suggestions for future research... Anita Snow has a pretty good article highlighting the same diversity of responsibility in Castro's designated succession team that I mentioned the other day. Under Fidel's scheme, Raúl is only part of a more collective leadership strategy--one that also gives Carlos Lage and Felipe Pérez Roque quite a bit of power, but that ultimately means a more classically Marxist-Leninist, ideologically-driven, party vanguard-based leadership. Not a perfectly coherent one, though--Lage is not nearly as ideological as Pérez Roque is, and I'm not sure how compatible his reform tendencies will be with the more robust bluster of "los Taliban"--especially with Chávez in the picture. Ohhhhh, Hugo. You are such a huge pain in my ass. (Today's NYT article on the Venezuelan connection is also a good read).

Man, has it ever been a better time to be hopelessly addicted to Cuba? There are going to be so many competing interests and ideas, so many people and things to watch and to watch out for, so many super-interesting institutional comparisons to be made--no matter what happens next. Even if Fidel makes a miraculous recovery and delivers a 5-hour speech from his hospital bed tomorrow, the lid has already been blown off: ambitions revealed, pathologies exposed. Things are only going to get more interesting, and the place is going to be an incredible laboratory for the study of comparative politics for the forseeable future. This is the kind of thing nerdy political scientists like myself get unbelievably excited about, no matter the geographical setting--that this is happening in my much-adored Cuba is just about enough to make my head explode. But, you know, in a really good way.  ¶ 11:38 AM