but I am dubious on how much Fidel will back away from power as long as he is alive. He has been running the country for the last 49 years. He is not going to fade away.

I believe that he will probably end up doing what Mexican president Plutarco Elias Calles did from 1928 to 1934: rule from a far by appointing amiable administrator "presidents" to take care of the day-to-day matters of government.

In the case of Calles, the problem was that he couldn't re-elect himself, but he was the only true unifying power in Mexico at the time. Calles was eventually displaced by one of his chosen puppets, but the party system that he set up lived for another 70 years.

Castro is the unifying power broker in Cuba to this day. He can't run the government because he is to ill to do so. He will still have a strong influence in Cuban politics until he dies, unless one of the new presidents can successfully wrestle the loyalty of Cuban politicians away from Castro.

And he succeeded in killing her father after she fled to the States with her mother.  I'm glad he's retiring, but I know that for a lot of people, they won't judge this chapter of Cuba's history to be over until God finally gets his chance to cast judgement, too.

And Hugo is right--as long as Fidel is alive and coherent, he'll call the shots. The interesting thing will be to see how things shake out after he dies.

Cuba would be lucky as all getout to find themselves a Lazaro Cardenas.

Hopefully they will :)

I was an 8 year old Army brat in Germany in October 1962. My dad disappeared for three weeks, and mom had to figure out our chances of making it to the Channel coast in France in a Chevy Impala once the tanks came over the border. It didn't look good.

I spent three tours in Germany during and just after the Cold War.  I remember those NEO drills well.  (Noncombatant Evacuation Operation)  I was never convinced that we were going to be successful in getting all the family members out in time.  At the height of the Cold War in the 1980's, I was one of those who advocated removing all family members from Germany and making it a short tour area, like Korea.

God bless you and your mother.  You were very brave.

Spent a goodly chunk of the 80s in the Fulda Gap (speedbump to the Soviets!) and as far I knew, everyone's dad disappeared in the middle of the night for weeks at a time, and regularly had tanks roll past their front door on exercise.  

Good times.

I'm glad you enjoyed your days in the Gap.

I spent 1981-85 working NATO war plans and exercises.  What the family members didn't know kept them blissfully relaxed.  "Speedbump" is an apt description for most of our General Defense Plan.  I'll give you a hint of what was in store if the balloon went up:  we had to have contingencies for getting all the civilians off of the autobahns so that we could blow up the interchanges and bridges with nuclear demolitions.

It would have been ugly.  I am so greatful that we never had execute the plans.

I don't think anyone but the most sheltered stairwell dwellers  had any misconceptions about how things would turn out, if it ever went down.  Nonetheless, I did have my own personal space scoped out under a bridge next to my house.  There may well be still be some of the MREs I stashed behind some blocks there.  I was once an optimist, it seems.

~

But speaking of Blackhorse - I went back a few years ago.  It was so strange to see what was once the perfectly kept home of the American military ground forces spear's tip in shambles.  See, for example, this photo.  That said, I think it's a damn good thing that it can now be a shambles.  A bit of evidence that the right things can happen, despite man's failings.

I'm glad that we got to see it falling apart from disuse rather than as smoking rubble.

Yeah, this is hope for this world.

Those were scary times, luckily I was way too young to understand what was going on! :)

P.S. On the other hand, I do remember "duck and cover" drills when I was in kindergarten and 1st grade in NY City in the late 1960s.

worried quite a bit about whether there was going to be a nuclear war.  All during the early 60s there was that sensation that if the war ever came you were at ground zero and bound to be incinerated or at least badly hurt.  My father did a lot of reading on atomic bombs, and I remember when we first got our house my parents had a serious discussion about trying to build a shelter.  After some research my father decided it would be a futile gesture that close in to DC.  

My mother was employed at the CIA and our family lived in Pimmit Hills, just outside of Falls Church City.  Mom's job was in the Operations Center, where she typed the action reports which went straight to the desk of the director of the CIA.  

I was about 6 years old at the time and have clear memories of my white-faced mother coming home extremely late on several nights, huddling with my father for hours as they whispered about possibly having him drive the family to Massachusetts to her relatives while she stayed behind.  She was very close-lipped about what exactly was going on, but the anxiety, even to my child's mind, was palpable and intense.  Eventually they decided to keep the family together.  

I remember asking my parents, probably repeatedly, why we might have to leave our home.  They struggled to tell me without frightening me, and my father the high school history teacher told a convoluted story about the Reds, particularly the Red Chinese, wanting to take over the country, which I read as meaning that they were coming to Pimmit Hills.  For several days I had a recurring nightmare about red-clad Asians (I'd only seen pictures and had never met one) coming to my neighborhood and taking our house.  In the nightmare I was allowed to stay because red was my favorite color, but the rest of my family had to leave.  Boy, did I feel guilty about that.

It was the Cuban Missile Crisis and JFK's assassination which sparked my endless fascination with history and politics, which eventually morphed into an attraction to the law, so I guess I have Fidel to thank for my decision to become a lawyer.

I'm a young'un and never remember the Cold War (though my family did move from Italy to Colombia to flee the rising Communist party there, and then back to Italy when Castro, Guevara, and his bunch starting romping around South America), but to be totally fair, the United States had short and medium range ballistic missiles awfully close to Moscow long before the Soviets decided to park their bombs in Cuba for a couple weeks.

Yes that was a scary confrontation, but is it really fair to criticize the Russians' decision to do exactly what we were doing to them?  If you were a superpower wouldn't you do just the same?

It was Kennedy's decision to station nuclear missiles in Turkey that started the Cuban Missile Crisis.

What you need to understand to have the historical perspective is that there was an enormous imbalance of conventional forces between NATO and the Warsaw Pact.  The Soviets alone had an estimate 65 armored and mechanized divisions in East Germany alone.  The US, by comparison, had only four heavy divisions and two armored cavalry regiments in West Germany.  Our nuclear capability was supposed to be the balancing deterent.

In the 1980's, we had nuclear parity with the Soviets, but were woefully outgunned in conventional ground forces.  So, we used the Pershing II and the Ground-Launched Cruise Missile nuclear deployments as a bargaining chip.  The Soviets agree to limit the number of tanks, artillery, and attack aircraft located west of the Ural Mountains in exchange for our cancelling the Pershing II and GLCM.

n/t