, but his own claim to legitimacy was also inextricably tied to Fidel. In removing these “test tube leaders,” Raúl signalled that he intended to place his own imprint on the successor generation. (Mujal-León 2011, 156)

In this sense, both Fidel’s public endorsement of the new leadership and Raúl’s unrelenting praise for Fidel were like the two sides of the same coin… a coin that had just flipped with Raúl’s side now facing up. At this point it is important to highlight an important peculiarity of the Cuban succession: it occurred during the lifetime of the charismatic leader. Fidel would not simply disappear from the political scene; he would adopt the role of legitimator of the successor leadership. Fidel soon started to write regular op-eds in Granma, in a section entitled “Reflections of the comrade Fidel”. In them he only occasionally addressed domestic Cuban politics – and his endorsement to the Raúl’s cabinet overhaul was one of those few exceptions.

Hoffmann explained this Raúl-Fidel interdependency in Weberian terms:

[T]he Cuban case shows that the transfer of legitimacy from charismatic authority is not a one-time affair as the Weberian notion of “designation by the charismatic leader” suggests. Such designation may be a necessary, but not necessarily a sufficient, condition. As the

charismatic leader becomes the legitimator, the successor government needs to continually validate its actions through recourse to his legacy. (Hoffmann 2009, 241)

At least for some time, Raúl’s leadership thus appeared “critically dependent on recourse to the charismatic leader for legitimacy” due to a “power-sharing arrangement between the outgoing leader and his successor” (Hoffmann 2009, 241). However, Fidel would lose relevance in the political scene bit by bit, not least due to old age. In this sense, when Raúl Castro and Barack Obama announced the normalisation of relations between the United States and Cuba on 17 December 2014 – a diplomatic breakthrough agreed after half a century – Fidel only gave his opinion over a month later. Fidel expressed in an op-ed both his support to the diplomatic process (with caution) and to “the President of Cuba” (with distance) – in the past simply referred to as “Raúl” or “comrade Raúl” by Fidel – but acknowledging that he had not “exchanged a word” about it (F. Castro 2015). Likewise, a few months earlier Fidel complained in Granma that he had not been notified of the death of a Cuban sports’ figure he admired (F. Castro 2014a), which exposed the extent to which he had been sidelined. Despite Fidel acting as legitimator of Raúl for a while, the latter would consolidate a new, own-merited, leadership team.

In any case, by mid-2009 an era in the Cuban top leadership had just ended and a new one had begun. Both the Grupo de Apoyo and the Battle of Ideas had been dismantled and their leading representatives disgraced.