The Other Tempest

In April, as the tempo of the Elián González custody dispute accelerated toward its predawn climax in Miami, across the Florida Straits in Havana, news of Elián was temporarily eclipsed by less sensational, if no less predictable, headlines: Fidel Castro's pro forma denunciation of the global market economy at the Group of 77 South Summit (the underdeveloped nations' version of the Group of 7), and traffic-snarling demonstrations at the Czech Embassy protesting that republic's UN resolution condemning, for the second year in a row, human rights violations in Cuba. The bitter divisions within the Cuban family, free-market systems, civil liberties--these aging issues, intermittently masquerading behind new faces, obscure the fact that for the past decade, Cuba has successfully transformed itself from Potemkin village to Investment City. It is institutionalizing economic arrangements (if not top-to-bottom reforms) that for all intents and purposes will one day undermine both the mundane and the mythic pillars of Castro's "unfinished" revolution.

What might remain, or by any reasonable standard should remain, of Cuba's revolution in the uncertain years ahead is the question of the day. Will the assembled heirs, the generation of young, intelligent leaders well positioned to carry on the affairs of the Cuban state, remain, in whatever fashion or degree, ideologically betrothed to the revolutionary past and its ghostscape of glories, even as they improvise on Castro's stubborn politics of contradiction (which amount to a risky prescribed burn of capitalism through Cuba's debris-strewn socialist wilderness)?

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