Comparisons with his elder brother are inevitable, but in some ways Cuban President Raul Castro could not be more different from his predecessor, brother Fidel Castro.

In recent days, Raul Castro has quietly featured as a central figure at a major diplomatic gathering.

Cuba this week took over the rotating presidency of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), and Castro, 81, addressed his peers in Santiago’s Espacio Riesco convention centre. “The world economic order is unfair and promotes exclusion,” he said. “It is trapped in a global crisis to which no solution is visible for now.”

The speech was nothing like the colourful, hours-long performances for which Fidel Castro was known for, milking the spotlight at venues such as the annual UN General Assembly.

However, Raul’s speech confirmed what had been apparent over the weekend in Santiago at the preceding European Union-CELAC summit: the younger Castro has a place - if he wants it - in the international community of leaders, at least wherever the US is absent.

Since he succeeded his brother in the Cuban leadership in 2006, Raul Castro has kept largely to himself. He does not enjoy public events, and even within Cuba his speeches are brief and relatively infrequent.

He does not attend the UN General Assembly, and he only occasionally attends gatherings of Latin American or Non-Aligned Movement countries.

In Chile, he made a rare appearance at a major international summit, standing beside European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso on Saturday for the EU-CELAC group photo.

On the way there, he shook hands with the German Chancellor Angela Merkel and held private meetings in Santiago with other conservative elected leaders, including presidents Enrique Pena Nieto of Mexico and Sebastian Pinera of Chile.

Castro actively supports CELAC as a forum for the Americas that excludes the US and Canada, but things are different regarding the EU.


RIM seeks a comeback

 

The tech world is filled with tales of giant companies that withered and died as they were leapfrogged by new technology, but few have been superseded quite as spectacularly as Research in Motion Ltd (RIM), which is hoping that a pair of new smartphones to be unveiled today would save the Canadian company.

The BlackBerry Z10 and BlackBerry X10 are the culmination of RIM’s desperate years of effort to play catch-up with the smartphone leaders Apple Inc and devices operated with Google Inc’s Android system.

And while no one is predicting that RIM would return to the pre-eminent position it enjoyed as the world’s most popular smartphone before the 2007 launch of the iPhone, many investors are upbeat that the new devices offer a solid foundation for the future.