Latest from Fidel Castro has Cuba guessing

In a place normally reserved for heated arguments about Cuba's national pastime, an unusual political discussion took place on a warm January afternoon.

Three fifty-something-year-old men stood in the shade in the capital's Central Park the other day, debating whether ailing leader Fidel Castro was in or out.

"He's backing off; we're already seeing it," one man said

"It's a deliberate strategy," said another. "The comandante waited until the inauguration to say we're going to hear less from him. That's a message to the United States."

Castro's latest published "Reflections" essay has Cubans guessing. Will the 82-year-old former president follow through and become less involved in the affairs of a country he has long dominated? Is his latest essay another signal that Cuba is ready to engage the United States following decades of hostility?

Last week, after Barack Obama was sworn in as the 11th American president to confront someone named Castro in Havana, Fidel Castro talked about his own mortality.

Castro, who has not been seen in public since July 2006, wrote that he did not expect to be alive at the end of Obama's term.

He also said he would write less to avoid interfering in the work of his successor and younger brother Raul.

That remains to be seen. One of the men in a corner of Central Park where the talk usually involves baseball, not politics, put it succinctly: "We don't need to see his face all the time to know who is really in charge."

Indeed, Fidel is nowhere and everywhere in Cuba. He has had an intimate presence in every Cuban life, whatever people thought of him. He is felt more than seen.