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Cuba: Raul Castro, 95, Is Still Alive and in Command

HAVANA TIMES – No, this isn’t a trailer for the next Universal Studios movie, set against the backdrop of ancient Egypt. It’s reality—or at least the version of reality that Cuban state television decided to show us last Saturday.

Raul Castro, our beloved 95-year-old Generalissimo, has risen from the dead. Or rather, he has reappeared, because, as we well know, in Cuba no one from the top military brass ever dies; they simply change uniforms.

It turns out that the usual suspicious minds in Miami and on social media had been spreading some rather inconvenient rumors: that Raul had suffered a stroke, that he was on life support, that he was already keeping his brother Fidel company in the pantheon of national heroes, with another boulder piled on top.

Of course, in the absence of an official medical report—because transparency isn’t exactly the custom on the island—the popular imagination took off as usual, with echoes from the other side of the Florida Straits.

But the regime, true to form, wasn’t about to let a trivial matter like the death of its supreme leader ruin the 65th anniversary of the Interior Ministry’s Personal Security Directorate. No sir, something had to be done, and done it was.

The state newscast showed us footage of a military ceremony, and there was Raul, in his inseparable olive-green uniform, whether held together with pins or propped up no one could say, trying to walk energetically and delivering some of his favorite slaps on the back—the hard kind, the kind that can leave a hole in your back—just so you can feel his energy and power, and the most naïve........

© Havana Times