In this photo downloaded from the state media Cubadebate web site, Cuba's Fidel Castro meets with a group of Cuban and foreign intellectuals who are attending Havana's International Book Fair, in Havana, Cuba, Tuesday Feb. 15, 2011. (AP Photo/Roberto Chile, Cubadebate)(Credit: AP)
Fidel Castro said Tuesday he resigned five years ago from all his official positions, including head of Cuba’s Communist Party, a pre-eminent job in the island’s political pantheon that he was thought to still hold.
It was the first time the 84-year-old revolutionary icon has said he no longer heads the Communist Party, which he has led since its creation in 1965. The Communist Party website still lists him as first secretary, with his brother President Raul Castro listed as second secretary.
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.”
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Associated Press writers Laura Wides in Miami, Florida, and Anne-Marie Garcia in Havana contributed to this report.
U.S. President Barack Obama practices his soccer dribbling abilities as he plays with local children during his tour of the Ciudad de Deus Favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Sunday, March 20, 2011. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)(Credit: AP)
Immersing himself in Brazil’s poverty and pride, President Barack Obama on Sunday held up the South American nation as a model of democratic change in a time of uprisings and crackdowns across the Arab world and yet another war front for the United States.
From Rio’s glamorous beaches to a notorious slum to an elegant theater, Obama glimpsed the city’s cultural extremes and offered the kind of personal engagement that can pay political dividends for years. Less than one day after announcing U.S. military strikes against Libya’s government, Obama made time to kick a soccer ball around with kids in a shantytown.
The competing stories of Obama’s itinerary — a war front in Africa, an economic commitment to South America — divided his time in incongruous ways. By morning, he spoke with his security team about the international assault against Moammar Gadhafi’s defenses; by night, he was to stand atop a mountain and admire Rio’s world famous statue of Jesus.
Meanwhile, U.S. warplanes pounded faraway Libya.
It was all summed up by one image: Obama, adeptly juggling a soccer ball, as his aides helped him juggle his agenda.
In a speech, Obama celebrated Brazil as a place that has shifted from dictatorship to democracy, moving millions into its middle class and embracing human rights. He underlined that point as unrest sweeps the Middle East and north Africa, leading to dramatic change in some cases and violent crisis in Libya.
“As two nations who have struggled over many generations to perfect our own democracies, the United States and Brazil know that the future of the Arab world will be determined by its people,” Obama told an invitation-only crowd inside an ornate hall here.
“No one can say for certain how this change will end, but I do know that change is not something that we should fear,” he said. “When young people insist that the currents of history are on the move, the burdens of the past are washed away.”
His speech and his whole trip to this region have been overshadowed by the onset of war in Libya. Obama has tried to find a balance of showing command of the war strategy without altering his diplomatic mission or offending his hosts in Latin America.
And on Sunday, he was determined to be with his family, get among the people and feel the culture.
Obama and his family visited the City of God shantytown that gained fame through a movie of the same name. The slum is undergoing a transformation as Rio works to improve the plight of its poorest people and clean up its reputation ahead of hosting the 2016 summer Olympics.
Obama, his wife Michelle and their daughters, Malia and Sasha, watched young children pound on drums and perform a dazzling acrobatic dance. And then all the Obamas took turns at a little soccer, led by the president.
Obama chose a community center in the heart of one of more than 1,000 slums, or “favelas,” that dot the urban hills surrounding the city. The tour was designed to illustrate Obama’s push for what officials call citizen security, an emerging concern in Latin American countries as they wrestle with narco-crime and poverty.
Dozens of young children pressed up against a chain-link fence trying to get a look at Obama; the president ultimately stepped outside and gave a big wave.
Obama’s route to the slum was itself a contrast of life. The president began and ended his day in a hotel that fronted the famed Copacabana beach, where tourists and locals in bathing suits soaked in the sun and watched for his motorcade.
“He is thinking of Rio as more than just the Christ and Copacabana,” said Noemia Marinho, a 40-year-old lingerie saleswoman who lives in the slum and had her hair done just for the president’s visit. “Maybe our government will look to us more as well.”
The president’s tour had an underlying goal of endearing him to a diverse and multicultural country where his personal story already makes him popular. Obama is trying to bolster ties to Brazil — and do the same in Chile and El Salvador over the next three days — as way to boost the economic, security and political interests of the United States.
Obama delivered his speech at the Theatro Municipal performance hall that sits on Cinelandia Plaza, a historic square that was the scene of a 1984 protest that set the stage for the eventual end of a 20-year military dictatorship.
Here, once again, Obama made a game effort to connect to the locals. That included making a solid effort at speaking some Portuguese, drawing some cheers and a few wry smiles from the audience.
He thanked those in attendance for showing up despite the fact that a soccer match between two of Rio de Janeiro’s biggest rival teams, Vasco and Botafogo, would begin a few hours after his speech. The very mention of the match in soccer-obsessed Brazil provoked a strong reaction from the fans of the competing teams in the audience.
“For so long, you were called a country of the future, told to wait for a better day that was always just around the corner,” Obama said. “Meus amigos, that day has finally come.”
The speech was originally billed as an outdoor event on the plaza open to all, but U.S. officials decided at the last-minute to move inside as logistics, costs and other concerns mounted. That sharply reduced the ability of many people to see him. It also lowered Obama’s profile on a day when the attention back home was focused squarely on the war.
The president was ending his stay in Rio with a nighttime walking tour of Corcovado Mountain to the Christ the Redeemer Statue that is the very symbol of the city. He and his family were flying to Santiago, Chile, on Monday morning.
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Associated Press writers Jim Kuhnhenn and Juliana Barbassa in Rio de Janeiro and Bradley Brooks in Sao Paulo contributed to this report.
FILE - In this July 16, 2008 file photo, Carlos Pascual, listens during a press conference in Berlin. U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Carlos Pascual, who criticized his host government's handling of the drug problem in a cable divulged by the WikiLeaks website, has resigned, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Saturday, March 19, 2011. (AP Photo/Franka Bruns, File)(Credit: AP)
The U.S. ambassador to Mexico resigned Saturday amid furor over a leaked diplomatic cable in which he complained about inefficiency and infighting among Mexican security forces in the campaign against drug cartels.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in Paris to meet with U.S. allies on Libya, said Carlos Pascual’s decision to step down was “based upon his personal desire to ensure the strong relationship between our two countries and to avert issues” raised by President Felipe Calderon.
Clinton didn’t say specifically what she was referring to, but a furious Calderon has publicly criticized Pascual’s cable, which was divulged by the WikiLeaks website.
Pascual’s resignation — less than two weeks since President Barack Obama met with Calderon at the White House — appeared to be the biggest fallout yet from thousands of sensitive U.S. diplomatic cables from around the world released by WikiLeaks. It was the first such public departure by a U.S. ambassador during the Obama administration.
Mexico’s government offered a polite and muted response, offering “its best wishes to Ambassador Carlos Pascual in the duties he will undertake after concluding his post in our country.”
“Institutional contacts between both countries are solid, as it should be between the neighboring and friendly countries with common goals,” Calderon’s office said in a statement. “The Mexican government reiterates its commitment to consolidating the principles of shared responsibility, trust and mutual respect as the basis of bilateral ties with the United States.”
Clinton took the unusual step of announcing the departure of an individual member of the diplomatic corps, and while she was on the road meeting with U.S. allies to discuss the commencement of military attacks on Moammar Gadhafi’s Libyan government.
She went to lengths to praise Pascual’s work in Mexico and said the Obama administration never lost confidence in him. Clinton said Pascual’s work with Mexico to build institutions capable of fighting drug traffickers “will serve both our nations for decades.”
She added that she was “particularly grateful to Carlos for his efforts to sustain the morale and security of American personnel after tragic shootings in Mexico” that killed a U.S. employee, her husband and a Mexican tied to the consulate in the border city of Ciudad Juarez last year.
“It is with great reluctance that President Obama and I have acceded to Carlos’s request” to step down, Clinton said in a statement.
The ambassador’s resignation, however, laid bare how difficult relations between the U.S. Embassy and the Mexican government had become since the release of the cable in December.
Calderon has made no secret of his personal anger at Pascual.
“I do not have to tell the U.S. ambassador how many times I meet with my security Cabinet. It is none of his business. I will not accept or tolerate any type of intervention,” Calderon said in an interview with the newspaper El Universal in late February. “But that man’s ignorance translates into a distortion of what is happening in Mexico, and affects things and creates ill-feeling within our own team.”
Pascual also may have ruffled feathers in the Mexican government and Calderon’s National Action Party by dating the daughter of Francisco Rojas, the congressional leader of the former longtime ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party. Mexican officials and the U.S. Embassy have declined to comment on that matter.
One of the leaked diplomatic cable that most angered Calderon was dated Jan. 29, 2010, and referred to friction between Mexico’s army and navy while detailing an operation that led to the death of drug lord Arturo Beltran Leyva.
Pascual said the U.S., which had information locating Beltran Leyva, originally took it to the army, which refused to move quickly. Beltran Leyva was eventually brought down in a shootout with Mexican marines, which have since taken the lead in other operations against cartel capos.
Other U.S. Embassy cables released since have reported jealousies and a lack of coordination between various Mexican security forces.
Their release has marred a relationship that both the United States and Mexico have for years touted as being stronger than ever.
Washington supports Mexico’s war against drug trafficking with more than $1 billion in equipment and training, and has frequently praised Calderon’s government for bringing down an unprecedented number of top drug lords. Mexico, in turn, has extradited a record number of trafficking suspects to the U.S. for prosecution, a step Mexico was long reluctant to take.
But the Calderon government has become testy when U.S. officials express serious concern about the growing violence in Mexico, where more than 35,000 people have been killed in drug gang violence since Calderon launched a military offensive against cartels in 2006. Calderon publicly criticized Clinton last year when she suggested Mexico was starting to resemble Colombia two decades ago.
Pressure had increased on Pascual in recent weeks, but the State Department had vigorously defended him, praising him at a March 4 briefing for his “tremendous work on behalf of the U.S.-Mexican bilateral relationship.”
“I know of no plans to adjust his status,” the department spokesman at the time, P.J. Crowley, insisted. He added that Clinton was fully behind Pascual.
The State Department took the same stand as recently as Thursday. “We have full confidence in our ambassador,” State Department spokesman Mark Toner said. He said Pascual was doing “stellar work” and no change was being contemplated.
Pascual, a Cuban-American who was the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 2000 to 2003, was appointed to the Mexican post in June 2009.
It was unclear when he would leave Mexico or when his replacement would be named. Clinton said she has asked Pascual to stay on for the time being to ensure “an orderly transition.”
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Associated Press writers Merrill Hartson and Bradley Klapper in Washington contributed to this report.
(This version CORRECTS that three people tied to the Juarez consulate, not four, were killed last year.)
U.S. President Barack Obama, left, with Brazilian President Dilma Vana Rousseff, right, during their joint news conference at the Palacio do Planalto in Brasilia, Brazil, Saturday, March 19, 2011. Obama welcomed Brazil's rise as an economic power and said the United States would be an eager customer for its oil exports as he opened a Latin America tour against the backdrop of an escalating Western military showdown with Libya's Moammar Gadhafi. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)(Credit: AP)
Seeking to link his Latin American tour to job growth back home, President Barack Obama said the U.S. was eager to sell its goods and services to economically booming Brazil’s growing middle class. The president’s economic message, however, was overshadowed by events in Libya, where a western coalition launched a risky offensive against Moammar Gadhafi.
After an early morning arrival in Brazil’s capital, Obama held meetings with newly elected President Dilma Rousseff, then addressed a joint meeting of U.S. and Brazilian business leaders. He praised Brazil’s economic ascent, and said American workers stood to benefit from increased ties with the world’s seventh-largest economy
“As the United States looks to Brazil, we see the chance to sell more goods and services to a rapidly-growing market of around 200 million consumers,” Obama said. “For us, this is a jobs strategy.”
Executives from a number of American corporations, including International Paper, Cargill, Citigroup and Coca-Cola, participated in the CEO session.
Obama began his three-country, five-day tour of Latin America against the backdrop of ominous developments in earthquake-ravaged Japan, where officials struggle to prevent a meltdown at a damaged nuclear power plant, and in Libya, where a U.S. and European coalition launched a risky military operation to protect civilians from attacks by Gadhafi’s force.
The White House said Obama was briefed on developments in Libya early Saturday by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and national security adviser Tom Donilon.
US President Barack Obama, far left, with first lady Michelle Obama, far right, and daughters Malia, and Sasha, center, during their airport arrival at Brasilia Air Base in Brasilia, Brazil, Saturday, March 19, 2011. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)(Credit: AP)
President Obama is in Brazil this weekend as part of a five-day tour through South America. While the focus of the trip is to encourage stronger trade relations between the two countries, conservative critics are painting it as a “Rio vacation.” This after a week in which the president sustained significant right-wing blowback for filling out an NCAA bracket on ESPN and playing golf as turmoil escalated in Libya and Japan.
In particular, Newt Gingrich and Sean Hannity hammered the president over the trip, while New York Daily News columnist Andrea Tantaros said Obama has “priority issues” during an appearance on “The O’Reilly Factor.”
The most incendiary optics, however, came by way of Fox Business host Eric Bolling, who spent a chunk of his program last night painting a picture of Obama as aloof and out of touch. During one bewildering stretch, he insisted that Obama would spend the trip with his wife “spreading suntan lotion on each other” and “sipping caipirinhas on Air Force One — our Air Force One — while Rome burns.”
The Daily Beast’s Mac Margolis comes to the president’s defense, pointing out that Latin America — and Brazil, in particular — is a strategically important region that’s vital to the United State’s economic well-being, both now and in the long-term:
At a time when global markets are still struggling, Latin America may be one of the few sources of good news for recovering U.S. economy and a rare opportunity to tap new alliances… Critics fault Obama for a trip that will produce no new treaty and no bold policy initiative for the region… But in a way, his visit is confirmation of a region on the rise.
Likewise, liberal radio host Leslie Marshall lambasted conservative attacks on the president, pointing out that the trip has been scheduled for months.
Despite scant evidence that the president will be reclining beachside, piña colada in hand, there’s little indication that this conservative media narrative will cool in the coming days.
What connections can be drawn between astronomers who study distant stars and galaxies, archaeologists who study pre-Columbian petroglyphs and mummified human remains, and women searching for loved ones who disappeared during Chile’s 1970s military dictatorship? In Patricio Guzmán’s almost metaphysical documentary “Nostalgia for the Light,” Chile’s Atacama Desert — often described as the driest place on Earth — is depicted as the site of all these explorations. This film demands patience from the viewer, unfolding its themes and its spectacular images gradually. But it packs a potent intellectual and emotional wallop, combining a post-Augustinian philosophical consideration of time with a passionate desire to uncover Chile’s painful recent history.
A veteran Chilean leftist who spent many years in exile after the 1973 military coup that overthrew the democratic socialist government of Salvador Allende, Guzmán became famous throughout the film world for his three-part documentary “The Battle of Chile,” which captured all the drama and tragedy of his country’s revolution and counterrevolution. It’s one of the greatest living-history pictures ever made, as well as a work of ardent political advocacy that influenced a generation of young radical filmmakers all over the world. (I’m confident that Michael Moore, Oliver Stone and Ken Loach, for instance, would agree.)
Almost four decades after Gen. Augusto Pinochet ousted Allende and installed a murderous right-wing junta (warmly embraced, of course, by the United States), Guzmán remains hypnotized by that history. (He has also made films about Pinochet and Allende, as well as a documentary about his own return to Chile in 1997.) Traveling into the Atacama turns out to be at once a way of transcending that fixation and of going into it more deeply. Astronomers come there from all nations because the humidity-free skies render celestial bodies brilliantly clear; archaeologists come there because human remains and artifacts from thousands of years ago are perfectly preserved; and bereaved mothers, wives and sisters come there because Pinochet’s regime apparently buried the bodies of hundreds of kidnapped and executed dissidents there in the ’70s and ’80s.
All these people, Guzmán observes, are concerned with the past, and at least indirectly with the most profound and unanswerable questions about the nature and meaning of human existence. (Remember that the starlight we see from Earth has been traveling through space for many years; astronomers viewing the most distant galaxies are literally looking billions of years back in time.) As one astronomer explains, there is almost no such thing as the present — a fact observed by St. Augustine 1,600 years ago — and another observes that the atoms of calcium in the bones of Indians and dissidents interred in the Atacama were forged long ago by the stars, perhaps in the Big Bang itself. Guzmán even finds a young female astronomer whose parents were killed by Pinochet’s goons when she was a year old, and who finds in her profession a transcendent understanding that has eased her pain. (If the final scenes of her with her newborn don’t leave you weeping, irrespective of your politics, I don’t know what to say.) “Nostalgia for the Light” is less a conventional documentary than a work of poetic imagination or a nontheistic spiritual meditation. Enormously moving and wondrous to behold, it looks for a peaceful equilibrium in the universe that its creator’s home country may never find in itself.
“Nostalgia for the Light” is now playing at the IFC Center in New York. It opens March 25 in Seattle; April 1 in Vancouver, Canada; April 22 in Los Angeles and Washington; and May 13 in San Francisco, with more cities to follow.
In this photo downloaded from the state media Cubadebate web site, Cuba's Fidel Castro meets with a group of Cuban and foreign intellectuals who are attending Havana's International Book Fair, in Havana, Cuba, Tuesday Feb. 15, 2011. (AP Photo/Roberto Chile, Cubadebate)(Credit: AP) 
U.S. President Barack Obama practices his soccer dribbling abilities as he plays with local children during his tour of the Ciudad de Deus Favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Sunday, March 20, 2011. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)(Credit: AP) 
FILE - In this July 16, 2008 file photo, Carlos Pascual, listens during a press conference in Berlin. U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Carlos Pascual, who criticized his host government's handling of the drug problem in a cable divulged by the WikiLeaks website, has resigned, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Saturday, March 19, 2011. (AP Photo/Franka Bruns, File)(Credit: AP) 
U.S. President Barack Obama, left, with Brazilian President Dilma Vana Rousseff, right, during their joint news conference at the Palacio do Planalto in Brasilia, Brazil, Saturday, March 19, 2011. Obama welcomed Brazil's rise as an economic power and said the United States would be an eager customer for its oil exports as he opened a Latin America tour against the backdrop of an escalating Western military showdown with Libya's Moammar Gadhafi. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)(Credit: AP) 
US President Barack Obama, far left, with first lady Michelle Obama, far right, and daughters Malia, and Sasha, center, during their airport arrival at Brasilia Air Base in Brasilia, Brazil, Saturday, March 19, 2011. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)(Credit: AP) 
A still from "Nostalgia for the Light" 
