By The Miami Herald

MIAMI – Funeral music is playing on Cuban state radio, and riots are breaking out in the eastern city of Guantanamo. It is Valentine’s Day 2008, and Fidel Castro has died.

“We must preserve continuity,” says Fidel’s brother and successor, Raul Castro – actually former CIA analyst Brian Latell, playing the role of Raul at a mock post-death meeting of Cuban leaders held Friday at the University of Miami.

The military announces its plans to round up dissidents and quell protests. Vice President Carlos Lage urges reason. The head of the legislature, Ricardo Alarcon, is fired for insubordination. Bickering abounds on how much information to reveal to the public.

As Miami’s Cuban exile community and the U.S. State Department prepare for the eventuality that is Fidel’s death, UM went a step further. With larger-than-life photos of Fidel and Raul hanging on a conference room wall, UM’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies staged a war game-like version of the first hour after the death.

The outcome: the Communist Party’s top officers debate damage control as tensions escalated between hard-liners and moderates. From his first moments as Cuba’s new president, Raul starts slipping, failing to control other officials and ordering funeral music be broadcast before an announcement of his brother’s demise has been made. Yet there is no immediate and total collapse of the communist system.

While packed audience members shelled out $30 each and even the head of the U.S. State Department’s Cuba office attended, the event did not escape a measure of criticism from Miami Republican Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart.

In a statement, he called the exercise an “academic justification for a lack of pressure for a democratic transition” and said it would have been more useful to analyze “the forms of pressure and the other factors which lead officials of dictatorships to allow a democratic opening after the death of the dictator.”

Organizers defended the simulation as an important step toward breaking the perception that Cuba will be free of communism upon Castro’s death. Participants projected a “quick and easy succession” from Fidel to Raul but a long and difficult transition from communism to democracy.

“In almost every modality, what we did is very real,” said Latell, author of the book “After Fidel” and now a senior research associate at the institute. “Americans, particularly here in South Florida, ought to be prepared. The day he dies there will be celebrating in the streets in Miami. And then the day after, they’ll realize, “Well, he’s dead. Now we have Raul.”‘

Raul Castro has headed the Cuban armed forces for 47 years and is Fidel’s designated successor. Latell said he is known to advocate better relations between the Cuban and U.S. militaries. But he’s also long been rumored to be an alcoholic who lacks his brother’s persona.

Latell said he deliberately portrayed him as a stumbling younger brother who has difficulty filling his more dynamic brother’s shoes. He expects Raul would lose his temper and fail to control the party in the way Fidel Castro has.

The model meeting also showed that Cubans – both in Miami and Cuba – must not wait until Castro’s death to start pushing for democratic changes from within, said the institute’s director, Jaime Suchlicki, who played the part of Cuban Army Gen. Alvaro Lopez Miera.

“None of us want what we discussed here,” Suchlicki said. “It’s the most likely scenario, but it’s not what we wish for.”