Walking along the sea wall of the Malecon one afternoon recently with hundreds of thousands of Cubans demonstrating for the return of Elian, it was remarkable to see how firmly Fidel still holds power. Workers, schoolchildren, students and soldiers lined up not only obediently but energetically to march against imperialismo.

How any of the cheering demonstrators truly felt about the Elian affair and the future of their country was difficult to discern. Maybe they were all feigning enthusiasm to impress the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution cadres overseeing their performance.

Or maybe they weren’t. While the rhetoric blaring from the loudspeakers was strident and banal, the demonstrations nevertheless seemed like a huge citywide festival. Unlike their defunct Soviet sponsors, Castro and his cadres learned long ago how to season their authoritarianism with salsa.

And whatever ultimately happens to Elian, his plight permitted the Cuban authorities to show that they still possess organizing muscle and considerable popular support — even in a period of terrible economic deprivation.

Judging by the size and spirit of the daily rallies outside the U.S. Interest Section, it appeared that the Miami exile directorate had overreached badly this time and offended the pride of the people back home. Their attempt to take a 6-year-old boy from his natural father presented Castro with a perfect symbol of the suffering inflicted on Cuban families by three decades of American sanctions.

In a country where children fall ill and die because they lack medications that, if not for sanctions, would be available from U.S. drug companies, the loud professions of concern by the exile leadership for the well-being of one little boy ring unctuously hollow. Havana’s Catholic prelate has urged the return of Elian to his father and the lifting of sanctions on food and medicine.

Earlier, at the Miami airport, I had observed this political stalemate from the other side, as scores of exile families boarded a plane for Havana with enormous duffel bags of Christmas bounty. For a flight scheduled to depart around 8 a.m., all passengers were required to show up at least five hours earlier to fill out multiple forms and clear their baggage through security.

Such onerous conditions didn’t appear to discourage any of the travelers, however, as they sipped cafe con leche and waited patiently in long lines. A stewardess told me that the airline always flies a Boeing 777 on this route, because only the largest jets in its fleet can accommodate the crowds who now want to make the short trip across the Florida Strait.

When we landed at Josi Martm International Airport, waiting outside the terminal to greet the flight was a large, excited crowd of people barely able to restrain themselves from rushing through the doors. The demand for travel to Cuba by Cuban-Americans is so intense that direct charter flights are now being allowed from New York and Los Angeles, besides Miami. The first New York flight on Dec. 3 was fully booked a month in advance.

As one of the Cuban-Americans making his first trip back explained to me, these mass pilgrimages are a clear repudiation of the old attitude toward the homeland in his community. Intimidating accusations of treason against those who wish to visit Cuba have lost much of the force they once possessed.

“I’m feeling torn about the embargo,” admitted Mario, a businessman from Long Island. Formerly convinced that sanctions should continue forever, he now believes that ending them may eventually bring down the regime he despises. Like certain American policymakers, he also suspects that Castro prefers the status quo, so that he can blame the United States for Cuba’s continuing economic decay.

“I was brought up to think this was all evil,” mused another son of exiles, as we sat on the patio of the Hotel Nacional a few nights later. An executive of an American television company, Henry had come down for the Havana Film Festival, defying the old taboo. “But in spite of the horrible conditions here, a lot of the people seem happy. It’s very confusing.” He does feel certain of one thing, however, which is that the embargo should end as soon as possible.

For younger Cuban-Americans like Henry and Mario, ideology is giving way to their relatives’ need for food and medicine. But humanitarian considerations are hardly the sole reason why the American sanctions policy is increasingly discredited. With a highly educated labor force and vast natural resources, the potential for economic growth in Cuba remains enormous. Castro has grudgingly acknowledged market forces, permitting some expansion of private agriculture and enterprises.

The urgent preservation of Old Havana’s gorgeous but crumbling architecture, for instance, is being partially financed by small businesses set up under the authority of city historian Eusebio Leal, who more resembles an entrepreneur than a commissar. Yet he has set aside a significant share of his growing budget to improve conditions for residents of the neighborhood, a slum where residents rioted a few years ago over the lack of clean water and decent services. His vision of a flourishing community with prosperous small businesses, refurbished housing, popular cultural institutions and new schools sounded more social-democratic than Stalinist.

These are modest hopes, however, in a broad and dismal landscape of poverty. The depressing truth is that those who have dollars in Cuba now eat well, while those who have pesos are often hungry. Clever as he is, Castro has discovered no way to stabilize the dual economy left behind by Soviet Communism’s collapse. Old revolutionary ideals of equality and sacrifice are being challenged by the flourishing black market. I couldn’t walk two blocks in town without being offered stolen Cohiba and Monte Cristo cigars at a tiny fraction of their official price.

Globalization has won. The Revolution — and the counter-revolution — are dead.

The  charge is sensational because Latell is the highest-ranking former CIA official to ever accuse the Cuban leader of personal responsibility for JFK’s death. It is uncorroborated because much of the evidence Latell cites in the book is not in the public record or available to JFK scholars. Even the CIA is keeping its distance. When I asked the Agency to comment on Latell’s thesis on Wednesday, a spokesperson replied, “You can report the CIA declined comment.”

Still, Latell is a former CIA official in good standing, and his allegations signal the CIA may be changing its institutional position on the causes of JFK’s death. As the 50thanniversary of JFK’s death approaches in 2013, Latell’s book indicates the Agency defenders are moving toward “a modified limited hangout” — Washington lingo for a public relations maneuver to release previously hidden information in the service of preventing exposure of more damning detail.

For most of the past five decades the institutional posture of the CIA has said that there is no evidence of  conspiracy in Kennedy’s death and no evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald, a known leftist, acted at Castro’s behest. In 1967, CIA director Richard Helms sent an order to every CIA station in the world ordering them to take steps to combat speculation about Oswald’s motives and associations. The Agency’s line echoed the Warren Commission: that Oswald had killed JFK for reasons known only to himself and anybody who thought differently was irrational or anti-American or both. If Latell, a career CIA employee, had written his book in the 1960s or 1970s, he would have been fired.

Indeed, Latell’s book implies a  harsh assessment of the FBI and the CIA’s performance in 1963. If what he says is true, both agencies were closely watching a known leftist encouraged by a hostile intelligence service and failed to prevent him from killing the president of the United States in broad daylight—and then failed to discern Cuba’s involvement for close to a half-century. Latell, reached by telephone, declined to discuss specifics of the book in advance of its publication in April,  but he did say of the FBI and CIA, “They should have done a better job.” When asked if the CIA or Congress should investigate his findings, Latell said, “I don’t know that they should do anything.”

Latell’s most intriguing contribution is the testimony of Florentino Aspillaga, a career General Directorate of Intelligence officer who defected to the United States in 1987. Latell interviewed him extensively in 2007 and 2008, and found him unusually credible on the workings of the Cuban security forces. Aspillaga told Latell that on Nov. 22, 1963, he was manning a Cuban radio monitoring station that usually focused on Miami or Langley. His bosses, he said, made an unusual request that day: monitor the airwaves in Texas. Soon came the shocking news that JFK had been killed in Dallas. “Castro knew,” Aspillaga is quoted as saying. “They knew Kennedy would be killed.”

This story is worth checking. A number of other credible witnesses (not mentioned by Latell) came forward over the years to say they knew Kennedy’s life was in danger in Dallas. The Cuban intelligence service had many informants among anti-Castro, anti-JFK militants with whom Oswald associated in 1963. It’s quite possible that Cuba has not disclosed all that it knew about the accused assassin.

To buttress his case, Latell cites three other stories, all of them familiar to JFK scholars.

He quotes the reports of Jack Childs, a leader of the American Communist Party who also worked as an FBI informant. Childs met with Castro in May 1964 and reported that the Cuban leader had said that Oswald had told Cuban diplomats that he would kill the president and that Cuba had denied him a visa because of his provocative behavior. When the FBI received Childs’ report, director J. Edgar Hoover downplayed its significance to the Warren Commission.

Latell cites the account of Vladimir Rodriguez Lahera, the member of Cuban intelligence services who defected in early 1964. According to the results of a  lie detector test, Rodriguez Lahera’s answers indicated that Oswald was known to Cuban intelligence services before Kennedy was killed. Rodriguez Lahera was considered credible and worked for the CIA for a couple of years. But as Latell notes, the CIA did not share this information with the Warren Commission.

Latell also cites the intercepted conversation of a woman who worked in the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City named Luisa Calderon. A CIA wiretap picked up her remarks after the assassination in which she said, “I knew about it almost before he [Kennedy] did.” Latell thinks the remark is indicative of foreknowledge of a plot to kill Kennedy. But the CIA’s Mexico City station chief Win Scott didn’t think her comment was significant and he didn’t share it with the Warren Commission.

Which raises an obvious question: If this evidence is so compelling in 2012 why didn’t the CIA and FBI forward it to the Warren Commission for investigation back in 1964? The answer is found in the hundreds of thousands of new JFK documents forced into the public record in the 1990s. The CIA and FBI didn’t investigate what the DGI knew about Oswald in 1964 because any such inquiry would have revealed the curious role that the CIA itself played in the genesis of the “Castro did it” theory.

As I reported for Salon in 2003, within hours of JFK’s murder, an Agency student group in Miami was giving reporters evidence of Oswald’s pro-Castro ways. Declassified CIA records show that the group, Cuban Student Directorate, received $51,00 a month from an undercover CIA officer running  “psychological warfare” operations. The group’s revelations about Oswald’s public support for Castro in New Orleans generated scores of headlines across the country that linked Kennedy’s murder to a “Castroite.” When the Cuban students proclaimed in print the next day that Oswald and Castro were the “presumed assassins,” it was the first JFK conspiracy theory to reach public print. Whether Latell knows it or not, his book is a direct descendant of this CIA-funded operation.

Yet in the days and weeks that followed the CIA blocked investigation of Oswald’s Cuban contacts. When U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Tom Mann pushed for such an investigation in Mexico City in the days after the assassination, Mexico City station chief Win Scott rebuffed him with the support of the FBI. In Langley, the senior CIA official in charge of reviewing Oswald files, John Whitten, wanted to investigate Oswald’s Cuban connections in Miami and New Orleans. He was promptly removed from his position by deputy CIA director Richard Helms.

The problem was that the Agency’s pre-assassination interest in Oswald, far from being “routine” as the CIA told JFK investigators in 1978, was intense. The newly declassified records showed that between 1959 and 1963 more than 40 different reports were placed in Oswald’s file, including State Department cables, intercepted personal letters and FBI reports. When Kennedy was alive, the file was controlled by the Agency’s secretive counterintelligence staff, which is responsible for detecting threats to the Agency’s operations.

Latell is aware of this record. He served as chief of the Agency’s Center for the Study of Intelligence, which oversaw the declassification of the long-secret CIA material between 1994 and 1998. But the book does not address what the  Agency knew about Oswald before the assassination.

And this is what the modified limited hangout of the “Castro did it” theory achieves. It concedes errors and calls attention to new information about JFK’s death while turning public discussion away from the troubling totality of the historical record and the thousands of JFK assassination records that remain secret. We are sure to hear more of the “Castro did it” theory between now and the 50th anniversary of JFK’s death. It deserves the closest scrutiny.

Sarah Stephens, executive director of the Center for Democracy in the Americas, answered my questions on what the new property law means for the future of Cuba.

What exactly does the new law do, and how radical a change is this?

This is a significant change. A free market in housing has not existed in Cuba since 1959. While Cubans had homes, they could not legally buy or sell them. They could swap their residences with others in an informal market. But these transactions required approval by a bureaucracy and often involved payments under the table which were against the law. Under the new rules, the bureaucracy mostly vanishes, homes can be bought and sold normally, and the government will collect a transaction tax.

Do we have a sense of how Cubans feel about this change?

As one Cuban said to us, this change has been long awaited and long desired by the Cuban people. Cuba has a housing shortage.  Several generations of the same families are often crowded into one dwelling, subdivided among them. The housing shortage discourages family formation, and even divorced couples sometimes have to live together because they have no other place to go. Giving Cubans the right to buy and sell their homes will increase mobility, foster capital formation, spur activities like home construction and remodeling, and give Cubans greater choices in where they live (and with whom they live!). This is a big deal.

Can you explain how the law came about?

This reform is something that Cubans have wanted for some time. It was a subject that arose time and again during the debate that President Raul Castro sparked in Cuba about economic reform. It was approved in April 2011 during a meeting of Cuba’s Communist Party. The law was finally issued in November of this year.

Does the new law presage other major reforms by the Raul Castro government?

One analyst referred to the reform process in Cuba as “relentless gradualism,” by which he meant the government would “roll out” reforms not all at once but on a steady and consistent basis. They have difficult issues ahead of them — including the decision already made to lay off from state payrolls hundreds of thousands of workers and the need to merge Cuba’s system of dual currencies. The idea is for a process of stable transition, and bringing the population along as changes — the easier and the harder ones – are made.

Can you give a quick update on Obama’s policy toward Cuba? 

Publicly, President Obama has positioned himself as a skeptic – saying that reforms are good but he hasn’t seen the results yet. On a policy level, however, his decisions to gradually loosen restrictions on travel and remittances to Cuba are in fact acting as supports for the economic reform process. For better or worse, the administration’s strategy is to try and do good things without exciting excess opposition from U.S. hardliners.

They show small groups of activists banging cookware, chanting anti-Castro slogans and “Freedom!” until police and state-security agents arrive to whisk them away.

In some of the videos, larger crowds of Cubans stand around watching the protesters, but they do not join in.

The incidents come after a period of relative calm that followed the Castro government’s move last year to release scores of imprisoned political prisoners, with the Catholic Church playing a mediating role. The amnesty briefly ameliorated criticisms by Western governments and human-rights groups of Cuba’s one-party socialist system and its treatment of non-violent dissenters.

Now activists are once more testing Raul Castro’s tolerance for public protest — and whether the tactics used by tweeting insurgents in the Middle East could spread anti-government sentiment here.

For some time things were OK. My father took over his father’s butcher shop, and my mother took care of me and my older sister. I took to what babies did best: eat, sleep and soil my diapers. Accompanying me in my crib, I had many stuffed animals, but I took a fancy to a small rubber toy cat. When I could talk, I named him Hebertico. No one is sure why I came up with that name but it stuck.

As Castro’s grip tightened over the small island nation, the situation began to change. Neighbors started to disappear. Some went to “El Norte” (the United States). They would leave by plane, or by boats or makeshift rafts. Others were sent to prison or forced labor camps for crimes against the state, and still others faced the firing squad. Most of those people were turned in by neighborhood spies.

These happenings did not affect my family at first. However, soon state rations were being imposed on everything, including food. As the sole proprietor of his business, my father didn’t feel he had to comply with those rules when it came to taking food to his family. But local spies reported my dad just the same. Soon Castro’s “soldiers” — more like armed thugs, really — started to stop by our house when my father was at work, and threaten my mother. By the time I was 4 years old, my parents decided to leave the country.

In those days, regardless of how you got out of Cuba, it was done in a clandestine manner. My mother didn’t even have a chance to tell her parents we were leaving. She just visited them the day before we departed, made some plans for later on in the week, and left my grandparents’ home for the last time.

It was around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis that my parents decided to leave the country. My father’s sister and her family lived in New York City and they were able to sponsor us. On the day we left, we went to the airport where we had to endure endless lines to clear an infinite number of checkpoints. The stations served as a series of humiliating searches, which Cubans leaving the country were forced to undergo. Castro’s government wanted to make sure these “gusanos” (worms or caterpillars), as we were called, did not leave with government property — that is, money, personal jewelry, personal clothing or anything of value. In short, we were only allowed to leave with the clothes on our backs. The only jewelry my mother was able to take was her wedding band. My older sister was permitted one baby doll. I was allowed to take Hebertico.

However, one of the female “inspectors” was convinced that my mother was trying to smuggle more jewelry. After a rigorous pat-down that would shame any American TSA employee, the inspector took Hebertico from my hands and shook him rigorously. Not convinced that my favorite toy was not hiding any of Cuba’s “treasures,” the inspector took a pocket knife and cut a gash into Hebertico’s side. I watched as this “Hero of the Revolution” performed his “duty.”

It was an act of spite — Hebertico is hollow and made of rubber. Before the gash, the only hole he had was the tiny one that came from the manufacturer. It would have been hard to hide anything in him.

After more waiting and harassment, we were allowed to board the plane. The flights had no assigned seats — you just grabbed the first one you could find. I sat with my mother toward the front of the plane; my father and sister toward the back. As a final “bon voyage,” it was common for some of Castro’s soldiers to board the plane, walk up and down the aisle, seize an unlucky passenger, and drag him or her off the plane. As we settled into our seats, my mother grabbed my hand. I looked up at her and saw beads of sweat drip down the side of her face and her eyes bulging with fear. Three “soldiers” boarded our plane and proceeded to walk down the aisle. Then we heard a scream and the thud of a rifle’s butt against flesh.

My mother squeezed my hand tighter. It hurt, but I did not cry. With my free hand, I gripped Hebertico for comfort. Moments later, the soldiers dragged a dazed man with a bloody face off the aircraft. A woman from the back of the plane screamed profanities at them. They yelled back that if she didn’t shut up that they would take her too. Her children cried for her to sit down; she did. The door to the plane closed, the engines started and we took off. My mother released her grip on my hand as tears streamed down her face. I clutched Hebertico.

After a brief stop in Miami, the Freedom Tower or “El Refugio” as we called it, we arrived in New York to start a new life in a strange land.

Eventually, my father found gainful employment and we were able to lead a stable working-class life. He never tried to start a business in New York; he just resigned himself to working in a meat-packing warehouse.

Over the years, Hebertico slept in my bed by my side. As I got older, I would hide him in my pillowcase. Whenever I felt scared in the middle of the night, I would reach for my pillow and clutch Hebertico. In my teen years, I placed Hebertico in the top drawer of my dresser. To this day, he resides in the top drawer of my armoire.

You might wonder how a rubber toy could be a hero. Hebertico was my hero because he was the only constant in my life during those early years. Growing up in a strange land, he was a faithful compass when my world was caught up in a tornado. He was and remains a link to my past.

Many spring cleanings have come and gone and I have parted with many things. Hebertico is the one possession I can never part with. I plan to give him to my daughter, so she can pass him on to her children.  

The declaration raised questions about just how much power Fidel Castro has been wielding behind the scenes — with or without a formal post — and to what extent Raul Castro has had true freedom to make his own decisions.

Castro wrote in an opinion piece that when he got sick in 2006, “I resigned without hesitation from my state and political positions, including first secretary of the party … and I never tried to exercise those roles again.”

He said that even when his health began to improve, he stayed out of state and party affairs “even though everyone, affectionately, continued to refer to me by the same titles.”

Castro’s comments come just weeks ahead of a crucial Communist Party Congress, in which it was widely expected that a new party leader would be picked — presumably his brother. The Congress also is tasked with endorsing a series of major economic changes Raul Castro has enacted since taking over the presidency, including opening the island up to limited private enterprise.

“I think it’s significant, because if nothing else it’s Fidel Castro sending a clear message that his brother is in charge of the country,” said Tomas Bilbao, executive director of the Washington-based nonprofit Cuba Study Group, which supports increasing economic and academic exchanges with the island. “He’s setting the ground ahead of the party congress for there to be a smooth transition.”

The elder Castro stepped down in 2006 due to a serious illness that almost killed him. In an official proclamation released on July 31, 2006, Fidel Castro provisionally delegated most of his official duties to his brother — including the presidency and head of the party.

In February 2008 he announced he was officially stepping down as president, and Raul Castro was formally picked to succeed him by the country’s parliament a few days later. But no reference was made to Fidel leaving his party post, and Cuban officials and ordinary people have referred to him as the party leader ever since.

While the government historically has focused on the day-to-day running of the country, the party is tasked with guiding the Cuban people on their path to communism. In practice, no major policy can be passed without the party first agreeing.

The opinion piece, which was published on the state-run Cubadebate website overnight and in newspapers Tuesday morning, caught many people by surprise.

“It’s incredible. Nobody can believe it,” said Magaly Delgado, a 72-year-old Havana retiree who was clutching a copy of Granma, the Communist Party daily. “I always thought he was still in charge. … He never said he had resigned.”

The Cuban government had no immediate comment on the bizarre revelation, which raises fundamental questions about assumptions that have been made about how Cuba has been led since Raul Castro took over.

Many were slow to acknowledge at first that Raul Castro held any power at all and doubted that the quiet and unassuming younger brother could step out from the shadow of his larger-than-life older sibling. In those initial days, Raul said he would make decisions in consultation with Fidel, though he has not repeated that in recent years.

Doubters — including many in the Cuban-American exile community — pointed to Fidel’s leadership of the party as evidence the arrangement was just for show, despite the fact the elder Castro has since revealed that his 2006 illness put him on the brink of death.

If Fidel’s statement Tuesday is taken at face value, it would suggest that his brother has been flying solo since he took over in 2006, at least officially.

Castro’s traditional foes in the exile community reacted with bewilderment.

“It shows the absolute lack of transparency because for the last five years everyone in Cuba, everyone in the world, thought he was the head of the Communist Party, so it shows how absolutely closed and totalitarian and personal that dictatorship is,” said Mauricio Claver-Carone, director of the Washington-based U.S.-Cuba Democracy PAC. “At the end of the day, only he knew he wasn’t in power.”

Despite the drama of the announcement, it is not clear what importance it has on an island ruled by the force of Fidel Castro’s personality for many decades.

In the opinion piece, Fidel indicates that, with or without formal titles, he will always be an intellectual force in the revolution, a refrain he has uttered several times in recent years.

“I remain and will remain as I have promised: a soldier of ideas, as long as I can think and breath,” he writes.

While nobody was expecting Fidel Castro’s announcement to come the way it did — as a fait accompli thrown into a long opinion piece that otherwise focuses on criticism of President Barack Obama — speculation has been rampant that he would soon step down.

If the 79-year-old Raul Castro moves up to the top spot, it will give the Cuban leaders a chance to pick someone without their famous last name to hold the No. 2 position, potentially tapping a would-be successor after 52 years of uninterrupted rule since they ousted Fulgencio Batista in 1959.

In interviews and public appearances in recent months, Fidel Castro has intimated that he no longer has much say in party business. When he met with Cuban students in November, one asked for his thoughts on the upcoming Congress.

Castro politely brushed the question aside, telling the students he was not meeting with them in his capacity as party chief.

By way of explanation, he added: “I got sick and I did what I had to do: delegate my duties. I cannot do something if I am not in a condition to dedicate all my time to it.”

——

Associated Press writers Laura Wides in Miami, Florida, and Anne-Marie Garcia in Havana contributed to this report.