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<p>HAVANA, Cuba - For the nearly five decades Fidel Castro ruled this country, he was a daily presence in Cubans&#8217; lives. His speeches echoed on their televisions and his stern rules shaped almost every aspect of their existence.</p><p>They woke up Saturday and found out he was gone.</p><p>A numbness has set in here since. Few Cubans seemed to believe the death of Castro at age 90 will bring immediate transformation of their country, the only one-party state in the Western Hemisphere. After all, poor health forced Castro aside in 2006, and the system he created has carried on without him.</p><p>But Castro&#8217;s death nonetheless represents a psychological break with Cuba&#8217;s past and the figure who has dominated it for three generations. There is enormous, built-up pressure, especially among younger generations, for a faster pace of change that brings new freedoms and better living standards.</p><p>Now the Cuban government must manage those expectations at a moment of new uncertainty in the island&#8217;s all-important relationship with the United States. The Communist government has tentatively embraced improved relations with President Barack Obama&#8217;s administration and a new surge of American visitors. Many here fear that President-elect Donald Trump will roll back the changes.</p><p>Among the Cubans who want change to come faster, and who are tired of the political divisions and tensions that Castro represented, there was a hushed sense of relief Saturday at the news of his death.</p><p>&#8220;People here are so tired. He destroyed this place,&#8221; said a university engineering student who was walking home Saturday morning from the market in Havana&#8217;s central Vedado neighborhood. He began trembling when a reporter told him that Castro had died, and that this time it wasn&#8217;t a mere rumor.</p><p>&#8220;I think you have to look at both the good and the bad, but there was more bad,&#8221; said the student, who declined to give his name, saying it would land him in trouble at school.</p><p>As reports of the Cuban leader&#8217;s death spread Saturday morning in the capital, there were no signs of unrest but, perhaps just as tellingly, not much spontaneous mourning either. Cubans went on with their lives in a world that is very much Castro&#8217;s creation: They went shopping at government stores, waited in government hospitals and tuned in to (or turned off) round-the-clock Castro tributes on government television.</p><p>&#8220;This isn&#8217;t like the death of Stalin, or Mao, when people threw themselves into the streets and thought the world was coming to an end,&#8221; said Aurelio Alonso, a sociologist and the deputy editor of the Cuban journal Casa de Las Americas. It was something they have been expecting. &#8220;People are mourning, sure,&#8221; Alonso said, &#8220;but he had a long life.&#8221;</p><p>For years, foreigners speculated about whether the death of Castro would bring dramatic change. But Castro&#8217;s succession plans were completed years ago, leaving his noticeably healthier brother, Ra&#250;l, 85, fully in charge. Cuba&#8217;s military and security services remain firmly in control of the state and allow no organized opposition or public dissent.</p><p>Ra&#250;l Castro plans to step down in 2018, and vice president Miguel Diaz-Canel, 56, a career Communist Party official who is not related to the Castros, is in line to succeed him.</p><p>Cuba has mostly recovered from the post-Soviet austerity period that left Cubans hungry and desperate in the early 1990s, when riots broke out in Havana and Fidel Castro showed up to quell the crowds.</p><p>Fidel opened Cuba up to tourism, and a record 3.5 million visitors arrived last year, far more than the number who came here before his 1959 revolution shuttered the island&#8217;s casinos and led to the seizure of all the hotels. Those travelers include an increasing number of U.S. visitors, providing a cash infusion at a moment when economic growth is otherwise stalled. The first commercial flight from the United States to Havana in more than a half-century is scheduled to land Monday</p><p>Still, there is growing discontent with the system Castro created and declared &#8220;irrevocable.&#8221;</p><p>The socialist system affords Cubans access to health care, education and food rations but has failed for decades to provide them with more than the essentials. And the country&#8217;s economic outlook appears to be going from bad to worse.</p><p>With the death of Venezuela&#8217;s Hugo Ch&#225;vez in 2013, Fidel Castro lost his political protege and Cuba&#8217;s main economic benefactor. Ch&#225;vez sent billions of dollars in petroleum shipments, helping the government in Havana keep the lights on and the air conditioners running, with enough left over for Cuba to re-export the oil at a profit.</p><p>But oil prices have crashed, Venezuela is mired in crisis, and no other easy income source is coming to the Cuban government&#8217;s rescue. Cuba&#8217;s economic growth is once more stalled, and emigration is at a 10-year high.</p><p>Modest steps toward economic liberalization undertaken by Ra&#250;l Castro led to a boom in small businesses, especially restaurants and bed-and-breakfasts, but the opening has lost momentum. The government has kept American firms at arm&#8217;s length despite a surge of interest from U.S. businesses after Obama&#8217;s normalization moves.</p><p>Some have speculated that Ra&#250;l Castro may pick up the pace of reforms now that his brother is gone.</p><p>In an April speech, the younger Castro quipped that Cuba was not actually a one-party state: &#8220;We have two parties here, just like in the United States,&#8221; he said. &#8220;Fidel&#8217;s and mine.&#8221;</p><p>Fidel&#8217;s is the Communist one, Ra&#250;l added, &#8220;and you can call mine whatever you want.&#8221;</p><p>Critics found nothing to laugh at, but former Cuban diplomat Carlos Alzugaray said it wasn&#8217;t entirely a joke. Hard-liners within Cuba&#8217;s hermetic power circles identified more with Fidel than his younger brother.</p><p>Many of the liberalization moves introduced by Ra&#250;l Castro represent an implicit rejection of his older brother&#8217;s rigid, state-dominated economic model. &#8220;Ra&#250;l Castro will have a freer hand now,&#8221; Alzugaray said.</p><p>&#8220;It&#8217;s not that Fidel Castro would have opposed him,&#8221; he said. &#8220;But it&#8217;s like when you have a sick relative and don&#8217;t want to upset them. There are things Ra&#250;l probably didn&#8217;t want to do while his brother was still around.&#8221;</p><p>But many Cubans worry about the possibility that Trump could tighten the Cuba trade embargo and toughen travel restrictions. During the presidential campaign, Trump said he would reverse Obama&#8217;s policy of expanding relations with Cuba unless the Castro government allowed more religious freedom and freed political prisoners.</p><p>Fidel Castro never wanted any statutes of himself to be put up in Cuba. There are no streets or parks named for him. That will almost certainly now change.</p><p>The government has declared a nine-day period of mourning, heavy with revolutionary symbolism.</p><p>Castro&#8217;s body will lay in state Monday and Tuesday in Havana&#8217;s Plaza of the Revolution, where Cubans will be able to &#8220;pay tribute and sign a solemn oath to fulfill the concept of Revolution,&#8221; according to a statement in the Communist Party daily Granma.</p><p>After a mass gathering in the plaza planned for Tuesday, Castro&#8217;s body will be carried to Santiago de Cuba, at the southeastern end of the island, reversing the journey that his bearded rebels made in January 1959 when they seized power.</p><p>Castro will be cremated on the morning of Dec. 4 and laid to rest at the Santa Ifigenia cemetery in Santiago, the site of the tomb of Cuban national hero Jos&#233; Mart&#237; and other 19th-century independence leaders.</p><p>On Saturday, police and soldiers sealed off access to Havana&#8217;s central plaza, where most of the headquarters of the Communist Party and government buildings are clustered. But there was no heavy security deployment visible in the city&#8217;s streets.</p><p>Castro&#8217;s death is &#8220;a huge loss for us,&#8221; said Jose Candia, 70, who woke up to the news and took his dachshund for a walk along Havana&#8217;s Malec&#243;n sea wall.</p><p>Candia and other older Cubans dedicated their lives to low-paying government jobs that demanded absolute loyalty and discipline. The news of his death seemed to hit them hardest.</p><p>&#8220;I think of his bravery. His honesty. I&#8217;ve been committed to him all my life,&#8221; said Yolanda Valdes, 75, a history teacher and Communist Party member. Tears began running down her face. She said that she had been crying all morning.</p><p>&#8220;I adored him,&#8221; she said.</p><style>
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<div class="neCaption">Shown in photo is Cuban premier Fidel Castro in 1974. (AP Photo)</div></div><div class="metaInfo"><photo0>https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/web1_zzzxzxzxx-1.jpg</photo0><caption0>Shown in photo is Cuban premier Fidel Castro in 1974. (AP Photo)</caption0><photoCredit0></photoCredit0></div></div>
<div class="metaInfo"><bylineMeta><p>By Nick Miroff</p><p>The Washington Post</p></bylineMeta></div><div class="metaInfo"><factboxMeta><p><strong>VIDEO</strong></p><p>For the nearly five decades <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/video/c/embed/2a7fcf56-b3da-11e6-bc2d-19b3d759cfe7?allowPreroll=0&amp;e=0" target="_blank">Fidel Castro</a> ruled this country, he was a daily presence in Cubans&#8217; lives. His speeches echoed on their televisions and his stern rules shaped almost every aspect of their existence.</p></factboxMeta></div><div class="metaInfo"><videoMeta><p><table class="mceItemTable" style="border:none;width:98%;"><tbody><tr><td style="font-weight:bold;font-size:100%;vertical-align:top;text-align:right;border:none;">VideoID:</td><td id="videoid" style="width:50em;font-size:90%;"> </td></tr><tr><td style="font-weight:bold;font-size:100%;vertical-align:top;text-align:right;border:none;">VideoType:</td><td id="videotype" style="font-size:90%;">WAPO</td></tr><tr><td style="font-weight:bold;font-size:100%;vertical-align:top;text-align:right;border:none;">URL:</td><td id="url" style="font-size:90%;">www.washingtonpost.com/video/c/embed/2a7fcf56-b3da-11e6-bc2d-19b3d759cfe7?allowPreroll=0&amp;e=0</td></tr><tr><td style="font-weight:bold;font-size:100%;vertical-align:top;text-align:right;border:none;">Video Embed String:</td><td id="videoembedstring" style="font-size:90%;">&lt;iframe src=&#8221;//www.washingtonpost.com/video/c/embed/2a7fcf56-b3da-11e6-bc2d-19b3d759cfe7?allowPreroll=0&amp;e=0&#8221; width=&#8221;480&#8221; height=&#8221;290&#8221; data-category-id=&#8221;segments&#8221; data-aspect-ratio=&#8221;0.5625&#8221; scrolling=&#8221;no&#8221; frameborder=&#8221;0&#8221; webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen&gt;&lt;/iframe&gt;</td></tr><tr><td style="font-weight:bold;font-size:100%;vertical-align:top;text-align:right;border:none;">Video Caption:</td><td id="videocaption" style="font-size:90%;">Fidel Castro, the Cuban dictator who led the country&#8217;s communist revolution in the late 1950s, died on Nov. 25.</td></tr><tr><td style="font-weight:bold;font-size:100%;vertical-align:top;text-align:right;border:none;">Video Credit:</td><td id="videocredit" style="font-size:90%;">The Washington Post</td></tr><tr><td style="font-weight:bold;font-size:100%;vertical-align:top;text-align:right;border:none;">Video Position:</td><td id="videoposition" style="font-size:90%;"> </td></tr></tbody></table></p><p style="margin-top:10px;font-size:70%;color:#555;">(use the &#8220;for files&#8230;&#8221; link above to associate attached files with this source)</p></videoMeta></div>

A country molded by Castro wonders what comes next