Redstate is reporting from "Congressional sources" that Castro is in grave condition or already dead

Whether its true or not, "intestinal surgery" is code for colon cancer, and if Castro already had intestinal bleeding as news reports suggests--its advanced, probably metastisized--a death sentence if he isn't dead already.

I think its likely that regardless of Castro's prognosis, he will not be running the government again.

Which leads to the question of what happens next.

The celebrations may be premature.

We are not just dealing with one man here, but a regime, and the fact is that the regime has an intense interest in perserving the status quo. Castro has had a long time to coopt everyone and kill the rest. Raul Castro has just as much invested in maintaining the current regime as his brother has had, so if he succeeds to power, it becomes difficult for him to instigate reforms, even if they are badly needed.

As much as people complain about fractionalized countries like Lebanon, the fact that there are several power centers makes it much more amenable to an eventual democratic consensus. With a unipolar country like Cuba, there is no alternative power and no power vacuum to produce change.

About a week ago, I stated rather matter-of-factly that Castro likely had colon cancer which had metastisized and probably affected other organs (the liver?).

Now apparently I find that some medical doctors agree with my diagnosis...(via Polipundit)

"(Castro) will be in bed for several weeks."

Although Cuban medicine is generally not considered to be of the same quality as American medicine, it is considered advanced for a Third-World country. Cuban surgeons probably know that bed rest after surgery is now frowned upon. The current trend in post-operative care is to ambulate patients as soon as possible. In the biggest abdominal operations done on patients (liver transplants, pancreas resections, aneurysm repairs) every effort is made to get people out of bed in the first day or two. So, it is hard to imagine what surgery would keep Castro in bed for several weeks if he was not at a terminal stage of his life.

There is something suspicious going on here. If Castro had some non-life threatening condition, why would the authorities not simply say that he had a perforated peptic ulcer which was successfully repaired and that the recovery time would be a week?

My guess - Castro has widely metastatic colon cancer and will be dead in the next several weeks without ever regaining control of the country.

So how did I know?

Sad personal experience.

The rather rapid decline of Castro and his planned for incapacitation sounded exactly like what occured to my father, who from the time he realized there might be something wrong to surgery was only four months, and whose death occured only 2 months later. The cancer creates an intestinal blockage which signals you that something is wrong, but by that time, you've already had the cancer for sometime. Once it gets in the liver, its unbelievably debilitating--which would account for the extended bed rest--the afflicted have almost no energy to do much besides breathing.

You might think that a head of state would be subjected to a regular regimen of colonoscopy exams. President Bush's recent health exam certainly included one. I suggest that it may well be a cultural and generational aversion to such "invasive" exams.

Castro could be dead in a couple of months or possibly last out the year, but while there are treatments that could possible extend his life by a few months, they can't do much but prolong the inevitable.

Castro's death is a moot point now. What really matters now is the future of Cuba.

Cuba is not an "imminent threat", but it is an imminent opportunity, much like the situation in North Korea. The media is reporting, in their own self-interest, that N.K. is this big threat, but the fact is that our strategy there is to hasten and manage their inevitable collapse in the context of the larger dynamics of the region.

Cuba merits the same kind of close attention. The larger dynamics of the Latin American region concerns the ambitions of the Chavez regime, of which Cuba plays an integral part. Chavez has a wonderful opportunity to make Cuba a client state. Will the U.S. stand idly by?

I would hope not.

Somebody should be heading over to Southcom to get some interviews...

Time Magazine prints some of the speculation of what a post-Fidel Cuba will look like.

Frankly, I don't think anyone has a clue. It reminds me of the foreign service crap about Saddam's potential as a moderate--wishful thinking.

In truth, Raul really has little choice but to be practical. He is known to be more down-to-earth and sociable than Fidel — unlike Fidel, he loves to drink, dance and tell ribald jokes — and he has been Fidel's most trusted No. 2 since they were guerrillas fighting in Cuba's eastern Sierra Maestra in the 1950s. But Raul enjoys little if any of the mystical popularity that Fidel still retains, at least among older Cubans, and which has helped keep him in power since his 1959 revolution. That's a big reason why the government in recent months has engineered a p.r. makeover for Raul that included a lengthy article in the official mouthpiece, Granma, highlighting his warm and fuzzy side as a family man and grandfather. But that may not do the trick. To forge a viable connection with Cuba's 11 million beleaguered people, many analysts believe Raul will also have to loosen their leashes more than Fidel ever allowed.

No choice? Whoever wrote this doesn't understand something fundamental about oppressive regimes--when the chips are down, they get more oppressive, not less. Governments and people, tend to go with what works for them--in Europe the tendancy is towards appeasement, and when the going gets rough, the Europeans appease--its what they know, its what they do. If Raul Castro finds power slipping through his fingers, he'll also go with what he knows--brutal repression.

Raul Castro is not some apparatchnik acclimated to obsequious compromise. He's had the power of life and death his entire life and has become an expert at wielding it. There is no Gorbachev in Cuba, only one more Stalin.

Last week we were in St John's, US Virgin Islands. Our rented villa in the jungle was stormed by the gentleman on the left. Crazed by the smell of food left on the kitchen counter by the previous guests, this tree rat gnawed umpteen holes in the wire mesh over all the windows and tried to gnaw his way through the glass. He succeeded one night by scaling a vertical, holdless wall to an upper window. I trapped him the next night and released him a couple of miles away down the mountain. (I'll pass over my tarantula catching exploits as you may not believe me).

The aggression and fearlessness of this rat so impressed us that we named him Francis Drake after the English hero and scallywag who had terrorised the Spanish Main from his base nearby.

What a life! born a nobody, commanded the second voyage around the world, thrashed the world's major military power all over the globe, contemporary of Shakespeare, died on the attack.

Note: In fact Francis Drake was the first man to command a voyage round the world as Magellan died en route.

Perez Hilton, Babalu blog and others are reporting that Castro is dead. This wouldn't be the first time, so we'll not break out the party hats and noisemakers yet.

Such is the problem of getting accurate news in a socialist paradise. At very least, he is very sick and the expectation is that his death is imminent. It could be no more than a janitor seeing one of Castro's doctors shaking his head and spreading the word via the grapevine.

Frankly, it doesn't really matter when he dies--there has already been a power transfer and Castro matters less at this point than does the infrastructure he's left behind. Ultimately I think the celebration is going to be followed with disappointment as nothing substantial changes for Cubans.