He has to be concerned that the political and economic systems he holds dear have exhausted themselves everywhere else. Yet his heart is not in economic reform or in political liberalization, and he has grudgingly done only the minimum required to survive. Even in Cuba, the ideology of communism is virtually dead. If daily life for most of Cuba's 11 million citizens is less miserable than it was during the darkest days of 1993, it is still a grinding round of poverty, hunger and dead-end jobs. Unemployment, not known for decades, looms for hundreds of thousands of redundant workers.
Dissidents languish in jail.
Still, those who predicted four years ago that Castro's regime was doomed have been proved wrong. The economy has emerged from the abyss. At the depths of the special period, the country had almost no petroleum, electricity, food, transport or production. Today Havana blooms with chicly renovated hotels, neon signs, crowded restaurants and nightclubs. The U.S. dollar has swallowed the Cuban peso.