Post-Fidel Cuba

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Fidel Castro is stepping down? As Dorothy Parker said upon hearing of the death of President Calvin Coolidge, how can you tell?

The Bearded One lost most of his relevancy for us "yanquis" long ago. He once loomed large in the lives of us Baby Boomers as we crouched under our desks in "duck-and-cover" drills, terrified of his nuclear-tipped Russian missiles. "Only 90 miles from our shores," our elders constantly reminded us.

To today's youths, Mr. Castro is so last century. Even in Miami and Havana, the response to Mr. Castro's retirement is reported to be remarkably ho-hum. More business-as-usual than dancing-in-the-streets. The Fidel Castro we used to know and care about has not been in charge for some time. His younger brother, Raul Castro, 76, has been acting president since Fidel, five years older, fell ill in July 2006.

The Soviet Union is no longer around to prop up his island's economy with $2 billion a year. Even Mr. Castro's stature as Latin America's leading leftist is getting nudged aside by one of his biggest fans, President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Mr. Chavez wants to be Fidel Castro, but with oil, as he enlarges his influence across Cuba and the rest of Latin America.

Although Raul has his own record for ruthlessness, he also has begun sowing the seeds of a post-Fidel Cuba. He has become a promising "pragmatic institutionalist," in the view of author Julia E. Sweig, director for Latin America Studies for the Council on Foreign Relations. For practical reasons, he has inched his country toward a more competitive economic system, like China, whose "communism" increasingly looks more like state-controlled capitalism.

Raul also has encouraged public meetings to air complaints and hinted at something else that Fidel dreads: the use of "incentives" to increase productivity. Perhaps America's leaders can say of Raul, as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, "We can do business together."

Those who visit Havana, as I did a few years ago, find a tirelessly enterprising and entrepreneurial people eager to free their appetite for enterprise from state-sponsored constraints.

Generations of Cubans born since Fidel's revolution already have begun to lay groundwork of a post-Fidel Cuba in a vigorous dollar-based entrepreneurial economy that parallels the government's anemic peso economy.

Besides a great potential vacation spot, Cuba offers something America's farmers, manufacturers and service providers need: customers. After a half-century, America's embargo against Cuba has outlived any usefulness it might have had. Instead, it provides the regime with a handy excuse for its own economic failures. That's why a right-left, labor-corporate coalition of congressmen and others has called for ending it.

The next president must decide whether he or she will continue to pander to the hard-line embargo supporters or open diplomatic and economic doors to a post-Fidel Cuba that approaches capitalism with no more fear than the tiny bit that Fidel manages to generate among Americans today.

Both Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama expressed a willingness in their Austin debate to fully engage Cuba diplomatically. Only Mr. Obama said he would meet with the next Cuban leader without preconditions but backed away from his support for lifting the trade embargo, which he advocated as a Senate candidate in 2003.

Republican front-runner Sen. John McCain, who has accused Cubans of participating in torturing some of his fellow prisoners in Hanoi during the Vietnam War, has said Raul is "worse" in many ways than Fidel. Yet since Mr. McCain also took the lead on improving relations with Vietnam, it would not be that big a leap for him to do the same with Cuba. We can only hope.

If the embargo has any value at all, it should be used to push for human rights on the island. For example, the Committee to Protect Journalists, of which I am a board member, ranks Cuba second only behind China in jailing the most journalists — 22 in Cuba, 29 in China, whose population is more than 100 times larger. That's a side of Cuba that no country should imitate, including China.

Clarence Page is a nationally syndicated columnist.