IT'S hard looking at recent photographs of Fidel Castro and connecting the frail, 81-year-old figure with half a century of brutal despotism on Cuba.
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Yet Castro the dictator surely is the enduring legacy — nearly 50 years of cast-iron control, suppressing dissent, retarding Cuba's economic and cultural potential and continuing the Cold War with the United States two decades after it ended everywhere else.
Castro was an absolute leader who robbed the Cuban people of lives and livelihoods, creativity and opportunities for prosperity. In his wake he leaves a country economically locked in the past, his people the real victims of his bunker mentality.
That suggests Castro is ceding all power to his brother, 76-year-old Raul, which isn't completely accurate. Some experts see the older brother exercising some power from the wings of the stage, a "moral veto” over decisions Raul Castro might make, grasping some control until he breathes his last.
There's much talk of change Raul Castro might bring. President Bush said he hoped it would be the "beginning of a democratic transition” for Cuba. Perhaps. The younger Castro is a lifelong ideologue and communist networker. It's hard to imagine him junking a political and economic infrastructure he helped maintain the past five decades. Telling is the fact news of Fidel's resignation, posted on the Internet, was as inaccessible to most Cubans as Google and Yahoo.
Still, there's opportunity for the United States, at last, to try something different. An economic embargo dating to the 1960s that was supposed to undercut Castro's regime helped him keep power, as he used confrontation with Yankee imperialism as an excuse for absolutism.
Economic engagement could blow social and political freedom all across the country. Castro's exit makes it possible, finally, for Cuba to end its lonely Cold War vigil.
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