On Thursday, a year to the day after Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s (so far) final public address to Cuba, his brother Raul — younger at 76 — addressed Cubans in Fidel’s place. In his speech Raul said that should Washington be willing and civil, he stands ready to open negotiations with the administration that follows U.S. President George W. Bush’s.
Formally Raul’s government is only provisional, but Fidel, 81, unlikely will be returning from his botched surgery of last year to his formal role as head of government. Whether that is a “good” or “bad” thing for Cuba is an issue better left to historians and the Cuban people, but what we at Stratfor can do is pass judgment on Cuba’s weight with and without Fidel at Cuba’s helm.
Geopolitics is first and foremost the study of place. At Stratfor we look to geography to guide our analyses and forecasts in the belief that people’s attachment to a specific geography shapes their culture, economic and political life. Amalgamated, this enables them to form nations, the building blocks of the world in which we live.
One of the simplest examples with which to illustrate this point is the United States. From the viewpoint of geopolitics it does not matter whether any particular American is a gay Hispanic hairdresser in downtown Spokane, Wash., who revels in all things New Age or a suburban Asian housewife in the exurbs of Orlando who thinks Yanni should be flayed alive.
All ultimately hail from the same geography — the United States — and this provides one with the sense of identity that tends to supersede all else. Carrying forward the example, Americans, like all other nationalities, act as a unit — which thankfully (from Stratfor’s viewpoint) makes them rather easy to predict. In the case of Americans, their common background of living in a huge country with a seemingly never-ending array of natural riches has made Americans both unrealistically optimistic and confidently arrogant: Americans are convinced things should and will get better, just as every American pioneer found yet more bountiful land across every horizon. And so Americans are baffled by negativity, convinced that those who disagree with them — even other Americans — are simply ignorant.
Another defining characteristic of the geopolitical framework is that it ignores the role of the individual. Well over 99 percent of the human population conforms to the idea of nationality, and nearly all of those remaining are satisfied with celebrating their uniqueness in a personal way. Most world leaders fall into the 99 percent. Ho Chi Minh, Adolf Hitler, Helmut Kohl and Theodore Roosevelt all were utterly replaceable. All simply acted out the nationalist ambitions of their respective nations.
But from time to time a truly exceptional person rises to the top of his or her nation’s leadership, and leads a country to make an impact on the world grossly beyond what any sane analyst would expect.
Fidel Castro was one of those individuals. Cuba is a country of approximately 10 million people parked squarely in the path of maritime traffic to a major coast of a global superpower. Therefore, for security purposes, it was and remains a strategic imperative for the United States that Cuba be at least neutral, if not outright allied, with the United States. A hostile presence on Cuba, whether Cuban or a third power, could threaten shipping to and from the Gulf Coast.
When Castro rose to power the island had been not only under de facto U.S. control for decades, but for a long time even had a clause in its constitution explicitly enabling U.S. military intervention at the time and place of Washington’s choosing. Through a combination of personal charisma and savvy diplomacy Fidel not only swept away those links, but also secured Cuba’s independence from U.S. influence and sparked anti-U.S. feelings on a continent-wide basis throughout Latin America that, for the most part, endures today.
Again, judgment as to whether that is a good or bad thing is something we will leave to others — our point is that Fidel mattered much in the same way that Nigeria matters. For a lone personality to affect the ebb and flow of the power of nation-states — much less a superpower — is a very rare boast that can only be claimed by precious few people throughout history. Other examples include Pope John Paul II for his role in undermining Soviet rule in Central Europe, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir for developing a nuclear arsenal that forced the Soviet Union to treat her tiny country as a near-equal, and maybe — just maybe — Colombian President Alvaro Uribe Velez, who, by negotiation and military leadership, might prove capable of sealing the regional splits that until now have made Colombia ungovernable and therefore a marginal power.
Cuba, by dint of the luck of the geographic draw, lies in the United States’ shadow, and therefore Raul’s call for better relations is not so much a bold stroke of statecraft but an admission of the inevitable. Cuba’s day in the sun is over. In time, Raul could prove to be a competent leader — and ending the half-century standoff across the Florida Strait would be no small accomplishment — but he is no Fidel.
In a series of reports by 
