Fidel and China

It’s been 10 months since Fidel Castro underwent risky gastrointestinal surgery and partially stepped off the stage as Cuba’s paramount leader.

He’s 80 now, and there are increasing signs that Castro is aware of his entry into the twilight despite an apparent slight recovery in his health in the past two months.

His situation has some bearing on China, where former leaders exercise significant influence even once they leave, or are pushed off, the public stage.

Over the past several months, 13 newspaper essays have been attributed to Castro, who still hasn’t been seen in public since taking sick. The published “reflections” reveal the thoughts of a man very unlike the hardened revolutionary and famously anti-American leader the world knows. An interesting analysis of Castro’s new status, from Brian Latell of the Cuba Transition Project at the University of Miami, has come across my inbox.

“Today he is detached and seemingly disinterested in Cuba’s policy dilemmas and needs. His ‘reflections’ hardly touch at all on issues of concern to the Cuban people or their leaders who conduct the country’s domestic and foreign affairs. He has never mentioned or referred to his brother Raul, or any other Cuban official for that matter. . . . He has not penned a word intended to assuage, reassure, or shape the attitudes of the Cuban people about their day-to-day dilemmas.”

Latell goes on to say that Fidel’s essays do not give instructions to Cuba’s interim leaders on policy, nor do his sayings appear to carry any binding weight. The wording, Latell says, “might be interpreted as indicating that, relatively helpless and isolated in his convalescent quarters, Fidel is being censored and muzzled by his successors.”

“This new, more constrained Castro also never mentions Marx, Lenin, or communism as such. Unlike his practice through all the decades of his fiery rhetoric, he closes the “reflections” without appending the once familiar incantatory slogans, “Patria o Muerte” or “Venceremos.” There are instead Chinese fortune cookie style bromides that appear at the end of some of the reflections.”

“On April 3 he closed with the strange comment, ‘As can be seen, there are many dark faces to a polyhedron.’”

“And on May 16 he closed with the observation that, ‘I recommend to my readers to pay attention to the complexities of human activity. It is the only way to see much further.’”

“Whatever may actually be occurring within the Cuban leadership in the process of drafting, reviewing, and publishing these “reflections” by Fidel, the final seemingly inescapable conclusion is that this is an entirely different, depleted and diminished man than the one who controlled every important aspect of Cuban life for more than 47 years.”

Now on to China, where the leadership often seems disembodied, carefully contained in tightly controlled and remote conditions. Even when they die is kept secret. Case in point: Huang Ju, the No. 6 man in the Communist Party, has been variously reported to be dead, or sick and in the hospital. The State Council denied reports that Huang died May 9. But basically there is no information.

Huang’s patron is former President Jiang Zemin, who is perhaps a more pertinent example. How much power and influence does Jiang still have? Most Chinese don’t really know. Real debate about Jiang’s legacy is largely verboten, following the unwritten but strictly enforced rule that China’s leadership cannot be criticized.

Is Jiang a “depleted and diminished man,” as Castro appears to be? Or at 79, is he still maneuvering beyond his “Shanghai clique” and pulling strings on a variety of matters, perhaps even in the People’s Liberation Army? I don't know the answers.