Succession a major problem of two different old men
By Gwynne Dyer
LONDON (JP): The first thing you see when you fly into Havana airport is an enormous wall-slogan: "There will be no transition." They didn't put it there just to make Pope John Paul II feel at home, but it's as true of his own policy as it is of Fidel Castro's. Both men are determined that their revolutions will live on after them.
Castro, at 71, has ruled Cuba with an iron hand for almost forty years. Pope John Paul is older, at 77, and has ruled the Catholic Church with equal inflexibility since 1978. And both men's main preoccupation now is to ensure that the succession falls into safe hands that will preserve their revolutions.
Castro seems particularly conscious of the parallels. In a live national television broadcast last week he urged his followers to turn out for the religious services that the Pope will celebrate in four Cuban cities, and made an ironic plug for himself at the same time: "Instead of seeing a meeting of an angel with the devil, couldn't one think of a meeting between two angels?"
One could certainly think at least of a meeting between two kindred spirits. Not only do both men have strongly authoritarian personalities, but they share one great common goal: to prevent a counter-revolution after they are gone.
John Paul is in a bigger hurry, for his health is now failing fast, but he also has a much better chance of success. The only electorate he has to worry about is the College of Cardinals, and he has personally chosen 89 of the 107 cardinals who will be eligible to vote (they must be under 80) for the next pope. They are his men, and they will defend his heritage.
It is an extraordinary heritage. John Paul came to power in a church in the throes of modernization, and dragged it back to traditional doctrines and unquestioning obedience. The world's billion Catholics had little say in that operation, and they will have little say in the selection of John Paul's successor.
The likeliest candidate, now that health problems have sidelined previously favored cardinals like Belgian Godfried Danneels and Brazilian Lucas Moreira Neves, is Cardinal Francis Arinze, a 66-year-old Nigerian who combines great warmth with rigid orthodoxy on issues close to John Paul's heart like the bans on birth control, abortion, women priests, and married priests.
The leading Italian candidate, Carlo Maria Martini of Milan, is probably ruled out by his liberalism. Other Europeans like Christoph Schoenborn of Vienna and Miloslav Vlk of Prague don't make the cut simply because if the next pope is not Italian, he probably won't be European at all.
Latin America, home to over a third of the world's Catholics, is Africa's real competition, but it has no really front-rank candidates in the present College of Cardinals. That may change, of course, when John Paul names 16 new cardinals next month to bring the College up to its full strength. The point is that he has created a situation where all the plausible candidates are men who will carry out his will, at least for one more papacy.
Fidel Castro must envy him that. There are lots of Communist Party members in the queue to replace him, including his brother Raul Castro (6 years younger), the armed forces chief, and Ricardo Alarcon, president of the National Assembly. But Castro's fear is that Communism itself will not survive him.
All the Communist regimes of Europe have crumbled, and Cubans have lived in crippling poverty since the generous Soviet subsidies dried up. Above all, the death of Jorge Mas Canosa has just deprived Castro of his best enemy.
What kept Castro in power so long, and would motivate some Cubans to fight for him even now, was not Cubans' love for him or Communism. It was the fact that so many Cubans resented the relentless U.S. pressure against the country, from attempted assassinations and invasion in the early 60s to a trade embargo that has lasted into the present.
Mas Canosa, the right-wing millionaire who founded and led the Cuban American National Foundation, lobbied hard and with great success for those policies under eight U.S. presidents, but it did not win him much love among Cubans still living on the island. Mas Canosa's death, however, changes things both in the Cuban exile community and in Cuba itself.
The emergent opposition leader is Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo, a companion of Castro in the original revolutionary struggle who resisted the imposition of a Communist dictatorship and suffered 22 years in solitary confinement in a Cuban jail. He contemptuously referred to Castro and Mas Canosa as "two sides of the same coin: they empower each other and they live off each other."
Upon his release and exile from Cuba in 1986, Gutierrez Menoyo founded 'Cambio Cubano' (Cuban Change) as a democratic alternative to the hard-liners. He seeks not a U.S. invasion but just the creation of a 'legal space' in Cuba where a democratic opposition can organize. With Mas Canosa's death, he has become the most influential Cuban exile leader -- 52 percent of exiled Cubans in Miami backed him in a recent poll -- and a mortal threat to Castro.
Gutierrez Menoyo is dangerous because he is reasonable. He fought against the old regime, and he doesn't frighten people in Cuba. Give him a few years, and he may even manage to end the U.S. embargo, Castro's main excuse for the economic disaster he has wrought in Cuba. And when Castro finally dies, Gutierrez Menoyo, not any of the Communist stalwarts of the present regime, will be the prime candidate to replace him.
The two old men meeting in Havana this week have much in common, and even seem to have a genuine respect for each other. But Pope John Paul knows that he has won the battle to perpetuate his ideas and policies, probably for another generation. And Fidel Castro knows that he has probably lost.