CUBA: Manuel Roig-Franziaprofiles Raúl Castro, brother of Fidel, who is now likely to take over
Raúl Castro has long operated in the backstage of Cuban politics. But his public record, which has emerged over his 19 months as interim president, suggests he might pursue reforms to allow more political and economic latitude.
Uneasy in the spotlight, Castro (76) appears to have been laying the groundwork for a larger reorganisation of Cuba's economy since he took over from his ailing older brother, Fidel, in July 2006.
He has publicly mocked Cuban farmers for failing to cultivate rich farmland, held public forums for citizens to criticise the government and started reforms to streamline the country's inefficient bureaucracies, especially those involved in distributing food to Cubans who face shortages.
If picked by Cuba's newly-elected National Assembly in a presidential vote scheduled for Sunday, Raúl is almost certain to preside over a government based more on a collective style of leadership than his brother. A career military man, Raúl is known more for his organisational skills than his charisma.
There is a slim chance the assembly could choose among two of Fidel's other favourites - the young, ideological foreign minister Felipe Perez Roque, or the more cerebral and technocratic vice-president Carlos Lage. The two have helped Raúl run the country since Fidel became ill.
In the past 12 years, with varying degrees of success, Raúl has pushed reforms his brother had been reluctant to embrace until the fall of the country's biggest financial backer, the Soviet Union.
The younger Castro started slowly, first allowing private ownership of small food markets. Then Raúl, who has been defence minister since 1959, shrank the military.
He converted some of his top generals into businessmen so that they could run the tourism empire he built after persuading his brother to allow more foreign investment. The military now presides over a lucrative tourist trade, cutting partnership deals with European hoteliers.
In another apparent break with his brother, Raúl offered a surprise in 1994 when Cubans were fleeing the island.
He took to the podium to calm a population struggling to feed itself after the collapse of the Soviet Union. "Beans," he told the crowd in Havana, "are more important than cannons".
Suddenly, a country that had envisioned itself as a place under siege was admitting that feeding its residents meant more than building its military.
As the new flow of tourism dollars eased the crisis, Raúl generally slipped from the public spotlight again, remaining a mystery to outsiders and to the Cuban people - the island's great enigma. He is known as a practical joker, a family man, a guy's guy who drinks whiskey with his generals and dotes on their kids; and he is, as he once described himself, "Raúl the Terrible", the revolution's feared enforcer of the all-powerful Cuban state.
"I like to work in the shadows," Cuban author Norberto Fuentes remembers Raúl telling him years ago. "I like to pull the threads of conspiracy."
Raúl played a key role in building and leading the legendary guerrilla force in the Sierra Maestra mountains that conquered Cuba in 1959. He was the more devout Marxist-Leninist of the Castro brothers and would later travel to the Soviet Union to handle many of the negotiations that brought nuclear weapons to the island and sparked the Cuban missile crisis.
While Fidel was becoming an international political celebrity, Raúl was transforming his mostly illiterate forces into Cuba's most efficient institution. To this day, he is seldom out of military uniform.
Raúl's military now controls about 60 per cent of the Cuban economy, according to an analysis by Florida International University economists.
Last July, he made his most significant appearance as interim president, telling a large crowd in the city of Camaguey that he would seek business deals with "serious entrepreneurs" from other countries. He peppered his speech at a ceremony commemorating the 54th anniversary of Cuba's revolution with business jargon, uncommon in a socialist state.
"He'll make changes very gradually, very systematically," Jose Ignacio Pina Rojas, then Mexico's ambassador to Cuba, said in December 2006