I had a long talk with my cousin the other day. This isn't my cousin the Red who's lived here all his life, but my cousin from the other side of the family. He left Cuba in the early 60s, his parents sent him here to get him away from Fidel on the Peter Pan program. He lives in Miami now, and I frequently talk to him to keep my pulse on the Cuban community down there and on the island. Both cousins share one trait, an almost praeternatural intelligence, and I trust their analyses and their intuition.

But my older cousin, although smart and highly educated, is too ideological for me, and when it comes to politics, he tends to see only one side. He has actually traveled to Cuba, as a tourist, and swears it is a worker's paradise. I didn't believe him. Supposedly, the problems they have there are solely the fault of the US embargo, not the pathetic mismanagement of the economy by the Marxist ideologues in charge. My Cuban cousin, on the other hand, lived there til he was a teenager, saw the revolution go down and then turn communist. His parents and other relatives who eventually escaped, plus many of his Miami aquaintances, keep him up to date on what has happened since. And although not formally educated, he is phenomenally well-read and very perceptive. I trust his observations, especially since, in his case, he is not ideologically pre-programmed. He isn't one of these reactionary Miami exiles whose business was ruined by Castro and has spent his life fantasizing revenge. His politics are rather liberal, if not downright leftist, but he has no illusions about the brutality and incompetence of the Castro dictatorship and the gangster government that has taken over the island. I tend to favor his views on this issue.

So I asked him the question everyone's been asking, "What's going to happen in Cuba when Castro and Raul finally croak?" I suspected he had already given it a great deal of thought.

In a nutshell, his response was that there will be violence. Probably all-out civil war. Cuba is not Comunista, he said, it is Fidelista. Underneath the Marxist rhetoric it is still the standard Latin American model, the strongman, el líder, el Caudillo, el Generalíssimo. Fidel has run the place on the sheer force of his personality, and he has created a state using fear and patronage, while allowing his most dangerous opposition to either leave the island or languish in jail.

But as he puts it, Fidel may be a genius, but he is also a sociopath and a narcissist. The result has been a cauldron of competing interests which he has exploited to keep power and who will want to settle accounts when he's gone. Everyone has an axe to grind, and since the state has used the informer and the denunciation of "contrarevolucionario" as a means of personal advancement in the bureacracy, the island boils over with unrequited revenge. Everyone in the vast Cuban prison Gulag has an extended family that has suffered unfairly, through association, because of the alleged crimes of one of its members. Everyone who has lost a job or position due to political maneuver has his revenge plotted out. The army, as in all Latin American countries, is the only force with any discipline or organization or competence. And they will not tolerate the loss of their position. As my cousin puts it, it's in the culture, and like Sicilians, the Irish, and other islanders, they have a tendency to vendetta. The Miami Cubans, or what is left of them, since that generation is dying off and their kids often don't even speak Spanish; will come back like carpetbaggers, along with economic adventurers and soldiers-of-fortune ready to cash in on the new Capitalist Cuba.

He tells me Cuba is not Eastern Europe, it will not be a replay of the Vietnamese or the Chinese experience in California. That class already came here in the sixties, in the first wave of immigration from the island. This will be like Spain in the Thirties, and more than likely, some fascist Franco-type thug acceptable to the USA will be who eventually takes over. The new Cubans are a people who have only known this system, they think differently, and they are all poor and have always been poor. They do have one thing in common. They are all very well educated. That is one thing the government has done there, everyone has secondary education, or a degree and a profession, even if no one has a job. That cannot fail but breed resentment. European and Canadian tourists love Cuban hookers not just because they're young, pretty and cheap, but because they are such well-informed and and sparkling conversationalists. And they all speak English.

There are other sources of friction, Cuba remains a racist country, and even though racism has been deinstitutionalized, was never legal on the island and there never was a Jim Crow apparatus as in the US, a long look through the Party ranks will reveal only white, European faces. And the country has only two social classes, those who work for the state, and those who don't. The latter usually don't work at all. Only a massive repressive apparatus of informers reaching down to the apartment floor level has managed to keep the lid on so far.

My cousin tells me the dumbest thing the Cuban Exile community and the US Administrations who courted its political support did was to insist on an embargo against the island. Nothing has been more destabilizing to the Castro government than the Miami relatives sending pictures of their cars, their houses, their clothes back home. But the older generation of exiles is dying off, their kids don't care, and the exile community is no longer (and really, never was) as ideologically committed and monolithic as everyone thought. Few exile Cubans can stomach the Castro regime, but the political clout has been wielded primarily by the most ideological and intransigent of that community. They are fading into history, even if a few of them made it to the US legislature.

The US has become a promised land, and one of the predictions he makes is of a huge Mariel-type wave of immigration after the Castros fall and the domestic strife in Cuba explodes as these long-repressed social forces are turned loose. The troubles will not just remain in Cuba, as with the Irish and Sicilians, they will spill over here, too.