For 10 years, Raúl has benefited a lot from having Fidel around.  Fidel always showed up at the big celebrations or wrote a column. Forget that.  It won't be pretty in 2017, as we see in this report from the AP: Castro must manage these twin economic and diplomatic challenges during a year of transition. The 85-year-old general has promised to hand over the office in early 2018 to a successor, widely expected to be Miguel Diaz-Canel, a 56-year-old official with neither the Castro name nor revolutionary credentials. The change will occur without Castro's older brother Fidel, the revolutionary leader whose largely unseen presence endowed the system he created with historical weight and credibility in the eyes of many Cubans before he died last month at 90. "Even if those two events hadn't taken place -- Trump's victory and Fidel's death -- 2017 was going to be a very difficult year for Cuba," said Cuban economist...(Read Full Post)