Beatification Ceremony with Raul Castro Present

Cuban landmark for Catholic friar

The first beatification ceremony in Cuba has been held in front of thousands of Catholics and President Raul Castro.

It was the final step before sainthood for 19th Century friar, Jose Olallo, known as the "poor people's priest".

The ceremony in Camaguey was broadcast on state television.

The unannounced arrival of Mr Castro was greeted with applause, a sign of the growing rapprochement between the communist state and the Church.

The top Vatican official who anoints saints, Cardinal Jose Saraiva from Portugal, presided over a mass lasting almost three hours at the Church of the Virgin of Charity.

Cuban Cardinal Jaime Ortega, papal nuncio Luigi Bonazzi, Camaguey Archbishop Juan Garcia, and about 20 Cuban and foreign bishops were also present.

Doves were released and bells rung as Friar Olallo's remains, in a gold-coloured urn, were taken in a procession through the city.

Friar Olallo, a member of the Hospitallier Order of Saint John of God, helped the sick and wounded during Cuba's first war of independence (1868-1878) against Spain.

He defied Spanish orders barring members of religious orders from Cuba, and was the sole Hospitallier on the island at the time.

Improving relations

While the ceremony was the first to be held in Cuba, Friar Olallo was not the first Cuban to be beatified.

Cuban-born Fray Jose Lopez Piteira was beatified in 2007, but the ceremony took place in Spain where he died during the Spanish civil war.

In the early years of the revolution, Cuba was an atheist state. Many priests were expelled or sent to labour camps.

But relations have improved significantly since former leader Fidel Castro welcomed Pope John Paul II to Havana a decade ago.

When his brother Raul took over the presidency earlier this year, his first foreign visitor was the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Bertone.

And this is second time in a week Mr Castro has been to a church.

On Thursday he accompanied the Russian President Dmitri Medvedev to the recently opened Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Havana.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/7757062.stm

Published: 2008/11/30 00:34:33 GMT

Reform Impact on Family Farms

Cuba’s family farms grow again

Monday, July 14, 2008 LA Times

In a series of reforms aimed at improving self-sufficiency and curbing costly food imports, Raul Castro has the idle lands around cities planted.

By Carol J. Williams

July 14, 2008 in print edition A-3

Speckled chickens in Geraldo Pinera’s garden will be on his family’s dinner table soon, stewed with herbs and tomatoes and garnished with creamy slices of the avocados now ripening on a pair of spindly trees.

Pinera, a member of a 25-family farming cooperative in this village outside Havana, tends a private half-acre plot tucked between the state-owned mango orchards where he works a day job. He raises guava, passion fruit, sweet potatoes and poultry to augment a $20 monthly income and the government ration of starches.

Like other Cuban families, the Pineras are eating more fruits and vegetables as a result of a national campaign to boost food output and curb costly imports. Their efforts represent a small but significant step toward the government’s ultimate goal to vastly reduce its dependence on more efficient foreign producers, especially for favorite foods such as rice, meat and dairy.

President Raul Castro spurred the planting of idle lands around cities with a series of reforms in recent months aimed at improving self-sufficiency. The moves included making land available free to those willing to till it and easing a strangling national bureaucracy that once controlled a farmer’s every step, from seed procurement to sales price.

Castro has unleashed an ambitious effort to lift output of high-ticket items, raising prices paid to meat and milk producers and freeing growers from obligations to sell their food to the state.

He has made seeds, tools and fertilizers available through a new network of country stores and challenged a population that is 80% urban to grow what it eats.

But a swift expansion in meat and dairy production remains a daunting task, as few farming co-ops have money to pay for cattle even when the prices for their products are increasingly enticing. Predictions of quick results appear to echo the excess ambition of the failed drive in 1970 to harvest 10 million tons of sugar and the unfulfilled plans of past decades to provide each family with its own milk cow.

The government expects to cut food imports by at least 5% next year, Deputy Agriculture Minister Juan Perez Lama told journalists in Havana in early June. He also predicted that rice imports could be halved within five years – a herculean task considering that Cuba last year imported $170 million worth from Vietnam, China and the United States.

Cuban state enterprises grew about 10% of the 700,000 tons of rice consumed last year. Private farmers produced about twice that. Although 70% has to be imported, scholars point to the rise in the small-farm output begun a decade ago.

“It’s an impressive goal [to halve rice imports] but I do think Cuba is in a unique position to achieve it,” said Catherine Murphy, a San Francisco Bay Area sociologist working on development projects in Latin America.

Murphy lived in Havana during the late 1990s, when the country suffered severe food shortages after the loss of Soviet aid. That experience of having to swiftly replace imports is serving Cubans well now that food prices are rising around the world, she said.

The state food trade agency, Alimport, reported that rice costs had tripled this year.

In announcing cuts in public investments because of high fuel and food prices, Vice President Carlos Lage predicted that imported food would cost the government at least 50% more this year than last, when it spent $1.7 billion.

Cuba spent almost 30% more on food imports from the United States last year than in 2006, but that increase was due to rising costs, not quantity, said John Kavulich, senior policy advisor of the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council in New York.

The United States has imposed a trade embargo on Cuba for decades. Food and medicine sales have been allowed in recent years, but prohibitive shipping and payment regulations still prevent Cubans from taking full advantage of their nearest market.

Dairy output has been slumping since the early 1990s, “fundamentally due to very low investment by the dairy cooperatives, for either keeping their herds or pastures in good shape,” said Frederick Royce, a University of Florida researcher who did graduate work in Cuban agriculture in the mid-1990s.

Until recently, he added, the set price the government paid farmers for milk was well below its cost of production.

In May, farmers who gathered in Havana for a meeting on organic and sustainable agriculture spoke of the need for ingenuity and doing more with less. Such skills were needed in the years after the Soviet trade bloc collapse, referred to as the Special Period in Peacetime, which generated nationwide deprivation.

The outlook for small-scale organic farming has patriotic agronomists like Victor Cruz, a retired army colonel working 50 acres in a rural enclave just south of Havana, predicting victory over the economic blockade imposed by the United States.

“We will succeed in growing our own food because we have the spirit of the revolution driving us,” he said. “We were hungry during the Special Period, but we learned a lesson about dependence.”

Raul Castro, then defense minister under older brother Fidel’s leadership, spearheaded that recovery effort in the mid-1990s, deploying troops to the fields to plant, tend and harvest. Daily calorie intake dropped by a quarter during that time and the average Cuban lost more than 20 pounds before domestic production picked up.

Cuban agriculture had been backsliding again since 2004, when Fidel Castro halved sugar cane growing and milling amid a global slump in sugar prices. He also restored limits on the sale of privately grown produce in an effort to prevent what he considered farmers’ exploitation of urban compatriots.

The government also failed to fulfill promises of better housing for many of the large farming cooperatives in remote rural areas, which have traditionally operated with much less efficiency than the urban and suburban patches that have ready access to buyers.

Along the gravel road leading to the mango co-op, women such as Catalina Alfonso display their produce in battered wheelbarrows for passing motorists and pedestrians.

“I make hardly anything because most of what we grow we need for ourselves,” Alfonso said. “But at least we are eating better nowadays.”

Alfonso’s neighbor, Carmen Martino, like many Cubans, disputed whether more fruits and vegetables represented an improvement.

“We Cubans eat rice, beans and meat. We have since colonial times,” Martino said with a defiant bob of her head that jangled her gold earrings, hoops encircling the word “love.” “I know fruits and vegetables are healthier, but no one will get us to change our ways.”

carol.williams@latimes.com

New Wage Policy by 2009

Same wage for all setup abandoned by Cuba

Reuters

Friday, October 17, 2008

Cuba is pushing state-run companies to adopt new wage policies by 2009 that would allow workers and managers to earn as much as they can, local media said Thursday, as President Raul Castro seeks to improve economic performance.

The labour ministry, in conjunction with Castro's closest military economic advisers, issued instructions to managers this week on how to design the new system. He ordered it be fully discussed with workers and ready by December, after they failed to meet an August deadline, said Ariel Terrero, Cuba's most popular economic commentator.

There is little difference in wage scales set by central planners so someone who does little earns almost as much as someone who works hard, including managers.

The plan would replace the current across-the-board egalitarian system with one based on piece work and concrete conditions in each workplace.

Cubans make an average salary of about $17 per month but they receive subsidized food and utilities, transportation, health, education and, in some cases, collective bonuses. The Cuban state controls more than 90 per cent of the economy.

"The goal is to put an end once and for all to these egalitarian concepts that are so damaging for the economy and socialism and that have done more harm than good during these years," Terrero said.

© The Calgary Herald 2008

Economic experiment in Bayamo

Posted on Wed, Oct. 08, 2008

One town's experiment gives Cuban peso value

BY WILL WEISSERT
Associated Press

A communist experiment is letting average government workers in this eastern city enjoy a few things only foreigners and monied Cubans can usually afford: a good burger, a kicking jazz bar and stiff cocktails.

Across the rest of the island, average monthly government salaries of 408 pesos, about $19.50, don't cover grocery bills, let alone a night out. But in Bayamo the central government has made a special effort to support peso businesses, giving the lowly currency actual buying power.

Along the stylish pedestrian mall known as Paseo or ''The Boulevard,'' six blocks of restaurants, barber shops, ice cream parlors and department stores give Cubans a taste of tourist life at local prices.

Jazz bands jam for free until 2 a.m. at the Piano Bar, where mojitos go for just 5.50 pesos, or 30 U.S. cents. A 1950s-style diner serves up tasty meatball sandwiches for about half a peso -- the equivalent of three cents -- and four scoops of the richest ice cream in Cuba for about the same price.

''Almost everyone who comes in is surprised at first. The music is good. The cocktails are strong,'' said Ernesto Aldana of the Piano Bar, where the Cuba Libre -- copious rum pours with ice and splashes of cola and lime -- costs 4.80 pesos, the equivalent of less than 25 cents.

''It's like you're paying in dollars,'' Aldana said. ``But you're not.''

Under the country's dual currency system, most things Cubans want and need are not available in the money they earn -- the regular Cuban peso which is worth a little more than 4 cents. Virtually all upscale businesses across the island are priced for foreigners in so-called convertible pesos worth $1.08 each, 24 times as much.

Cuba has had two currencies since the collapse of the Soviet Union wrecked its economy and spurred its turn to tourism. Tourist businesses took U.S. dollars and charged U.S. prices, while the peso was maintained for everyday transactions.

The convertible peso, also called hard currency, was born around the same time but took on its current value in 2004, when the government banned the use of the U.S. dollar.

Cubans have long hoped the government would merge the two pesos and close the gap between the goods and services they and foreigners can afford. But so far, nothing has changed under Raúl Castro, who took over as president from his ailing brother, Fidel, earlier this year.

Cuba's government historically has chosen provincial areas to test potential economic policy changes. In Bayamo, a city of 140,000 and the capital of Granma province, leaders of the regional Communist Party began expanding peso businesses in 2005.

''Normally, there's a gap between quality of service to foreigners and service to Cubans,'' said Isidro Alonso of Bayamo's Communist Party's Committee on Ideology. ``We are working to erase that.''

Huge government subsidies are needed. Paseo businesses here take in only 1,000 to 1,700 pesos a day, or $50 to $80. And the program only took shape after Bayamo communists asked central government planners for special autonomy and won the right to sell regionally produced items such as rum, seafood, beer, yogurt, beef, ice cream and cheese to local residents, rather than shipping them elsewhere on the island.

''We would see products like powdered milk made here and sold somewhere else and we said, 'How is this possible? If we make it in Granma, we should be selling it in Granma,''' Alonso said.

However, rising global commodity prices have made Bayamo's government subsidies more costly, while hurricanes Gustav and Ike in recent weeks dealt serious blows to Cuban food production.

The government recently ordered all provinces to contribute more food to all parts of the country and reduce Cuba's dependence on foreign imports, said Humberto Rondon, technical director for production at a state cheese and ice cream factory outside Bayamo. In Granma's case, officials will now have to ship about 80 percent of its cheese to points elsewhere in Cuba.

Despite the hurricanes and rising food prices, the Bayamo experiment is so successful that the central government in Havana is continuing to devote $10 million this year to reopen some peso businesses and cover operating expenses of those already established, Alonso said.

There are ordinary peso businesses all over Cuba, but the products are shoddy and service is mediocre. Shortages of everything from potatoes to pasta mean most of the dishes listed on peso restaurant menus aren't available, while peso stores have long lines of customers for mismatched inventory on largely empty shelves.

Contrast that with Bayamo, where the raw juice bar offers freshly squeezed mango or papaya juice for the equivalent of less than a nickel. The fully stocked dairy stays open until 11 p.m. on Saturdays. Ground beef is often hard to come by elsewhere, but here two hamburger joints serve up double patties heaped with ham for about $0.40 in pesos.

There's an office supply store, a flower shop, two beauty parlors, a pair of seafood restaurants, a Spanish eatery and a place offering passable vegetarian dishes.

''Usually, without hard currency, you never go to restaurants, you never go out on Friday nights. But here you can,'' said Vilna Lopez, who rents rooms in her home three blocks from Paseo.

Out-of-towners even brave long bus rides to spend their pesos in Bayamo.

''I would like to take this place home with me, and I'm from Havana,'' said Alexey Rodriguez, visiting from the capital 460 miles to the northwest.

But the Bayamo experiment is too expensive to work on a larger scale. And it has not done enough to soften the sting of the dual currency system for many.

Ana Luisa Gonzalez earns 225 pesos a month as a street sweeper on Paseo. Her son works at a tampon factory. A portion of his pay comes in convertible pesos.

''We live on that,'' Gonzalez said. ``Salaries in (regular) pesos have no value.''

When asked about all there is to buy along Paseo, the 50-year-old shook her head and said even here, her salary isn't enough. One large block of cheese is 80 pesos.

''If I buy two cheeses and two yogurts here, there goes all my salary,'' she said. ``Then what?''

Fidel's exit means continuity. For change, look to Obama

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/feb/20/usa.eu



No one can quite replace Castro, but Cuba's course is clear for now. Its future will depend on who takes the White House

Ignacio Ramonet The Guardian, Wednesday February 20 2008

[This article appeared in the Guardian on Wednesday February 20 2008 on p28 of the Comment & debate section. It was last updated at 00:42 on February 20 2008. ]

The long and extraordinary political career of Fidel Castro is over - at least as far as the presidency is concerned. But his enormous influence will live on. His regular columns for Granma, the state newspaper - which he has continued to write throughout his illness - will continue. Only the strapline will be altered: instead of the reflections of the commandante en jefe, now it will be plain old camarade Fidel. For Cubans and international observers alike, they will still bear close reading.

There can be no replacement for Fidel. Not simply because of his qualities as a leader, but because the historical circumstances will never be the same. Castro has lived through everything from the Cuban revolution to the fall of the USSR, and decades of confrontation with the US. The fact that he departs while alive will help to ensure a peaceful transition. The Cuban people now accept that the country can still be run the same way by a different team. For a year and a half they have been getting used to the idea, while Castro remained theoretically president but his brother, Raul, held the reins. It was Fidel the mentor, as ever.

The most surprising thing that I found out about the man, in the hours we spent together compiling his memoirs, was how modest, human, discreet and respectful he was. He has a tremendous moral and ethical sense. He is a man of rigorous principles and sober existence. He is also, I discovered, passionate about the environment. He is neither the man the western media depict, nor the superman the Cuban media sometimes present. He is a normal man, albeit one who is incredibly hard working. He is also an exemplary strategist, one who has led a life of enduring resistance.

He contains a curious mixture of idealism and pragmatism: he dreams of a perfect society but knows that material conditions are very difficult to transform. He leaves office confident that Cuba's political system is stable. His current preoccupation isn't so much socialism in his own country as the quality of life around the world, where too many children are illiterate, starving and suffering from diseases that could be cured. And so he thinks his country must have good relations with all nations, whatever the regime or political orientation.

So now he is handing over to a team he has tested and trusts. This will not lead to spectacular changes. Most Cubans themselves - even those who criticise aspects of the regime - do not envisage or desire change: they don't want to lose the advantages it has brought them, the free education right through university, the free universal healthcare, or the very fact of a safe, peaceful existence in a country where life is calm.

While Castro turns full-time columnist, the main task for his political heirs will be how to confront the one perpetual challenge of Cuban life: relations with the US. We must wait to see if changes occur. Raul Castro has twice publicly announced he is prepared to sit down for talks with Washington on the problems between the two countries.

But it is in the US itself that a more appreciable political shift may come, with the Democratic frontrunner Barack Obama having signalled his willingness to engage with America's perceived enemies or adversaries, be it Iran, Venezuela or Cuba. An immediate and radical change may be unlikely, but there is reason to hope that November's election may at least alter the atmosphere after the Bush years - a presidency Castro regards as the most damaging to the whole planet of the 10 he has experienced.

The departure of Bush is likely to lead the US to a reappraisal of foreign policy: learning the disastrous lessons of Iraq and the Middle East, and returning the focus to Latin America. The US will find a changed situation: for the first time, Cuba has genuine friends in government in Latin America, most prominently Venezuela, but also in Brazil, Argentina, Nicaragua and Bolivia, a host of governments who are not particularly pro-American. It is in the US's interests to redefine its relations with all of them: non-colonial, non-exploitative and based on respect. Cuba, meanwhile, has developed closer relations with partner countries, as part of the EU-like ALBA economic and political organisation, and in agreements with the Mercosur trade area. In the bigger international picture, Cuba is no longer such a unique case.

It is on this international plane, developing ever stronger ties with Latin America, where the most visible changes in Cuban politics are likely to come. Its socialism will undoubtedly alter - but not in the manner of a China or Vietnam. Cuba will continue to go its own way. The new regime will initiate changes at the economic level, but there will be no Cuban perestroika - no opening up of politics, no multiparty elections. Its authorities are convinced that socialism is the right choice, but that it must be forever improved. And their preoccupation now, more than ever with the retirement of Castro, will be unity.

But everything in Cuba is related to the US: that is the one overarching aspect of political life which outsiders need to understand. The retirement of Castro, long anticipated, means continuity. But in the evolution of this small nation's history, the election of Obama could be seismic.

· Ignacio Ramonet is the co-author with Fidel Castro of Fidel Castro: My Life, and editor of Le Monde Diplomatique

Raul Castro raises hopes of economic change in Cuba

Tue Feb 19, 2008 1:22pm EST

http://www.reuters.com/article/internalReutersGenNews/idUSN1926216920080219?sp=true

By Anthony Boadle

HAVANA (Reuters) - Raul Castro, Cuba's likely new leader after his ailing brother Fidel Castro bowed out on Tuesday, is a pragmatist more concerned with putting food on Cuban tables than spreading revolution abroad.

The outwardly dour Raul Castro, 76, lacks his elder brother's charisma and has lived in his shadow for decades.

But he is seen as a ray of hope by some Cubans fed up with political rhetoric and the daily grind of getting ahead in a battered state-run economy.

As acting president since his brother was sidelined by illness almost 19 months ago, Raul Castro has encouraged Cubans to openly debate the shortcomings of Cuba's communist system.

If confirmed as president on Sunday as expected, he will face a Herculean task of solving Cubans' economic hardships.

While he has so far made few changes, Raul Castro has raised expectations that Cubans will soon be allowed to freely buy and sell their homes, travel abroad and stay at hotels and beaches where only foreigners can step foot.

In December, the camera-shy army general said Cuba had "excessive prohibitions", a sentiment shared by most Cubans who need government permits for almost everything they do, from buying a car to working as a clown or a shoe-shine.

Raul has acknowledged that wages paid by Cuba's socialist state are too low. He has called for "structural changes" in agriculture to increase food output and reduce Cuba's reliance on imports, and said Cuba was open to new foreign investment.

Yet Raul Castro is not expected to follow China's example and free up a market economy, at least not while his brother is alive. And he has promised more socialism.

"The challenges we have ahead are enormous, but may no one doubt our people's firm conviction that only through socialism can we overcome the difficulties and preserve the social gains of half a century of revolution," he said late last year.

Raul Castro extended an olive branch to Cuba's arch-enemy, the U.S. government, saying in July that Havana was open to talks to end more than four decades of hostility, but only when President George W. Bush has left the White House.

The younger Castro was flung into the role of running one of the world's last communist states when his brother was forced to step aside on July 31, 2006, after emergency intestinal surgery.

Fidel Castro has not been seen in public since then and the 81-year-old revolutionary announced his retirement on Tuesday.

"BEANS, NOT CANNONS"

As defense minister since the brothers led a 1959 revolution, Raul Castro built the armed forces into a formidable fighting force that defeated South African troops in Angola.

Once considered an implacable Stalinist and the Kremlin's most reliable friend in Cuba, Raul is said to have become more pragmatic after the collapse of the Soviet Union pushed Cuba to the brink of economic chaos.

"Beans are more important than cannons," Raul said during the crisis that left the air force parking its MiG jet fighters with the help of horses for lack of fuel.

He cut the armed forces to one fifth of its peak of 300,000 troops, and backed reforms that allowed limited private initiative to flourish in the 1990s.

An admirer of China's economic prowess, Raul is believed to favor loosening up state controls of the Cuban economy while maintaining one-party communist rule.

Forced to become self-sufficient after the loss of billions of dollars in Soviet aid, the Cuban military under Raul's savvy management was the first to introduce capitalist business practices in Cuba and has a big stake in the economy today.

It has emerged as Cuba's most efficient institution and owns lucrative enterprises in agriculture, industry and tourism, including hotels at beach resorts, an airline, a bus fleet, car rentals and a retail shop chain.

Cuba experts say he is a good talent spotter who surrounds himself with capable officials and is good at delegating.

Born on June 3, 1931, Raul Castro was raised -- like Fidel Castro -- on their father's large farm in eastern Cuba.

Since their guerrilla war in the Sierra Maestra mountains and the triumph of their revolution on Jan 1, 1959, Raul Castro has always been his brother's most trusted right-hand man.

His late wife Vilma Espin, who fought as a guerrilla, founded the Cuban Federation of Women and served as Cuba's unofficial First Lady.

His daughter Mariela Castro is a sexologist who has defended the rights of transsexuals and is pushing legislation to allow gay marriage in Cuba.

Tom Miller Describes Mixed Picture of Reform

As Fidel Fades From the Scene

By Tom Miller
Washington Post
Sunday, February 17, 2008; B02



HAVANA

We were sitting on a wrought-iron bench downtown, Manolo and I, chatting about the December weather, nodding to pedestrians strolling by. I was in Cuba to do some research on José Martí, the national hero who had laid the foundation for the island's war of independence against Spain more than a century ago.

Our conversation was politely interrupted by an officer from the Specialized Police, a force assigned to heavily tourist areas. He asked for identification, not uncommon when a light-skinned foreigner is chatting with a dark-skinned Cuban, then walked away after writing down our data. He returned a couple of minutes later. "Follow me," he said, motioning us to his squad car.

This, I thought, was a miserable way to begin my trip -- but an excellent way to take Cuba's temperature. Ever since Fidel Castro took seriously ill more than 18 months ago and named his younger brother Raúl, then head of the armed forces, temporary president, the word "transition" has been on everyone's lips. They know where their country has been, but no one is sure where it's headed.

The policeman turned us over to a higher-ranking officer who asked whether I had any papers with me besides a few loose sheets stuffed into a small notebook. I had none. Suddenly, several officers put Manolo up against the car, patted him down, handcuffed him and stuffed him in the back seat. I wasn't frisked or cuffed, but officers maneuvered me in on the other side, and off we drove to the police station.

It was a "Dragnet"-era cop shop, with a high desk and officers milling about. I was bumped higher and higher in officialdom, each time asked whether I had any other papers with me. Finally I was ushered into a room where a uniformed immigration officer from the Interior Ministry looked up from his computer screen. He was husky, almost chubby, and his conversation was friendly, or at least not hostile. He, too, asked about papers. "Why is everyone asking about papers?" I asked. He replied with a shrug.

Then a heavy-set plainclothesman from State Security came in. His hair resembled a small dark yarmulke, slightly askew. He thrust a piece of paper in my face. "Have you ever seen this?" he asked sternly. It was the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. "I've heard of it," -- I chose my words carefully -- "but this is the first time I've actually seen a copy."

"Are you sure?" He paused. "We are not opposed to this document, I want you to understand." I thought of the "Seinfeld" line, "Not that there's anything wrong with that."

"Someone fitting your description has been handing these out," my interrogator said, and repeated his Seinfeldian disclaimer.

"Well, it wasn't me," I said. Fifteen minutes later, I was released. I never learned what happened to Manolo.

My two hours in Cuban custody seemed to fit a new pattern. The human rights activist Elizondo Sánchez thinks that under Raúl Castro, there are fewer arrests and jailings and more brief detentions. "Our day-to-day observation leads us to think that the style of political repression has changed," Sánchez told the foreign media last month.

Raúl Castro, who turns 77 in June, has surprised a lot of people. I'd last been in Cuba a year earlier, and I'd seen a dismal population going about the daily business of getting provisions for the following day. That's still what most people do, but this time there was more money in circulation, more low-end street commerce, somewhat less sense of perpetual anguish.

Cubans spoke, if not well, then at least respectfully, of their acting president. In the privacy of his living room, a writer commented on the younger Castro's lifelong military career. "He knows how to delegate," he said. "Things are running more smoothly." Another acquaintance, a retired bureaucrat, speaking openly in a restaurant, said she thought that Raúl was more understanding of everyday hardships: "He lives in a real neighborhood and understands the street."

Fidel fatigue underlies some of this new attitude. A change -- any change -- is welcome, as long as circumstances get no worse. My informal survey took me to La Víbora, a once-tidy Havana neighborhood that rarely sees a foreigner. A longtime acquaintance there had been a well-regarded scientist some time ago, but the contradictions between words and actions had compelled her to leave government work and find solace in the Catholic Church, through which she makes humanitarian visits to prisons. She described a devastating rainfall that had pounded the eastern end of the island weeks earlier. People had lost their homes, buildings collapsed, roads were destroyed, railroad lines uprooted.

"If Fidel had been in charge, he'd have started a speech that would still be going, and he'd blame the imperialists for the storm," she said. "Raúl devoted three sentences to it in a speech and blamed climate change. He told us that the ruin came to $499 million, and he ordered repair crews to work on the damage."

She also credits the new provisional president with a measure of expanded inmate rehabilitation programs. "I tell you," she said, "I've known two leaders in my life, Fidel and Raúl. I'm not a fan of Raúl's, but I believe what I see."

I got another indication of Havana's mood when I joined a dozen artists, filmmakers and writers around a table of good cheer at a private residence, pouring glass after glass of Havana Club rum. One fellow laughed about the time years ago when culture authorities had tried to discourage him from painting a certain way because it was considered counterrevolutionary. Everyone lifted their copitas at the distant memory, and someone else talked about the difficulty the late gay poet Virgilio Piñera had experienced getting published. The table nodded, and someone piped up, "Clothes. Remember we were told we couldn't wear narrow straight pants?" "Yes, and we couldn't wear our hair in Afros! They said it was ideologically diverting." More laughter. I started to hum Dean Martin's "Memories Are Made of This."

"I used to listen to the Beatles on a cassette player in the bushes down by the Almendares," one fellow said. On and on these intellectuals one-upped each other, chortling at memories of authoritarian rule under Fidel. They spoke of the era of cultural autocracy in the past tense, as if it had happened under a previous regime. I asked whether they could have had this conversation 20 years ago. "Are you kidding?" a woman replied. "It would have been suspect just to have a dozen people meeting like this." The liberating air of Fidel's absence gave them enough freedom to indulge in repression nostalgia.

The music of the moment is reggaeton. Under Fidel it was salsa. Reggaeton -- a blend of reggae, Latin beats and hip-hop -- fills theaters with madly cheering fans. At Havana's Teatro América, I saw thousands of Cubans applauding wildly, singing along with the two-man Gente de Zona, whose songs they knew from radio play. The young performers, whose suspenders and gold chains drooped at their sides, poured beer on their bare chests to reflect the spotlight better. Raúl and Fidel were far away.

Out in the provinces, though, life goes on much as it did in the past, regardless of which Castro heads the government. In Camaguey, long supportive of Fidel, the streets are filled with as many bicycles as cars. The bread man pulls his cart through residential neighborhoods, selling loaves of soft white bread with a crumbly crust for five pesos (about a quarter), while another street merchant buys empty rum bottles for a peso to sell at a modest profit at a recycling center. A local businessman named Luis, watching the passing scene with me, reflected on the hardships that, despite Raúl, remain glaringly apparent.

"What we need," he finally said, "is a Cuban Gorbachev."

Few of his compatriots would put it that way, but it was a note of budding hope for his country's future.

tmiller08@q.com

Tom Miller, the author of "Trading With the Enemy: A Yankee Travels Through Castro's Cuba," has been visiting Cuba regularly since 1987.

*********************************

My comment to WashingtonPost.com

This article is a realistic portrayal of what is underway in Cuba.

However, it would be a mistake to interpret it as a sign of impending collapse, justifying maintenance of the travel and trade embargo.

Rather it should be seen as a reason for the US to take a different stance toward Raul Castro to encourage tendencies toward reform.

Miller's detention may well have to do with an initiative on the part of western human rights activists to pass out the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That has been a tactic in other countries.

In and of itself, such an action should certainly not attract any police attention or sanction.

However, when the neighborhood hegemon which has tried to control your country for over a century is publicly committed to regime change, is squeezing every last third country possibility out of an embargo, and calls for instability and military disloyalty, such acts of human rights education are not viewed as disinterested idealism.

For more information on the debate over reform in Cuba, go to http://internalreform.blogspot.com/