Will Castro's brother lead Cuba?
Updated on 19 February 2008
Almost 50 years after he seized power, Cuba's Fidel Castro has officially retired. His brother Raoul is expected to take his place.
The 81-year-old leader, who hasn't appeared in public since emergency stomach surgery 18 months ago, confirmed he wouldn't be seeking another term in power.
Castro is an icon of the struggle, a hero of the communist revolution, who once brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.
He was the charismatic revolutionary who became the world's longest serving political head of state.
If ordinary Cubans weren't forbidden from going online, they might have seen El Commandante's announcement on the website of the party paper, the Granma.
He insisted it wasn't goodbye, but after half a century at the helm, the ailing 81-year-old revolutionary had decided it was time to announce his retirement.
He said on Granma: "I neither will aspire to, nor will I accept, the position of president of the council of state and commander in chief.
"It would betray my conscience to take up a responsibility that requires mobility and total devotion."
Two out of three of this island's 11m people have known no other leader than Fidel, the single name by which most Cubans know him.
It's a conflicted nation; caught in the past, fed-up with the present, unable to grasp at the future.
But after 50 years of charismatic defiance many cannot but admire this revolutionary icon.
The question everyone's asking in Cuba, and Florida, 90 miles over the water is, whether Fidel Castro's revolution will survive him or do Cubans, despite all the deprivation they've suffered, actually revere him more than the American imperialist enemy would care to admit to?
Early on, before the 1962 nuclear missile crisis turned Castro into a figure of fear and loathing in America, he actually went there.
He had said: "The United States people are wonderful people..."
But the cordial atmosphere did not last long.
But Castro did turn to the Soviet Union, so he severed relations with the United States and imposed a total embargo on Cuba which is now in it's 45th year.
At home, he built a socialist state which attained the highest levels of adult literacy in the Americas. Health care is impressive; infant mortality and life expectancy rates on a par with the United States at less than a twentieth of the cost.
But Castro was no unblemished idealist; his regime repressed all forms of political dissent, denied Cubans basic freedoms, barred gays from even joining the Communist party, put neighbourhood spies on every block - Fidel's thought police.
Jose Miguel Vivanco from Human Rights Watch said:
"My opinion is that Castro is just another dictator, who treats his people as his personal property."
President Bush said in a statement:
"The question really should be: what does this mean for the people in Cuba? They're the ones that suffered under Fidel Castro; they are the ones who were put in prison because of their beliefs. They're the ones who have been denied their right to live in a free society. So I view this as a period of transition and it should be the beginning of the democratic transition for the people in Cuba."
Fidel's brother Raul is now the world's longest-serving defence minister; he's been Fidel's stand-in for 19 months already.
Cuba's newly elected national assembly meets to choose a new president on Sunday - and it will probably be Raul -although at 76, he's unlikely to succeed his big brother for long.
Among leading runners and riders are, a 56-year-old paediatrician, Carlos Lage, a member of Fidel's inner circle, a politburo member who's overseen capitalist-style reform.
There's the suave former foreign minister, Ricardo Alarcon, now president of the national assembly; at 70, he's no spring chicken though.
Current foreign minister, Felipe Perez Roque, Castro's ex-chief of staff; is at 42, young; but don't be fooled: he belongs to a hard line faction known as the Taliban.
And there's Esteban Lasso, an Afro-Cuban - one of the few in senior government posts - and with good peasant credentials to boot. But he is said to be more bureaucrat than politician.
