Martin Henry

When the Hispanic 'Ernesto' pushed over eastern Cuba earlier this week, the great mobiliser was himself immobilised. A Reuters report out of Havana said that for the first time in four decades, Cubans had to handle a hurricane on their own without Papa Fidel personally leading preparation and recovery efforts.

After the 1963 Hurricane Flora smashed into Cuba killing several thousand four years after Fidel Castro came to power, El Commandante was always on spot to take personal charge directing civil defence efforts for preparation and recovery. Ernesto caught him off his feet, old, sick and immobilised.

Civil defence, though, following the traditional pattern, evacuated hundreds of thousands of Cubans by order. We do it a different way; and we must commend the Government and its Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management for an orchestrated response to the Ernesto threat.

Cuba, for all practical purposes, is entering its post-Fidel Castro age. How long the transition will last, and what next are the open questions.

The revolutionaries are dying off. Earlier this month, and just ahead of Castro's 80th birthday, Gustavo Arcos Bergnes died at 79. Arcos is now hardly known, unlike 'Che' Guevara who became an international revolutionary hero and whose image [not Castro's] appears everywhere in Cuba. Gustavo Arcos was shot in the right hip and partially paralysed in the July 26, 1953 failed attack on the Moncado army barracks.

Granma landing

Among those killed in the ill-fated Granma landing, when the revolutionaries later 'invaded' from Mexico where they had regrouped, was Gustavo's brother Luis. Gustavo himself was made ambassador to Belgium after the revolution triumphed in 1959 but became disillusioned by the growing authoritarianism of the Castro regime. Last year the ailing Arcos complained in an Associated Press interview how the regime had shot a lot of people who could just have been imprisoned.

Branded a counter-revolutionary, Arcos himself was imprisoned for three years and then refused permission to leave the country. He and his brother Sebastian, who both became involved with the Cuban Committee for Human Rights when it was formed in 1978, were imprisoned in 1981 for attempting to leave the country illegally.

Remained unshot

Shortly after Gustavo's release in 1988, he became executive director of the committee replacing the leader who was chased out of the country. Pro-government protesters would gather outside Arcos' house to demonstrate and shout insults. Perhaps thanks to his distinguished revolutionary services Gustavo Arcos remained unshot and lived to die of old age. Thousands of 'counter-revolutionaries', high and low, were not so lucky.

The revolutionary government led by Fidel Castro, and later anchored in the Cuban Communist Party, has transformed Cuban society in many positive ways; but not without repressive oppression as an autocratic communist regime. This is not to say the revolution does not enjoy strong support among segments of the population which still adoringly regard Castro and the revolutionaries as saviour. Powerful indoctrination from infancy and the control of information hardly permit the emergence of any alternative view of Cuban history and society.

But the winds of change are blowing against a frail old man and a frail old system. As we prepared for Ernesto without autocratic force, we would be wise to prepare for a post-Fidel Castro Cuba in the Caribbean.

Martin Henry is a communication specialist.