Castro turns 81 out of sight but still present

HAVANA, Aug 12 (Reuters) As Fidel Castro turns 81 on Monday, Cuba watchers see the ailing leader fading into a role equivalent to China's Mao Zedong as his successors grapple with the need to reform the economy while preserving the Communist state.

Castro has been out of sight for a year, but not out of mind, thanks to regular newspaper columns dispatched from a secret medical facility.

He spends his time ''meditating in depth on the vital problems that threaten our species today,'' Castro wrote recently, calling US capitalism a threat to human survival.

The bearded revolutionary, who once toyed with the idea of abolishing money in a classless society, was forced to hand over power to his brother Raul last year after undergoing emergency intestinal surgery.

His illness is secret and his life private. Even his age is debatable. Some say Castro is a year younger than his birth certificate because the document was altered to get the bright boy into school earlier.

Officially, Castro is recovering from a life-threatening health crisis, but Cuba's Communist authorities no longer say he will return to office.

His niece Mariela Castro recently indicated that his health might not be improving, and the fate of Cuban Socialism depends on her father, Raul, and younger leaders.

''The concern that we all had about losing our leader is now closer to us,'' Mariela Castro told Spanish news agency EFE in an interview. She said Fidel Castro retains great influence in Cuba through his ''moral authority,'' but the country is moving on ''with or without Fidel.'' In a landmark Revolution Day speech on July 26, Raul Castro said salaries -- averaging 15 dollars a month -- were inadequate.

The acting president said ''structural'' changes were needed to jump-start agriculture and cut reliance on costly food imports.

He criticized the absurd distribution system for milk, a product that is hard to find in Cuban shops.

His focus on bread-and-butter issues revived hope among Cubans of relief from daily economic hardship.

Many remember Fidel Castro's quixotic efforts to modernize agriculture, symbolized by a prodigious cow called Ubre Blanca (White Udder) who made it into the Guinness Book of Records for producing 109.5 liters of milk in a day in 1982.

REALISTS VS UTOPIANS Independent observers say debate is raging within the Cuban government between realists who see reform as inevitable and utopians who want retrenched Communism.

''Today, Raul is the only hope of change in Cuba,'' said dissident economist Oscar Espinosa Chepe, a former diplomat in Yugoslavia fired for taking to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's spirit of openness, or perestroika, reforms.

''But hard-liners do not want economic reforms, because they know that will herald political changes,'' said Chepe, who sees freeing private initiative from state control as the way to economic revival.

After his brother's July 26 speech, Fidel Castro wrote that he is still consulted on key decisions, which Cubans like Espinosa Chepe took as a sign he is still in charge.

Western diplomats maintain Raul is running the show and do not expect Fidel to recover.

One European diplomat said he expects a formal transfer of power early next year to younger leaders like Vice President Carlos Lage and Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque, under the supervision of the older generation of revolutionaries.

''They know they have to urgently solve four big problems, otherwise there will be an implosion,'' the diplomat said, citing deficient public transport, decrepit housing, inefficient food production and low wages.

A big worry for Cuba's leaders is that reforms could trigger an unstoppable process of change, such as that under Gorbachev which led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, he said.

Some see Fidel Castro fighting for his legacy and the survival of Communism with the only means he has left, the written word.

''Is Mao Fidel's future? That is, will Fidelismo be repudiated and Fidel venerated as the founding father?'' asked Marifeli Perez-Stable, a Cuban sociologist at Florida International University in Miami. ''That thought probably grinds the Comandante's mind.'' Revolutionary leader Mao Zedong, who blocked reforms at the end of his life and left a moribund economy when he died in 1976, is still revered by many Chinese. But the Party repudiated his policies as it embraced a socialist market economy under Deng Xiaoping.

REUTERS JT RN1844