Until 2007, Raúl Castro had been something of a shadowy figure.
Ordinary Cubans recall that he was considered ‘more of a murderer than Fidel’ for his astonishing violence in the Revolution, while the more illustrious brother ran the country.
But now that Fidel is consigned to the history books, Raúl has been tinkering with the rusty old Cuban machine, attempting to improve the island’s economic problems, image problems, social problems – as a habanero friend said gloomily: ‘More problems than we can be bothered to count.’
In Fidel’s last years as President, he passed ever stricter laws to control the tourism-related ills of prostitution and jineterismo, or jockeying – ‘riding’ the tourists for money.
These culminated in the hated ‘asello del turismo’ law, which meant that Cubans could be arrested for openly consorting with tourists.
Now Raúl is overturning many of these laws, which saw Cubans downgraded to second-class citizens in their own country, able to enter tourist enclaves only as employees.
Cubans can now stay at luxury hotels, rent cars and bikes, at least theoretically. The new President has freed dissidents and signed the International Declaration of Human Rights, something his brother refused to do.
Cautious land reforms mean people can grow their own food, even make a small business out of it. Indeed, it would seem that the man once thought more vicious than Fidel has turned out to be, well, a bit of a softy.
One friend spoke of the goodwill that these changes have generated amongst ordinary people: ‘He’s affording us simple pleasures, like being able to rent a motorbike without needing a foreign passport and hundreds of dollars…though there are just as many police on the streets.’
And here is the problem. While these reforms change the visible aspects of people’s lives, there has been next to no change on the big issues.
Last month, the police arrested protesting wives of those still detained as dissenters, dragging the women away into buses and vans.
Raúl has started no moves towards political reform, while massive economic problems caused by mismanaged farmland – much of it unused, even when people desperately need and want to produce more food – and inefficient industry still threaten to undermine Cuba’s existence.
Raúl has lived through the last 25 years and has seen China’s rise and the Soviet Union’s fall.
He knows that maintaining stability after years of dictatorship is a delicate and sometimes rather comic process, as iron-clad regimes begin to flirt with modern culture, cautiously introducing reforms that seem trivial to outsiders.
There certainly is a sense of change in Havana; people seem excited at the prospect of something new coming, Instead of Fidel’s identikit speeches every Tuesday.
Perhaps the little changes are leading to a modest kind of revolution in Cuba.
