Kabuki theater now underway in Cuba in 2021 is using the same messaging as 2018, and equally as false.

"Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect..." - Jonathan Swift, A Letter to a Young Gentleman (1710).

Raul Castro (age 89) said today (April 16, 2021) he is resigning as head of Cuba’s Communist Party, "ending an era of formal leadership by he and his brother Fidel Castro that began with the 1959 revolution," reported the Associated Press. Three years earlier, Raul Castro handed over the office of the presidency to his hand picked successor Miguel Díaz-Canel on April 19, 2018. The dictatorship used this to give the impression that there was a transition underway to a post-Castro era in Cuba back then and many in the press bought the lie.

On April 18, 2018, Ed Augustin writing from Havana for The Guardian began his article, "When Cuba’s president stands down this week, it will mark the first time in nearly six decades that the island will be led by somebody whose last name is not Castro." Five years later and the same claims are now being made again by the experts and journalists, but Cubans in the island know better.

The Castro regime is repeating the same messaging now that is again being echoed by the free press. General Raul Castro remained head of the communist party, the maximum authority, controlled the military, and headed the commission that drafted the new constitution in 2018. Now he is formally ceding the position of the head of the Communist Party, according to press accounts and analysts, to someone not named Castro, but the Castro dynasty remains in control.

Remember when Raul Castro supposedly turned power over to Miguel Díaz-Canel on 4/19/18

This is not a transition but a succession to a new generation of the Castro dynasty led by Alejandro Castro. However, while he lives, Raul Castro will continue to have a veto over what happens in the archipelago. People outside Cuba may not know it, but Cubans on the island already do. Cuban independent journalist Camila Acosta, and member of the 27N intellectual movement explained to Deutsche Welle on April 16, 2021 that "for a long time, it has been the son of Raúl Castro, Alejandro Castro Espín, who moves the strings of the country. Raúl would only officially retire, although he should remain aware of everything perhaps as an authority figure as part of that 'historical elite' of the Revolution."

Raúl Castro Ruz, and his son Alejandro Castro Espín

Raul Castro's son, Colonel Alejandro Castro Espin (age 55), who negotiated the normalization of relations with the Obama Administration is an intelligence officer who also organized the 2014 Vladimir Putin visit to Cuba, regularly visits Russia for high level meetings, and is a hardliner who in 2009 wrote The Price of Power, a harshly critical appraisal of the United States that describes U.S. leaders as “those who seek to subjugate humanity to satisfy their interests and hegemonic goals.” He was also the go to person during the Trump Administration.

Alejandro Castro (shaking hands with President) negotiated normalizing relations with U.S.

According to The Miami Herald in the August 26, 2020 article "Former Trump campaign manager traveled to Cuba to meet ‘Castro’s son,’ Senate report says" in early January 2017, "when the Cuban government was looking for insights into President-elect Donald Trump, his former campaign chief, Paul Manafort, traveled to the island to meet with 'Castro’s son,' according to a U.S. Senate report" and the newspaper identified this "son" as Alejandro Castro.

When Raul Castro dies or becomes incapacitated Alejandro Castro will be the new patriarch of the Castro clan that will seek to hang on to power in Cuba. 

How the press and academia has responded to this recycled propaganda campaign illuminates an important reflection by the Spanish philosopher George Santayana:

"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Memory, and retentiveness are defenses against political propaganda and the Orwellian rewriting of history. The Czech writer Milan Kundera in his 1999 novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting observed that "the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." For too long the Castro regime has relied on others forgetting, it is time that more of us remember.

#UPDATE Diaz-Canel, a 57-year-old Communist Party official and the country's current first vice president, is due to be confirmed as the successor to Raul Castro, whose departure will end his family's six-decade grip on power https://t.co/vWBboeOR8l

— AFP News Agency (@AFP) April 18, 2018

The Castro family's six-decade grip on power did not end in 2018, and the Kabuki theater underway at the Cuban Communist Party Conference now in 2021 will not change the Castro dynasty's grip on power in Cuba. To change that will necessitate the international community calling out the Castro dictatorship's crimes, recognizing and engaging in meaningful solidarity with Cuba's nonviolent dissidents, and achieving an international consensus on sanctioning this outlaw regime.  

For the U.S. policy makers it means recognizing that since 1974 five American Presidents have tried to normalize relations with unilateral concessions towards Havana only to suffer foreign policy reversals. The alternative to this realistic historical assessment is to continue a relationship with Cuba that can best be summed up as "Groundhog Day."