Changing Of The Guard, NOT The Regime

Sorry for the inactivity, folks.  Part of it is a lack of motivation since I, as a conservative, have been essentially disenfranchised at the presidential level nine months before Election Day.  More pertinent is that we've had a death in our family this week and thus other matters have taken precedence.

I think that should be sufficient alibi for missing immediate commentary on this:

Fidel Castro the Marxist revolutionary and nemesis of [eight out of] ten U.S. presidents, resigned as Cuba's [communist dictator] Tuesday after dominating the island's politics and society for nearly five decades....

Oh, don't mind me, I'm just doing the remedial editing the WaPo incompetently omitted.

His resignation brought a measure of uncertainty to a political system that has changed little since Castro, now eighty-one and ailing, swept into Cuba's capital at the head of a guerrilla army. But in Havana, Cuba's seaside capital, and across the Straits of Florida in Miami, the resignation stirred only slight reaction, underscoring a sense among many Cubans and embittered exiles that the political transition was unfolding precisely as Castro planned.

Well, duh.  Could it be any more obvious?

Castro, who has not appeared in public for nineteen months since undergoing multiple intestinal surgeries, cleared a path for his seventy-six-year-old brother, Raúl, to be named president Sunday when Cuba's National Assembly meets. But that succession remained unclear because Castro did not mention it in his 1,076-word "Message from the Commander in Chief" -- his resignation announcement that filled the front page of Tuesday's Granma, the Communist Party newspaper.

"It would be a betrayal to my conscience to accept a responsibility requiring more mobility and dedication than I am physically able to offer," Castro wrote. "This I say devoid of all drama."

[snort]

For some reason I picture that line from a scene in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? after Roger has been squashed beneath a ton of bricks.  He's stumbling around the set in a daze with little stars circling his head and then exclaims, "Ready when you are, Raoul...."

The rest of the WaPo "story" is Castro hero worship, and there's little point in hacking that down.  This is, in point of fact, not much of a story.  Of course Raúl Castro will be crowned the next Marxist-Leninist king of Cuba.  Fidel certainly appears to still be in charge of things down there, and probably doesn't trust anybody else to succeed him.  The only factor that would be of interest to me is his kid-brother's age; passing the crown from an eighty-one-year-old geezer to a seventy-six-year-old geezer doesn't exactly secure the Castro dynasty in any long-term sense.  I'm not familiar with his progeny, but I would have thought that Fidel would have groomed a son or protege to take his place.  If Raúl is the best he can do, there may still be hope for Cuban exiles and those of us who thought that when Bill Clinton sought a military adventure in the Carribean, he should have invaded Cuba to topple a communist dictator rather than Haiti to restore one.

But for now, there is indeed no drama.  Other, perhaps, than that the American electorate may be about to send Castro's "nemesis" down the same road he took Cuba half a century ago.