THE VELVET EDGE | GMJOE™ CONSULTING
What if the final triumph of the Castro revolution is its ability to disappear without surrendering power?
By Joe Cozart | October 24, 2026
The revolution promised eternity. Miami issued a warrant.
Raúl Castro, ninety-five years old and among the last surviving architects of Cuba’s revolutionary establishment, now confronts an American criminal proceeding arising from the 1996 destruction of two civilian aircraft operated by Brothers to the Rescue.
Four men died. Thirty years later, a Florida court has supplied something the revolutionary imagination rarely anticipated: an allegation of criminal responsibility directed at one of its supposedly indispensable figures.
The warrant may never produce an arrest. Its significance lies elsewhere.
The Castro era may be approaching its conclusion without the Castro system having any particular intention of disappearing.
And therein lies the Cuban paradox.
For nearly seven decades, the revolution insisted upon its historical permanence. Its ideology was sacred, its leadership indispensable, its sacrifices beyond reconsideration. To question the government was to question the revolution; to question the revolution was to betray the country.
It was an efficient arrangement, particularly for those permitted to determine what constituted betrayal.
But perhaps the ideology was never the permanent asset.
Perhaps it was merely the instrument through which a remarkably durable concentration of economic and institutional authority was assembled.
An ideology may become obsolete. A governing mythology may exhaust its audience. A population may develop the inconvenient preference for electricity, income, and unrestricted movement over another ceremonial celebration of historical sacrifice.
The institutions controlling property, commercial access, financing, employment, and economic opportunity are under no corresponding obligation to disappear.
They may simply change their explanations.
Imagine the possibilities.
The revolutionary establishment announces that history has entered a new phase. International investors are welcomed. State enterprises become commercial corporations. Ministries acquire investment advisers. The language of collective ownership gives way to innovation, competitiveness, and sustainable development.
The officials who spent their professional lives denouncing capitalism discover that capitalism possesses certain admirable characteristics.
Particularly when they are permitted to become the capitalists.
Yesterday’s revolutionary administrator becomes tomorrow’s chairman. The ministry becomes a holding company. The party committee becomes a board of directors. The nationalized hotel becomes an investment opportunity.
Fidel’s photograph disappears from the lobby, replaced by an abstract sculpture and a corporate mission statement promising transparency.
The personnel remain reassuringly familiar.
One suspects the consulting fees would be magnificent.
The conventional narrative of Cuba’s eventual political transition presumes that the revolutionary establishment weakens, political freedoms expand, international investment arrives, and the economy gradually rejoins the commercial world.
It is a satisfying narrative because it assumes that the collapse of an ideology necessarily produces the collapse of the arrangements through which its beneficiaries exercise power.
History is considerably less sentimental.
The individuals best positioned to facilitate a transition may also possess the greatest capacity to determine its terms. They control institutions, information, relationships, commercial permissions, and assets whose ownership may be difficult to establish independently.
They also possess something particularly valuable in negotiations.
The ability to obstruct.
The people most capable of surrendering the old system may therefore be those best positioned to acquire the new one.
Political freedom could become the consideration paid for economic continuity.
The revolution would not be defeated by capitalism.
It would be liquidated into capitalism by its own custodians.
And the international community, delighted by the apparent disappearance of an ideological adversary, might discover that it had financed the conversion.
A remarkable achievement, if one happens to be standing on the appropriate side of the closing table.
But perhaps even this understates the paradox.
What if the eventual beneficiaries of Cuba’s transition include precisely those institutions and individuals who have spent decades advocating the destruction of the revolutionary system?
Foreign investors would require predictable commercial arrangements. International financial institutions would seek credible counterparties. Reconstruction would demand access to infrastructure, property records, banking relationships, and administrative capabilities.
Who would possess those capabilities?
Quite possibly the same networks that made the old system function.
The former revolutionary establishment could become indispensable to the reconstruction of the country it had governed into economic exhaustion.
Its institutional knowledge would acquire commercial value. Its administrative relationships would become negotiating advantages. Its control over assets would provide leverage over the terms of privatization.
Even its responsibility for the previous arrangement might be repackaged as expertise in managing the transition.
An entire governing class could discover that the consequences of its failures had created a market for its services.
This is a more sophisticated form of political survival than mere repression.
The ideology disappears.
The dependency remains.
And the people celebrating liberation may find themselves financing the institutions from which they believed they had been liberated.
There is an almost exquisite commercial logic to the proposition.
First monopolize the economy. Then exhaust it. Finally, offer to administer its reconstruction in exchange for ownership of the assets required to revive it.
The revolution becomes both the original problem and the indispensable solution.
One wonders whether the prospectus would describe this as vertical integration.
The arrest warrant against Raúl Castro introduces another complication.
Accountability and political transition operate according to different incentives.
Criminal justice concerns responsibility for identifiable acts. Political negotiation frequently concerns persuading individuals to surrender authority they retain the practical capacity to exercise.
The two objectives need not be incompatible. But neither are they naturally aligned.
What would persuade an official to cooperate with a transition if surrendering power increased his exposure to prosecution, confiscation, or permanent political exclusion?
Conversely, what would persuade a population to trust a transition in which the beneficiaries of the previous system received guarantees unavailable to the people who endured it?
A settlement may become politically achievable precisely because it protects interests that justice would otherwise challenge.
The old establishment obtains security. The new establishment obtains authority. International institutions obtain stability.
The citizens obtain an invitation to celebrate.
The ceremony can be magnificent.
The contract may deserve closer reading.
This is why the familiar argument about communism and capitalism may be less consequential than the question of who controls the transition between them.
Ownership can preserve relationships that ideology can no longer justify.
A political monopoly may become a commercial monopoly. Administrative privilege may become contractual privilege. Institutions formerly defended in the name of collective property may be reorganized into privately held enterprises whose beneficiaries were selected long before ordinary citizens were invited to participate.
The result could resemble liberalization while preserving much of the previous hierarchy.
Even political freedom might become more ornamental than consequential if access to employment, finance, property, and commercial opportunity remained dependent upon networks inherited from the revolutionary state.
The citizen would be free to disagree.
He might simply discover that disagreement had become an expensive professional decision.
And here a photograph of young Fidel Castro in New York supplies a small but revealing irony.
In 1955, Castro appeared in Manhattan seeking support for his revolutionary ambitions. Photographed in Central Park wearing a business suit, he was exercising opportunities to organize, solicit assistance, and pursue political change abroad.
He understood the usefulness of those freedoms.
His subsequent government imposed severe restrictions upon Cubans attempting comparable opposition.
The conventional interpretation is hypocrisy.
Perhaps it was something more deliberate.
Freedom may have been regarded not as a universal condition but as an instrument available to those seeking power and dispensable once power had been obtained.
The revolutionary could organize against the state.
The citizen could not organize against the revolution.
The distinction was not philosophical.
It was proprietary.
Who possessed the right to challenge authority?
That question may be the more durable inheritance of Castroism.
Not necessarily socialism. Not necessarily one-party government. But the proposition that the state possesses prior authority over the individual’s political and economic independence.
A genuinely different Cuba would require reversing that relationship.
The government would cease to be the proprietor of opportunity.
It would no longer be sufficient for the state to announce that it had granted additional freedoms. The meaningful question would be whether it retained the discretionary authority to withdraw them.
Property rights would matter because political officials could not redistribute ownership according to personal allegiance. Economic independence would matter because employment and commercial participation would not depend upon official favor. Political freedom would matter because the machinery of government could no longer be used to make dissent prohibitively expensive.
The point would not be to construct a more enlightened ruling class.
It would be to make the enlightenment of the ruling class substantially less important.
This is a distinction that revolutionary movements, democratic reformers, foreign investors, and aspiring political saviors have frequently found inconvenient.
The temptation is always to identify better people to exercise extraordinary power.
The more difficult undertaking is to eliminate the necessity for extraordinary power.
What if Cuba’s ultimate transformation is measured not by which faction acquires control of the government but by which powers the government permanently loses?
What if the decisive institutional achievement is not a new president, constitution, or economic doctrine but the disappearance of the mechanisms through which political authority determines personal opportunity?
What if a Cuban citizen could establish a business, acquire property, criticize an official, finance an opposition movement, or simply leave the country without first satisfying an administrative interpretation of loyalty?
Such a country would not require political heroes to guarantee freedom.
Its institutions would make freedom less dependent upon heroes.
For the revolutionary imagination, this would constitute a particularly humiliating outcome.
Imagine spending nearly seven decades establishing the indispensability of a political family, only to discover that the country’s greatest accomplishment is learning to function without one.
Imagine constructing an entire governing mythology around the proposition that the revolution and the nation are inseparable, only to find that the nation survives the revolution with considerably greater enthusiasm than the revolution ever demonstrated for the nation.
And imagine the surviving beneficiaries of the old order attending the inaugural ceremonies of a republic in which their former privileges have become ordinary commercial disadvantages.
No preferential access.
No revolutionary entitlement.
No inherited claim upon the nation’s institutions.
Merely the same laws, opportunities, restrictions, and accountability applicable to everyone else.
One suspects some would find the adjustment more distressing than the collapse of socialism.
Yet the danger remains that the transition itself could become the mechanism through which those privileges acquire permanent legitimacy.
Cuba’s reconstruction would attract capital. Capital would seek security. Security would depend upon legal recognition of property and contractual arrangements. And the people possessing the strongest documentary claims might be those whose access to the assets originated in the discretionary authority of the previous system.
The transformation could become irreversible at precisely the moment its underlying ownership arrangements ceased to be seriously questioned.
The revolution would have accomplished through privatization what it could no longer defend through ideology.
Permanent control without permanent revolution.
Castroism without Castro.
The international community might call it normalization.
The former establishment might call it modernization.
The investors might call it an extraordinary opportunity.
History might eventually call it the most successful liquidation of a political monopoly ever undertaken by its beneficiaries.
And this brings us back to Raúl Castro.
He may never stand before an American judge. His arrest warrant may remain an instrument of unresolved criminal accountability rather than an event that changes the government in Havana.
But the proceeding exposes the distinction between the authority an institution possesses and the legitimacy it claims.
It also invites a more consequential question.
Can Cuba prevent the inheritance of concentrated power even if it succeeds in ending the political order that created it?
For decades, the revolution claimed to speak for the Cuban people. Its beneficiaries exercised authority over institutions they insisted belonged collectively to the nation.
The extraordinary possibility is that those same beneficiaries might eventually seek private title to what they formerly administered in the public name.
The old revolutionaries would become the new proprietors.
The revolution would disappear.
Its beneficiaries would inherit the republic.
And the people would be invited to purchase their freedom from the men who had spent a lifetime explaining why they did not need it.
That would be the Cuban paradox in its most complete form.
Raúl Castro may never appear in an American courtroom.
But his revolution may yet face a judgment considerably more consequential.
Whether the men who claimed to own Cuba can arrange to inherit it after they have supposedly surrendered it.
The ultimate measure of liberation will not be the disappearance of the Castros, the retirement of their ideology, or even the privatization of the institutions they controlled.
It will be whether the next generation possesses the authority to prevent anyone from repeating the arrangement.
The Castro brothers acquired the state.
The question is whether their successors will acquire the deed.
¡Viva Cuba Libre!
Joe Cozart
GMJoe™ | GMJoe™ Consulting
Clarity. Strategy. Sovereignty.™
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