Last Wednesday, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro may have slipped into a coma.

On Saturday, his sycophant, Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, flew into Havana (scroll down), possibly to bid a final farewell to his Cuban master. And Brazil’s President Lula da Silva made a slip of the tongue last weekend, saying ‘when Castro was alive…’ forgetting no one had announced that The Beast was dead. Meanwhile, Otto Reich reports that news agencies are getting visits from Castroite government functionaries regarding coming funeral arrangements, including seating, best camera angles, visas, how-tos ahead the coming spectacle…where guerrillas, tyrants, and Sandalista suckups will gather in one horrible place to mourn their hero.

I think there is little doubt that the Monster of Havana who has spent 47 years destroying Cuba, is at or near death. The Grim Reaper is after him, and the sickle is no longer on a little flag with a hammer; it’s real.

It’s over.

As that happens, brutal crackdowns are happening against Cuba’s innocent independent librarians. Like this one by Castro’s savage martial artist goons who specialize in assaulting Cuban independent librarians, who represent Cuba’s fragile green shoots of civil society, blameless people like these:

Two Cuban independent librarians, beaten by professional government thugs
Source: Stefania LaPenna at Free Thoughts

See The Real Cuba‘s post here for details, they’re important.

I wrote to Martha Beatriz Roque this week – a fearless dissident who always answers e-mail and she did not reply. Maybe she cannot reply. Or it is too dangerous if she does.

Amid all the brutality against dissidents, there’s a sudden broader crackdown against ‘corruption.’ People are being busted left and right for stealing, which is rampant in Cuba, the only glue that holds the entire inhuman system together. This ‘reform’ however, is deceptive. Only the mainstream media seem to be eating that story up – just as they start to put out stories of how Raul Castro, Castro’s wretched brother and successor, is really, deep down, a ‘reformer.’ Just like Yuri Andropov, another ruthless man who rose to power and pretended to be a big jazz lover who’d reform the crumbling, rotting Soviet empire. So it is with Raul.

Because not one of the corruption crackdowns is a genuine interest in ending corruption. Instead, what’s happening is a power struggle.

Everyone steals in Cuba and everyone kicks some of the spoils upstairs to his or her patron. This goes all the way to the top of the Cuban hierarchy – 50 years after communism was introduced, Cuba has become an empire of thieves – the very concept that once fascinated Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – ‘thieves’ – which he obsessively wrote of in The GULag Archipelago.

When corruption crackdowns come, it’s a sign of turmoil at the top, Castro’s elite fighting over his dead carcass and the carcass of his thieves’ empire. Humberto Fontova, the great Cuban writer, explained as much in an interview with Investor’s Business Daily here:

“A Cuban’s got to know which party official is in favor within the regime. If your patron has fallen out of favor, it will be held against you.” And you’re likely to go down in a corruption crackdown.

The Cuban government’s sudden bid to end 49 years of corruption echoes Mikhail Gorbachev’s liquor-sales crackdown in the twilight years of the USSR. That, too, was part of a power struggle.

Much as Reuters would like to claim reform is possible in Cuba, it’s not. The main problem is that Cuba is a communist regime. Not only are all the institutions that check and balance powers gone, replaced by a maximum leader, but also the collective mechanism of the market to set prices is gone. Corruption is all that’s left.

“Everyone steals in Cuba,” Fontova said. “If they didn’t, they would starve to death.”

Castro’s system sets prices for everything. That includes the low wages of workers ???????? about $30 a month for Cuban doctors, for example, to the near-nothing prices of basic commodities like gas and toilet paper. The regime touts the low prices as proof of its humanitarian instincts, but reality shows how little it values anything.

Underpaid workers steal and resell commodities because they’re underpaid and alienated.

In shortage-plagued Cuba, half the nation’s gasoline, for instance, is siphoned off into black markets by everyone who comes in contact with the production chain. Workers kick money to their higher-ups and desperately try to make a profit on it themselves.

“Cuba’s economy was considered a basket case, even by communist standards,” said Fontova, noting that even the Russians threw up their hands at what Castro had wrought.

But to call it “mismanagement” is a misnomer, Fontova added. Cuba was the only society that ever went from vibrant capitalism to wasteland communism without a war, he observed.

In other words, there is nothing more than theft holding together that horrible regime that has smothered Cuba – there are no civil institutions, no checks and balances, no free flow of information – just one majordomo, on his deathbed, surrounded by gangsters now fighting over spoils.

Hence the corruption crackdowns are the visible evidence of the fearsome battles for absolute power at the very top.

What will become of Cuba in the midst of this, with Castro dead? It’s just not known. One thing is for sure: the remains of the Castro regime won’t give up power willingly. The only other thing that is for sure is that what can’t go on, won’t. Communism has to collapse because it is unsustainable.

Not just unsustainable in itself but even its life support is withering away as Manuel Rosales rises in the polls. He’s running for office on a platform of no more free oil for Fidel Castro’s odious tyranny. That in itself is an external threat to Raul Castro, who will go down in hail of gunfire rather than give up power.

What will become of Cuba? It is not going to be easy. Cubans and Cuban-Americans – as the reality of this enormity dawns – are introspectively thinking about this, in great detail. According to Cuban-American blogger Val Prieto, they know they can’t get caught up in celebrations, nor can they get caught up in score settling. A brave new dawn is emerging in Cuba and it’s a period of silence and introspection because the world truly is changing.

Read some of Val’s thinking and that of his fellow Miami Cubans in this intense thoughtful post here.

UPDATE: Fausta has more important details, plus excerpts from Mary O’Grady’s excellent WSJ column today in this must-read post here.

UPDATE: This analysis, by Charlie Bravo at Killcastro has a lot of wisdom and understanding. Read it here.

UPDATE: Castro insists he’s alive. He says he’s scoffing about the whole thing but I wonder why he felt such need to tell us. Read it here. Castrianism, an excellent Italian blog, has movies and pictures here.