Fidel as Uncle Junior

Anyone who watched the first season of "The Sopranos" knows the underlying tension between Tony Soprano and his uncle, Corrado "Junior" Soprano. Each wanted to run the family in the wake of boss's Jackie Aprile's death from cancer. During the power struggle Tony deferred to Junior, allowing him to take on the public airs of being the head of the north Jersey crime family while Tony could actually run things.

When I called my old friend, Julia Sweig, who holds the august title of Nelson and David Rockefeller Senior Fellow for Latin American Studies and Director of Latin American Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, we talked about Fidel as a kind of Uncle Junior figure of the Castro regime, still "hovering" over his brother, Raoul, the country's leader. Sweig, the author of a Fidel biography and most recently Friendly Fire: Losing Friends and Making Enemies in the Anti-American Century, noted that if Fidel "was really coming back" to power "we wouldn't be seeing him in his leisure suit. He'd be wearing his verde olivo." It's not that he's dead yet. He's still engaged behind the scenes and whipping off articles on ethanol and climate change. (First Wal Mart goes green, now Castro!) But his power is that of the crotchety guy who won't quite go yet. Meanwhile, the regime and the ailing Castro got what it wanted yesterday: A May Day that showed the party still very much in charge of the country and more attention to the case of Luis Posada Carriles, pending his trial on U.S. immigration charges. Havana accuses Posada of being behind a 1976 airliner bombing that killed 73 people -- a charge he denies. With all the major TV networks sending their stars in for May Day--a thankfully recovered Bob Woodruff for ABC, my friend Andrea Mitchell at NBC and CBS's gutsy Iraq star Lara Logan--the event got covered. Uncle Junior couldn't do better.

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