Fidel Castro is expected to recover from surgery for intestinal bleeding and play a public role in the future, according to a host of senior Cuban officials and other sources this week. However, with his 80th birthday looming and the need to resolve the succession in his lifetime to ensure an orderly transition, that role will never be the same.A week into Cuba's leadership crisis and after decades in which man and country have meant practically the same thing, a new dimension has clearly been added by the health problems and the provisional handing of authority to his brother Raúl – though exactly what the final equation will look like remains unclear. "After 47 plus years of one man symbolising the revolution and with near absolute control, it is hard to think of a Cuba without Fidel," says Frank Mora, a national security and Cuba expert at the National War College in Washington. "But that is certainly what everyone in Cuba and outside has been forced to do."
| “His sense of strategy and tactics have kept the Cuban process alive when logic indicated that it was doomed to failure...” |