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Where Power Is Really Concentrated in Cuba

one doesn’t need to hold any position to represent true power

Internal struggles to eliminate competitors, gain influence, or secure exclusive patronage have always been intense.

By Yunior Garcia Aguilera (14ymedio) 

HAVANA TIMES – It is true that power in Cuba is no longer as concentrated as before, that command has fragmented, and that the country seems to have moved from absolute top down to a kind of collective management of disaster. Today, more operators, more layers, more intermediaries, and more sectoral elites are visible than in the years of classic Fidel Castroism. But this does not imply that power has ceased to be concentrated. Management has fragmented, but what has not fragmented is command. And that command, even today, still points to a single name and his inner circle: Raul Castro.

The Cuban regime no longer functions as it did in the years when the bearded leader monopolized the discourse and transformed every governing problem into an extension of his personal will. That model, for both biological and historical reasons, is exhausted. In its place has emerged another architecture, less charismatic and more bureaucratic. But opacity does not equate to a distribution of power. The fact that today the administrators of the apparatus, the trusted technocrats, the military-businessmen, the guards, and the ideological commissars have a greater presence in public affairs does not mean that they all carry equal weight or that they collectively decide the strategic direction of the system.

This nuance corrects the illusion that true power simply erodes through attrition. Sometimes the opposite occurs. The disappearance of the founding leadership opens the door to new, more discreet concentrations of power. In Cuba, authority no longer needs to appear as frequently as before to maintain its monopoly on power.

Last March, amid negotiations with the United States, Miguel Diaz-Canel........

© Havana Times