When Tucson legislator Bruce Wheeler and his family left a Cuban jazz club last Friday they saw crowds of people milling around the streets of Havana, but nobody mentioned the enormous news of the night.
Longtime Cuban leader Fidel Castro, 90, had died a half-hour earlier. The news didn’t reach Wheeler until Saturday morning when a relative in Nebraska contacted them to make sure they were OK.
By that time, the normally bustling streets of Havana were “eerily quiet,” Wheeler said.
Wheeler, a Democratic state legislator from Tucson whose grandfather was Cuban, spent a week in Cuba to celebrate his son’s birthday and to take in the sights of a land “frozen in time,” with crumbling buildings and 1957 Chevys cruising the streets, he said.
Upon learning of Castro’s death, Wheeler asked a woman cooking nearby what she thought. She responded nonchalantly, “Oh, yeah. He died last night.”
The woman told him her family was split when it came to Castro. She and her husband didn’t like Castro, but her mother-in-law was a Castro supporter, Wheeler said Tuesday from St. Petersburg, Florida, the final stop before returning to Tucson.
“One is in mourning, the others are not,” he said of the cook’s family. “Officially, of course, everyone is in mourning.”
Castro led an armed revolution that overthrew the government of dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959. Castro held power until 2006, when he ceded control to his brother Raul.
Castro’s Cuba endured decades of a U.S. economic embargo and became a Cold War flashpoint in 1962 that nearly led to nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. In the process, Castro became a leading voice for leftist leaders in Latin America and elsewhere, as well as a dictator in his own right.
In 2009, Human Rights Watch called the Castro brothers’ rule a “system of abusive laws and institutions” that led to the arrests of hundreds of political prisoners for staging peaceful marches, criticizing the government in news articles, and trying to create independent unions. Other activities deemed by the government to be “dangerous” included failing to join official party organizations or attend pro-government rallies.
Like the cook’s family, some older Cubans supported Castro until his death, while others opposed him, Wheeler said.
As the country entered a national nine-day mourning period, students gathered on the steps of the University of Havana to honor Castro, Wheeler said. Many in the younger generation, which is made up of a well-educated workforce, want jobs.
The mourning period also spurred a cab driver to grumble to Wheeler, “Nine days. I can’t make any money for nine days.”
Raul Castro is now 85 and pledged to step down in 2018 after his term as president expires.
The question of the moment is whether post-Castro Cuba will resemble post-war Vietnam, which saw an influx of investment and economic growth, Wheeler said, or the chaotic days following the fall of the Soviet Union.
“It’s like Trump; We don’t know what’s going to change, but it’s coming quickly,” Wheeler said.
President Obama opened relations with Cuba in recent years for the first time in decades. On Nov. 28, President-elect Donald Trump said via Twitter he could pull back from that opening if a “better deal” isn’t worked out.
