Waiting for Fidel: Small Hopes and Great Travails in Havana

Fernando Rodríguez is clean shaven, but he makes a pulling motion under his chin as if he’s stroking a long beard.* It’s one of the many euphemisms Cubans use for Fidel Castro. “Este tozudo cumple setenta y dos años el trece de agosto,” he remarks casually. “This obstinate one turns seventy-two on August 13.”

“Obstinate” in living so long? In hanging on to power after almost forty years? A sixty-six-year-old father of five from a tumbledown Havana barrio, Fernando isn’t saying, but he’s clearly thinking both things. Like so many Cubans, he’s attentive to any sign that the leader may be aging, to any gesture that might betray weakening or augur change.

We are speaking one month after Pope John Paul II’s trip to Cuba, and Fidel has just given a seven and one half hour speech that, whatever it may lack in coherence, undeniably demonstrates physical vigor. Before talking informally with dozens of Havana reside...