Cuban President Fidel Castro (Cristobal Herrera/Associated Press)

News of his infirmity — and that he would be relinquishing power for at least several weeks — ricocheted around the world, as well it should have.

Fidel Castro — love him or loathe him — is, after all, a giant of his times, one of the last of the post-Second World War revolutionary leaders. He is also someone who has cheated death before, from no less an opponent than the CIA.

Reaction, though, was decidedly mixed: Thousands of Cuban exiles danced in the streets of Miami's Little Havana anticipating the end of what they see as Castro's autocratic rule while world leaders, for the most part, were much more cautious in their assessment. For many, the troubling sign was that the statement relinquishing power, temporarily, to younger brother Raul Castro was superfluous (Raul has been the constitutional number two for decades) and read out only by a functionary.

It was in Latin America, judging by the press reports and public statements, that the news that Fidel would be having stomach surgery for stress-related internal bleeding really seemed to sink in.

Castro is, after all, about to turn 80 in less than two weeks (on Aug. 13). Taking this and the surgery into account, his "emotional pilgrimage," as it was described two weeks ago when he took Venezuelan ally Hugo Chavez on a tour of the boyhood home of Castro's old revolutionary comrade Ernesto "Che" Guevara, has to be seen in a new light.

Interpreting Castro, of course, has never been easy. Even this statement, ceding power to Raul, is heavily nuanced.

Raul is to be the "ultimate authority." But on close reading, the statement also cedes important areas of responsibility such as the economy or foreign affairs, for example, to key individuals in the quartet of senior ministers who have basically been guiding Cuba for a decade or more.

They include (apart from Raul): Ricardo Alarcon, Cuba's former ambassador to the UN and now the president of the National Assembly; Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque; and Carlos Lage Davila, the executive secretary to the cabinet and the country's energy czar.

They are to act as a kind of governing committee, which many observers expect to be the way Cuba is run, at least for a time, in a post-Fidel era. But one of these men should emerge, within a few years, as the real power on the island and some analysts say the jockeying has already begun.

The contenders

Raul Castro

Raul Castro (Jose Goitia/Associated Press)

At 75, he is Fidel's younger brother by five years and for probably all but that time he has been by his side — at school, in jail, in their guerrilla hideaways leading up to the 1959 revolution, and in power. An early member of the Communist Party, Raul is much shorter, much more dogmatic and much less charismatic than his older brother. As a result, and because of his age, few expect him to be president for long or as other than a transitional figure.

Castro himself has made no secret of the fact that he is more strictly socialist and more anti-Washington even than his older brother. So he would not be the choice of those in the Cuban leadership who want to try to negotiate an end to the long-running U.S. boycott of Cuba, the dominant political issue on the island.

What's more, Raul Castro has considerable Cold War baggage that would make a real presidency by him problematic, even to a country like Canada, which has tried to be supportive of Cuba over the years.

As head of the armed forces, the younger Castro played a prime role in trying to bring Soviet warheads to Cuba in 1962 during the Nuclear Missile Crisis. He also lent out Cuban troops as mercenaries to Angola and Ethiopia during some of Africa's bloodier wars of liberation in the 1970s and early '80s.

With a reputation as Fidel's enforcer, Raul Castro was head of the army when it carried out a brutal execution of senior officers from the Batista regime in the early years in power. More recently he was reported to have been involved in the purges and jailings of political dissidents and intellectuals, activities that brought censure to Cuba at the UN in 1999 and 2001.

Ricardo Alarcon

Ricardo Alarcon (Paul Chiasson/Canadian Press)

He is number three in official rank (after Fidel and Raul) and many expect Alarcon, currently the president of Cuba's National Assembly, to ascend to the top job after Fidel goes, depending perhaps on how long the jostling for power takes. He is probably the compromise establishment choice if such a thing can be said to exist in Cuba. He is also said by some to have a common touch. Evidence for this is that he is driven about in a Russian-built Lada.

Described as a modest man with the demeanour of a senior civil servant by a Canadian businessman who has met him, Alarcon has been through the foreign affairs wars on behalf of Cuba. But at 69, he is also a visceral link to its revolutionary past.

Alarcon was drawn to Castro's 26th of July Movement as a young student of 18 and was instrumental in organizing its youth brigade. As his reward, he was appointed to a senior position within the ministry of foreign affairs at the tender age of 25, not long after graduating the University of Havana with a degree in philosophy. He never looked back.

Alarcon was Cuba's permanent representative at the UN in New York between 1966 and 1978 where, among other things, he co-chaired the committee on the rights of the Palestinian people. As a result, perhaps, he has been unusually harsh of late on Israel and the U.S. over the current conflict in Lebanon, calling the U.S. president, "the real terrorist" for not throwing his weight behind a UN ceasefire.

He is also, it appears, the most comfortable of the Castro ministers in English and with the idiom of American politics, so he is often the one to deal with the international press when any kind of important incident pops up.

Felipe Perez Roque

Felipe Perez Roque (Jose Goitia/Associated Press)

At 41, Perez is the youngest of the potential successors but he also represents an important demographic within Cuba: His touchstone is not the Castro revolution but the U.S. economic blockade of the island, which is now 46 years old, the longest in modern history, and a source of considerable hardship for ordinary Cubans.

The foreign affairs minister has spent his entire life under the blockade and, judging by the public speeches he made a year ago when he visited Canada, it's an issue that seems to consume him. He describes Cuba as a "country under siege" as a result of the American boycott but he also seems open to negotiating an end to it and accepting a much more open economy.

Perez's claim to fame — and also his weakness — is that he was Fidel's loyal, some say fanatical, chief of staff for ten years, beginning when Perez was 21. This gave him a close-up view of government but it also leaves him without a high-profile mentor once Castro is gone.

Newsweek magazine reports that Perez has been trying to undermine Alarcon in recent months. Though whether that's connected to leadership or the natural rivalry of two foreign affairs spokesmen is hard to decipher.

Perez has been foreign affairs minister since 1999 and he does have a tart tongue. He even took Canada and Mexico to task a few years ago, two countries that have been broadly supportive of Cuba over the years and are also significant trading partners. When the former Chrétien government was hosting the Summit of the Americas in 2001 and wouldn't invite Cuba because of its poor democratic record, Perez and his officials lashed out at Canada for being a puppet of Washington's anti-Cuban policy and for having a "dubious record" of its own on the issue of native rights.

Carlos Lage Davila

Carlos Lage Davila (Tom Hanson/Canadian Press)

To most of the international community, Lage is the least well known of the potential successors. But inside the country, he is the man with his finger on the key sectors, particularly energy, trade and currency. In his mid-50s, he has had what's been called a history of achievement when it comes to the case of Cuba's cash-strapped economy.

In the early 1990s, during a stint as adviser to Castro, he initiated a series of economic reforms that allowed for limited land holdings and small business initiatives.

His most recent coup was negotiating a guaranteed supply of subsidized oil from fellow leftists in Venezuela, in exchange for medicines and a small army of 2,000 Cuban doctors and health professionals to live in Venezuela for a time and treat that country's poor.

A doctor by training, a pediatrician in fact, Lage is one of those technocrats who seems to adapt quickly to other disciplines and has become Cuba's primary economic fixer. His leadership advantage, should it come to that, is that he is a good Communist who was rising on his own up the party ranks when he was spotted and advanced by Raul Castro, with whom Lage is said to be close.

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