So is this how it ends? Castro, who's 80, has ceded power to his brother Raul Castro, who's 75. Not exactly a mandate for the future.

An article in last week's New Yorker outlined fears that Cuba, post-Castro, will experience an uprising of the long suffering population. Some say the post-Castro era will be messy, with retribution and revenge against oppressive, tight-fisted government officials and sympathizers. Others, especially those in Miami, expect the transition to be smooth. And they expect to return to help it along. Which brings up another fear of Cubans, that the exiles will want to come back and pick up where they left off, displacing the population that has had to live in deprivation while the others were living well in Miami.

..."The day when Cubans will rise up is when the gentlemen from Miami arrive and try to appropriate peoples homes, and to give orders," one Cuban academic told [the New Yorker]....

Or it could work the other way with a huge wave of emigration from Cuba to Miami.

So there's plenty of potential for things to go good or bad. The US government has set up a transition team that's been working behind the scenes. Hopefully, they've been closely studying the things that didn't work in the Iraq government transition, so the same mistakes won't be repeated in Havana. No, seriously.