Confusion in Cuba Over Leadership and Future

HAVANA, April 30, 2007 — -- It's been nine months since Cubans learned July 31 that their 80-year-old president, Fidel Castro, had undergone abdominal surgery and temporarily handed over power to his younger brother by five years, Defense Minister Raul Castro.

They still have no idea where Castro is convalescing, what exactly he suffers from and why it has taken him so long to recover. Even the CIA isn't sure.

But that may be about to change.

Now, with officials insisting Castro is on the mend and increasingly involved in governing, Cubans expect they might see him at Tuesday's International Workers Day march, one of the country's most important political events, or sometime during the day on television.

"We always hope to see him. I hope to see him at the May Day march. Everybody hopes so," a young woman in Havana said, not giving her name.

The secrecy is necessary, due to the Bush administration's hostility toward the communist-run Caribbean island, officials here insist.

"I think we are now facing the worst moment in our relations with the United States. I don't remember another administration as aggressive, as openly against Cuba as this one," Ricardo Alarcon, president of the Cuban parliament and long-time member of Castro's kitchen Cabinet, told ABC's Bob Woodruff in Havana.

Since arriving in Cuba Friday on his first international assignment since recovering from a roadside bombing in Iraq in January 2006, Woodruff has been exploring Cuba's streets, sipping cups of rich Cuban coffee in crowded tenements and talking to officials and ordinary Cubans about Castro and Cuba's future.

His reporting team includes cameraman Doug Vogt and sound technician Magnus de Macedo, the same crew that was with him in Iraq the day he was critically injured by an improvised explosive device.

"Some people like Castro, and some people don't like him," 47-year-old Roberto Martinez said.

Martinez arrived in the United States with tens of thousands of other Cubans during the 1979 Mariel exodus but later got in trouble with the law and spent 10 years in prison before being deported to Cuba. He has two sons in the United States.