POLITICS-CUBA: Succession Will be Smooth, says Castro

By Patricia Grogg Reprint | | Print |

Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Jun 23 2000 (IPS) - Fidel Castro, who turns 74 on Aug 13 and has spent more than 40 years governing Cuba, feels his time is running out, works practically around the clock, and rules out a political upheaval when it comes time for his succession.

“I know very well that man is mortal, although never worrying about that has been the key to my life,” Castro stated in an interview with Federico Mayor Zaragoza, former director-general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

The president confessed that at the start of his “hazardous job as a revolutionary fighter” he believed it was “quite improbable that he would survive for very long,” according to a report on the interview published Thursday by ‘Granma’, the daily newspaper of Cuba’s governing Communist Party.

Castro said it was not necessary to prepare his successor, and he rejected the possibility of a “traumatic and chaotic transition” in this Caribbean island nation. Whenever a true revolution has established itself, he said, “no man, no matter how important his personal contribution, is indispensable.

“The transition from one social system to another has been taking place for more than 40 years. It is not a question of replacing one man with another,” he said — although he added that his succession was not only prepared, but already well underway.

Castro himself has stated in previous interviews that his brother Raúl, first vice-president of the Council of State and the Council of Ministers, and the minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, will replace him.

“I almost always work at all hours of the day and night. After you hit 70, do you have any time to lose?” the president remarked to Mayor Zaragoza.

The notoriously long-winded Castro also said he had reached the conclusion that speeches should be short.

In response to 33 questions posed by the former head of UNESCO, Castro defended socialism and Cuba’s strategy to maintain its socialist system.

He described the US election process as a “big comedy,” and reiterated that a country’s form of political organisation “cannot be submitted to conditions.”

The president also considered the current structure of the United Nations “outdated,” and said Latin America had “lost nearly 200 years of history in terms of social development and political integration.”

There is no difference between Cuban dissident groups at home or abroad, said Castro, who argued that they arose from the same origins and shared the same objectives. He described internal and external dissidents alike as “instruments of US policy towards Cuba.”

But with a few exceptions, the dispersed and fragmented internal opposition groups in Cuba maintain that they are independent of the hard-line anti-Castro Cuban exile community based in the US city of Miami.

However, in the president’s view, the “tiny little groups” operating in Cuba also form part of the “US counter-revolutionary strategy” and are “directly coordinated” by officials at the US Interests Section in Havana.

“Their essential mission is to obstruct Cuba’s diplomatic and economic relations, and to supply, with their provocations, publicity and material for the campaign of propaganda against, and isolation of, the revolution,” he said.

The president flatly rejected the possibility of political pluralism in Cuba, which has been ruled by a one-party system since the 1959 revolution.

“There will be no opening at all in that sense,” said Castro. “We see no reason to cooperate with the strategy of the United States,” which he dubbed “the big boss of colossal counter- revolutionary activity” against Cuba.

With respect to Elián González, the six-year-old survivor of a shipwreck and the focus of a major campaign by the Castro regime, which has been demanding the boy’s return to Cuba for the past six months, the president said “there will be no legal, moral or political manner of retaining him in the United States.”

Elián is waiting in Washington along with his father, Juan Miguel González, for the end of the long-drawn-out legal process into which he was drawn by his great-uncle Lázaro González, who is trying to keep the boy from being sent back to Cuba, as ordered by the US Immigration and Naturalisation Service.

Elián was one of three people who survived when the boat in which undocumented Cubans were trying to reach the United States sank last November. The boy’s mother and 10 others drowned.

Castro said US President Bill Clinton’s wife Hillary had assumed a “mistaken and unethical” position when she remarked that Juan Miguel González should defect. “When apparently honest people find themselves drawn into the whirlpool of US electoral politics, they run the risk of losing prestige,” he warned.