CUBA: Raul Castro shuns the limelight his brother loves, but has considerable organisational ability and ruthlessness, writes Carol J Williams
A lifelong understudy, Raul Castro takes centre stage in Cuba as a man defined more by contrasts with his iconic older brother than by his own performance: methodical where Fidel is impulsive; awkward in public where Fidel shines in the spotlight; approachable where Fidel has been seen as intimidating.
Chroniclers of the Cuban revolution paint a portrait of the acting president as a man at once compassionate and ruthless, more sensitive and family-oriented than Fidel Castro yet adept in the role of executioner. Historians also note that, unlike his brother, 75-year-old Raul Castro has moderated and moved with the times, embracing modest economic reforms that his brother rejected.
In his 2005 biography of the Castro brothers, After Fidel, Brian Latell, a former Cuba analyst for the CIA, describes the younger Castro as so overshadowed as to be underestimated.
It was Raul Castro who steered Cuba down the path of Marxism-Leninism, Latell points out, drawn into the Stalinist fold during a 1953 socialist youth conference in Vienna. It was also the younger Castro who first met Ernesto "Che" Guevara, the charismatic Argentine radical.
And it was the heir apparent who negotiated economic and strategic support from Moscow, including his July 1962 Kremlin visit which secured a Soviet promise to deploy medium-range missiles on the island - a move that brought the world to the brink of nuclear conflagration three months later.
As defence minister, Raul Castro built a formidable army that defeated US forays, from the bungled 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion to the airspace intrusions of radical exiles in the late 1990s. The strongest institution in the country, the Cuban military has never suffered an internal upheaval or engendered a coup attempt. Only one senior officer has ever defected.
Raul Castro's staunch Marxist beliefs and anti-American rhetoric have softened in the years since the Soviet Union's demise and the devastating cut-off of oil and subsidies from Cuba's erstwhile communist benefactors.
Forced to adopt a policy of self-sufficiency during the harsh years of the early 1990s, he deployed his forces to foreign-financed joint ventures that kept the country fed and brought in hard-currency investment. Today, the Cuban military is responsible for two-thirds of the country's convertible revenues. Raul Castro has been openly admiring of the "Chinese model", under which a strong autocracy remains in control while permitting some private enterprise.
Some who have met the younger Castro describe him as markedly different from a sibling who has been the embodiment of the revolution.
"My sense is that Raul knows he lacks the popular support of Fidel and has gone about cultivating a new generation of leadership to whom he would quickly turn over control" if and when he becomes permanent head of state, said Glenn Baker, director of the US-Cuba Co-operative Security Project at the Centre for Defence Information in Washington.
Baker met both Castros during a 2003 Havana visit and said Raul Castro was "as jovial and personal as his older brother was imperial and humourless".
Raul Castro Ruz was born on June 3rd, 1931, in the remote village of Biran in the Oriente province. He was the sixth of nine children eventually acknowledged by Angel Castro. His mother was Lina Ruz, a servant whom the Spanish émigré Angel Castro took up with while still married to the mother of his first two children.
Fidel Castro's legions of biographers have often paid notice to "rumours too consistent to be ignored" that Raul Castro was fathered by someone other than Angel Castro. The most persistent of these held that his father was a Rural Guards captain named Felipe Mirabal who was posted near the Castro homestead in the early 1930s.
Raul followed in Fidel's footsteps throughout his life, first to the prestigious La Salle school in Santiago, from which they were expelled for disruptive behaviour, then to the Jesuit Belen Academy, where Fidel flourished but his younger brother eventually dropped out. Raul returned to the family property, working in Angel Castro's construction and plantation operations, where he took up drinking and gambling on cockfights - vices said to still stalk him.
Raul Castro's role in the revolution's doomed overture, the July 1953 attack on the Moncada military barracks near Santiago, landed him in prison after the debacle, in which more than 100 rebels were killed or captured.
A May 1955 general amnesty freed the Moncada attackers, and Raul Castro fled to Mexico City to organise training for another assault. There he met Che, with whom he shared a deep ideological commitment to armed revolution for the Marxist cause.
The softness and sensitivity of his youth ground down by prison and exile, Raul Castro served as his brother's chief enforcer and is alleged to have cold-bloodedly executed recruits accused of betraying the revolution or wavering in commitment.
The Castro brothers and their guerrilla band returned to Cuba on December 2nd, 1956, deploying to mountain strongholds to wage what would prove a two-year insurgency.
After the New Year's Day 1959 triumph of the revolution, Raul took up his traditional role as Fidel's top lieutenant and, within days of the rebel army's arrival in Havana, married fellow revolutionary Vilma Espin.
They had one son and three daughters. Espin has since remained active in the political hierarchy.
As personally reclusive as his sibling is fond of the limelight, Raul Castro has made few public appearances, given only a handful of interviews and has often disappeared for months or even years.
"Every so often a rumour gets started that I died," he quipped to Cuban journalists when he surfaced in December 1991 after a long absence.
"During the Pan-American Games, they were saying I was being kept in a freezer."