The Economist’s assessment of the World for 2008 has been published, and forecasts the following for Cuba:

GDP growth: 5.4%
GDP: $49bn (PPP: $134bn)
Inflation: 4.3%
Population: 11.2m
GDP per head: $4,350 (PPP: $11,970)

The country is changing, but at an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary pace. The coming year will see Fidel Castro (81) move upstairs—either to take on the role of elder statesman or to meet his maker. His brother, Raúl (76), will consolidate his power as acting president, but at the head of a government team rather than as undisputed leader. More open political debate will be tolerated.

To watch: Relations with the United States will rise a degree or two above absolute zero as reforms progress in Cuba and hardline Republicans lose influence in Washington.

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Chris Simmons, a career counterintelligence officer for the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and expert in Cuban intelligence, wrote and op-ed published in the Miami Herald on the head of Cuba’s Interests Section (photo above), who was a former intelligence officer that might still be active.

Recent media accounts have heralded Havana’s selection of Jorge Bolaños as the incoming head of Cuba’s Interests Section in Washington. The conventional wisdom is that the posting of Bolaños, once the second-highest ranking Cuban diplomat, may indicate that Cuba seeks improved relations with the United States.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The CIA identified Bolaños as a suspected intelligence officer at least 34 years ago. More recently, a former member of Cuba’s Directorate of Intelligence (DI), Cuba’s principal espionage agency, confirmed that Bolaños was (or still is) an intelligence officer, although he was unclear whether Bolaños served with the DI or the notorious America Department (DA), the intelligence wing of the Cuban Communist Party. He observed that Bolaños is among a small group of old intelligence officers who at some point began working their cover identity more than their intelligence mission, as evidenced by his five appointments as ambassador.

It may be that Raúl Castro is not taking chances with what he used to call the Pinos Nuevos (New Pines, a reference to the younger generation). Bolaños is clearly part of the Vieja Guardia (Old Guard) and characterized as a very smart man who knows how to keep a low profile in order to avoid getting Fidel upset. The former DI operative suggested that Raúl Castro feels reassured relying on old colleagues like Bolaños.

His assessment of Bolaños’ intelligence ties is based on his close connections with the Superior Institute of Intelligence (ISI) as well as the DI and DA. Bolaños did not avoid such associations and was, in fact, a close friend of ISI Director Nestor Iturbi. Normally, career Cuban diplomats and senior officials stay away from the intelligence services because the association can cripple their careers when other countries’ counterintelligence officials get confused and identify them as intelligence collaborators or undercover DI or DA officers.

This former DI officer personally met Bolaños and spoke with him several times when he was assigned as a senior official with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Minrex). More so, Bolaños lived across the street from the ISI’s main entrance and parked one of his cars inside the ISI compound on a daily basis.

In August 2005, Paraguay investigated a large influx of Cuban nationals. At least two foreign governments had warned Asunción that Cuban intelligence officers were believed to be entering the country under tourist or medical cover. Predictably, it was Bolaños who, several years earlier, presided over the restoration of diplomatic relations with Paraguay while serving at Minrex.

In May 2004, the Mexican government ordered Bolaños to leave Mexico within 48 hours as a result of a spy scandal involving three DA officers: Orlando Silva Fors, José Antonio Arbesú and Pedro Miguel Lobaina-Jiménez de Castro. According to Le Monde, Lobaina headed the DA’s Mexico Section. Cuba and Mexico subsequently resolved Bolaños’ expulsion offer, and he remained Havana’s ambassador through September 2007.

It bears mentioning that Cuba’s Embassy in Mexico City hosts one of the two largest and most important DI Centers in the world (New York City is the other). Prior to his Mexico posting, Bolaños served in another assignment that closely tied him with Havana’s intelligence services. In the mid-1990s, he served as a first vice minister in Minrex, where he oversaw Havana’s interactions with Cubans living overseas. His duties there would have made him invaluable to the DI’s Department XIX (Counter-Revolutionary Targets), which pursues operations against the Cuban-American community.

At best, Bolaños is an experienced former intelligence officer with extensive connections throughout Cuban intelligence and the Ministry of Foreign Relations. At worst, he remains an active intelligence officer assigned to the DI, or more likely, the DA. Either way, the posting of this very skilled ambassador-spy is not a signal that Havana wants closer relations. Quite the opposite, the assignment of an Old Guard spy like Bolaños indicates that Havana’s main desire is to continue indefinitely its increased intelligence targeting of the United States.

Bolaños’ biography from the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

[Photo of Jorge Bolaños from La Jornada]

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Cuba’s acting leader, Raul Castro, sat next to the empty chair of his ailing brother at the final session of the National Assembly before next year’s parliamentary election. In a letter read out before the day’s business got underway, Fidel Castro said that in the past he had been a “utopian socialist”. It was a phase, he said, when he believed he knew what we had to do and wanted the power to do it.

“What the foreign press in Cuba have most reported in recent days has been the phrase where I expressed… that I am not a person who clings to power. I could add that I was once, for the excesses of youth and lack of conscience,” he said. “What changed me? Life itself, through the deepening of the thoughts of [Cuban independence leader Jose] Marti and the classics of Socialism,” he said.

Mr Castro also urged people to support his brother, saying he had read in advance a speech Raul made earlier this week in which he said Cuba needed to become more democratic, at least by allowing more open debate about economic and social issues.

Source: BBC

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Army General and interim president Raúl Castro presided over the legislative session of the National Assembly, which began today. Beginning in 2008, Cuba will have a new national assembly whereby deputies of the parliament and provincial delegates will be “elected.”

[Photo: AP]

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José Luis Rodríguez, Economic and Planification Minister, has announced that Cuba’s economy grew 7.5% in 2007. Rodríguez presented his report to the National Assembly of the People’s Power. Economic growth has increased 42.5% between 2004 and 2007 according to the Cuban Government.

[Photo: BBC]

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From the Economist print edition:

The post-Castro era inches closer

MY fundamental duty is not to cling to public offices, still less to obstruct the advance of younger people, but to contribute experience and ideas.” With these words, read out at his request on state television on December 17th, Fidel Castro hinted that he might step down permanently from his country’s presidency. With this Cuba’s elderly and convalescent leader seemed to open a public discussion over who might succeed him.

In July 2006 Mr Castro temporarily turned over his powers to his younger brother, Raúl, before undergoing abdominal surgery. Since then Cuba has been edging towards life without the man who has led the country since 1959. Raúl Castro, who heads a collective leadership, has launched an “open debate” on economic reforms. In the medium term these seem certain to involve a greater role for markets and foreign investment in the state-dominated economy.

Doubts over Fidel’s role have meant that change has so far proceeded at a glacial pace. Officials say that he has resumed work. This has included occasional meetings with foreign dignitaries and regular newspaper columns on topics ranging from “Bush, hunger and death” to climate change. He is said to keeps tabs on leading officials by telephone.

Fidel was recently nominated as a candidate in an election for the National Assembly due on January 20th. In March the president will be chosen for a five-year term from among the assembly’s members. Despite popular discontent over shortages, low wages and corruption, there has been no sign of any significant challenge to Communist Party rule.

The next three months will thus reveal Cuba’s immediate political future. Some believe that Raúl, who is himself 76, does not want the presidency, and that the job may go to Carlos Lage, the de facto prime minister, who oversaw liberalising economic reforms during the 1990s (some of them since reversed). If that has already been decided, more reforms may even be unveiled before the election.

But, as so often, Fidel seems to want to keep Cubans guessing. He closed his televised message with a reference to Oscar Niemeyer, a Brazilian architect who turned 100 on December 15th and who is still working. “One has to be constant to the end,” Fidel wrote approvingly. But perhaps constancy need not involve active political leadership.

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The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has published a volume addressing international security issues facing the U.S. in 2008 which includes a section on Cuba.

Some key observations:

• The succession in power from Fidel Castro to his brother Raúl appears to be a done deal, but the evolution away from fidelismo will start only upon the death of its namesake. When that happens, Raúl Castro steps out from behind the shadow of his flamboyant sibling and the beginning of a transition process to a new order in Cuba may commence.

• Even now as de facto chief of state and head of government, Raúl will not have complete authority while his brother lives. When Raúl finally is left alone in power, the potential for change in Cuba grows exponentially, given Fidel’s single-minded dedication to preserving Cuba as a police state with a controlled economy. But whatever glue Fidel’s persona contributed to holding the system together and generating international support will be lost to Raúl, who has neither the charisma nor the disposition to play the part of revolutionary icon.

• When Raúl finally is left alone in power, the potential for change in Cuba grows exponentially, given Fidel’s single-minded dedication to preserving Cuba as a police state with a controlled economy. But whatever glue Fidel’s persona contributed to holding the system together and generating international support will be lost to Raúl, who has neither the charisma nor the disposition to play the part of revolutionary icon.

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