Bíran lies twelve hours from Havana, in a fertile sugar valley near Cuba’s far eastern tip. Its dusty main street is lined with concrete homes and old men sipping rum in the afternoons, and its tidy government health clinic is populated by workers from the big collective farm, outside of town, whose acreage once belonged to a local grandee with American ties, but which, since 1959, has been owned by the state.

In these respects, the village is typical of Cuba. Bíran bears a distinction, though, that is signalled by a billboard that you see as you arrive. The sign, which bears the simple caption “BÍRAN,” depicts two old men in green fatigues. One of the men, Raúl Castro, made a New Year’s visit, two weeks ago, to hail the start of a new Cuban era, and to return to the rural idyll where he and his ailing brother, Fidel, were raised. Their father, Ángel, was a Spanish immigrant who arrived poor in Cuba, in the early nineteen-hundreds, then grew rich by buying land and selling sugarcane, cut for pennies by hard-driven workers, to the United Fruit Company. After the Castros won power, in 1959, and promised to break up Cuba’s large holdings, they turned their father’s lands over to the peasants they’d watched him whip. This has always been one of their core claims to socialist integrity—and it’s one reason why Bíran would always rank high, if Pew’s pollsters came here, in loyalty to its famed sons’ Communist Party.

The first of January in Cuba marks not only the start of a new year, but also the anniversary of Fidel’s bravura speech, in the country’s main eastern city, Santiago, in which he declared victory in the revolution. For years afterward, he made addressing his people en masse a New Year’s rite. But Raúl isn’t Fidel, and in Bíran he made no speech. Instead, he continued what had been a notably muted set of weeks since his hugely popular accord with Barack Obama, which reëstablished diplomatic ties between their governments, after fifty-three years of estrangement. Following some initial prisoner releases (which Jon Lee Anderson wrote about earlier this week), the U.S. Treasury and Commerce departments made good on many other commitments of the accord on Thursday, relaxing a number of travel, banking, and export regulations.

Raúl marked the New Year the same way that most Cubans did: by visiting friends and eating some pork. His quiet response marked a dramatic shift in Cuba’s political culture. For decades here, no important moment in the Communist Party’s larger narrative of the revolution was allowed to pass without a massive demonstration in one of Havana’s huge squares or elsewhere on the island. Whether it was the return of Elián González from Miami, or of sporting heroes from the Pan-Am games, confrontations with the United States were underscored by a summoning of the faithful, with schoolkids bussed in to wave little flags and to chant, along with their old leader, “We Will Win!” Yet although the Communist Party declared, with the recent accord, “We won the war,” there was no massive acto.

Part of the reason was, no doubt, the holidays, a season during which Cuba’s streets are hung with signs marking another year of revolución, but which sees the island’s usual slow pace amble to an easy halt for days full of domino-playing, rum-drinking, and, if you can afford it, on New Year’s Eve, a suckling pig roasting in the yard. It also had to do with Raúl’s personal style—he has never had his brother’s charisma or oratory will, and isn’t given to gathering large crowds. But it was hard not to feel that it all came back to Fidel’s absence. As recently as October, Granma, the Cuban Communist Party’s official organ, ran a “reflection” from the Comandante about a New York Times editorial that urged action along the lines that Obama eventually took (Fidel’s reply: favorable, but prickly). Were he physically and mentally able, it was hard to imagine that the elder Castro wouldn’t make at least a quick public bow. But the word from party insiders with whom I spoke in Havana matches what’s been surmised by rumor-millers on the street—last week brought a new round of death rumors—and is the same, too, as what I heard from the Castros’ last remaining relative in Bíran.

The old ranch there where the Castro boys grew up, with its raised Galician-style house and numerous wooden outbuildings, has recently been restored—with the help of foreign foundations—and turned into a desultory tourist trap whose most interesting feature is also its newest. Around a pair of raised granite tombs containing the remains of Ángel Castro and his last wife lies a semi-circle of stone cubbies engraved with the names of his kids—or eight of them, anyway. The friendly soldier who showed me the site explained to me that Fidel and Raúl had no cubbies, because “they’ll be buried elsewhere.” He did allow that one of Ángel’s other sons was not enshrined here—he’d been born to a field hand—and that he was still alive and living nearby. I found Martin Castro, who is eighty-six, in a modest concrete home off of Bíran’s main drag. After we agreed that the new deal with America was a great thing, I asked after his older brother’s health, and his blue eyes flashed the same shade as Fidel’s. “Es muy mal,” he said. He’s very sick.

The perception in Cuba of Fidel’s abiding presence behind the throne has been a key to Raúl’s steady hand in weathering frustrations at home—Cubans were livid, for example, at his government’s recent raising of the retirement age, from fifty-five to sixty for women, and from sixty to sixty-five for men. But it was Fidel’s absence that may have allowed Raúl to forge the new relationship with Washington; behind the scenes, his pragmatism no doubt came to the fore. Many aspects of the détente seem to counter the more cynical interests of the Cuban state—notably initiatives to improve Internet capacity and allow U.S. foundations and churches to fund their Cuban counterparts. A big part of the calculus informing Cuba's new openness to the U.S., though, is about economic necessity. With Cuba’s birth rate having fallen below replacement level as far back as 1980 (partly thanks to Cuban women’s universal access to reproductive health and abortions), and its work force shrinking, the country's vaunted health system faces pressing concerns about how it will care for the huge number of citizens readying to retire. Simply put, Cuba’s economic planners realized long ago that their socialist system couldn’t survive without more sources of foreign cash.

Every person I spoke with in Bíran echoed the feelings about the accord expressed by Flori Suarez, a math teacher at the town’s state-run school. “We’ve always seen the American people as our friends,” said Suarez, whose father once toiled as a machatero for Ángel Castro and United Fruit. “So we’re very happy to be unified at last.”

But Cubans, too, are concerned about what Raúl, whose own term ends in 2018, may do to “correct” their economy. From Bíran, I rattled on to Santiago in a ’55 Ford Fairlane with a rebuilt Russian engine. Its driver, Roberto Reyes, wondered whether Raúl would move to do away with the country’s byzantine system of having two currencies in circulation—one for Cubans, and another for tourists and packaged goods. Invoking a popular rumor, Reyes said he feared the introduction of a new Cuban peso pegged not to the U.S. dollar—at the moment that Cubans gain new access to Yankee greenbacks—but to the SUCRE, a currency used by its South American allies in the Venezuela-led ALBA trading block.