Fidel Castro savors final win over rivals, by Juan Gonzalez

Wednesday, February 20th 2008, 7:02 AM

Fidel Castro listens as Daily News' Juan Gonzalez speaks with him in 1994. ABC-TV's Barbara Walters looks on.

That day in Havana in late 1993, I was riding in a car with a Cuban government official, on my way to a session of the National Assembly, when a traffic cop at a deserted intersection signaled us to stop.

I had been up most of the night with a handful of journalists in one of those marathon interviews with Fidel Castro - the first of two I had with the Cuban president.

Just then, a black Mercedes with tinted windows sprang into the intersection. Flanked by two soldiers on motorcycles, the Mercedes sped past us and disappeared.

"El Comandante on his way to the Assembly," the official in my car whispered.

There was Castro, the target of hundreds of assassination attempts over many decades by the CIA, riding around his capital city in broad daylight with only a few bodyguards. No helicopters overhead, no sharpshooters on the roofs, no massive gridlock.

Tuesday morning, the ailing 81-year-old Cuban leader, the world's best-known revolutionary, savored one final victory over Yanqui imperialism.

After nearly 50 years of outwitting and outlasting the efforts of 10 American Presidents to strangle his Socialist revolution and drive him from power, Castro retired of his own free will.

The aging Communist, despised by many in this country as a dictator, but revered in much of the Third World for his many David-and-Goliath battles with the United States, will begin a new life writing newspaper commentaries.

By doing so, Castro hopes to assure a smooth transition to the next generation of Cuban leaders.

His brother and longtime comrade Raul will officially assume the presidency, but Raul is 76, and no one expects him to rule for long.

Fidel admitted as much in his autobiography published in this country only a few weeks ago. The remarkable book, written with Spanish journalist Ignacio Ramonet, has received little attention. Ramonet transcribes more than 100 hours of interviews with the Cuban leader.

The interviews cover everything from Castro's boyhood days to the Cuban missile crisis to the future of the revolution. Castro worked feverishly on the manuscript even after he fell gravely ill in 2006.

"If something happens to me tomorrow, [I'll tell you] with absolute certainty that the National Assembly would meet and elect him [Raul] - there's not the slightest doubt," Castro says in the book. "But he's catching up to me in years, so it's also a generational problem."

In the book, Castro confidently predicts, "We who made the revolution have brought up three generations" to carry on its ideals.

Among the top rung of current Cuban leaders, Ricardo Alarcon, the 70-year-old former UN ambassador and president of the National Assembly, and Carlos Lage, the brilliant 56-year-old vice president who has run the country's economy for the past decade, seem the leading contenders to eventually succeed Raul.

As for those in our country's Cuban exile community who predicted for decades Castro's imminent overthrow or death, the Cuban leader joked in his autobiography:

"I said once that the day I really die, nobody's going to believe it. I may be carried around like El Cid - even after he was dead his men carried him around on his horse, winning battles."

With Fidel retired, maybe the next American President will finally concede the obvious: the 50-year U.S. trade embargo with Cuba has been a failure and a joke to the rest of world.

After all, China has become the biggest factory of American capitalism. Vietnam is considered a friend. Dictators like Mubarak in Egypt get billions in U.S. aid. Castro or no Castro, it's time our leaders stop this rabid hostility to trading with Cuba.

jgonzalez@nydailynews.com