Cuban President Raul Castro on Saturday led tens of thousands of Cubans in a pledge to defend the socialist legacy of his brother, former Cuban president Fidel Castro, who died last week aged 90 and was to be interred in the city where they launched the Cuban revolution.
However, Fidel Castro’s image is not to be immortalized with statues nor would public places be named after him, Raul Castro said, in keeping with his older brother’s wishes.
“This is the unconquered Fidel who calls us with his example,” the president, dressed in his four-star general’s uniform, told a crowd that had burst into chants of “I am Fidel.”
Photo: AFP
“Yes, we will overcome any obstacle, turmoil or threat in the building of socialism in Cuba,” the 85-year-old Raul Castro said in a speech before Santiago’s packed central plaza.
Fidel Castro’s ashes were to be entombed near the remains of Cuba’s independence hero Jose Marti in a simple ceremony beginning at 7am yesterday, concluding nine days of national mourning.
On Saturday, Raul Castro was joined on the stage by leftist foreign dignitaries and the Cuban political leadership to bid farewell to the man known to most Cubans as El Comandante — the commander — or simply “Fidel.”
“The loss of El Comandante does not mean we will go stagnant,” said Ansel Hechavarria, 61, a mechanic hoisting a large Cuban flag just before the 90-minute ceremony began. “We are going to continue his legacy.”
After two days of events in Havana, Castro’s funeral cortege departed on a three-day, 1,000km journey east, retracing the route that the triumphant, bearded rebels took upon overthrowing the US-backed former Cuban president Fulgencio Batista in 1959.
Raul Castro said “millions” had come out to pay tribute.
Crowds have greeted the caravan along the whole route, with volunteers sprucing up bridges and houses with fresh paint in Castro’s honor.
Castro’s critics have kept a low profile during the official nine-day mourning period that ended yesterday, but dissident writer Yoani Sanchez took to Twitter to criticize the hagiographical tributes.
“The reality has gone from ‘delirious’ to ‘hallucinatory,’ like a nightmare that does not end and worsens if we turn on the TV,” she said.
Although billboards with Castro quotes stand throughout the country and his portrait hangs from numerous government buildings and in private homes, there are no statues or landmarks named after him.
“The leader of the revolution rejected any manifestation of a cult of personality,” Raul Castro said, adding that a law banning such homages would be presented to the Cuban National Assembly when it meets later this month.
With his brother at his side, Fidel Castro began his revolution on July 26, 1953, with a failed assault on the Moncada barracks in the eastern city of Santiago.
He went on to build a Soviet-sponsored communist state 145km from the US and survived a half century of US attempts to topple or kill him.
Fidel Castro’s socialist government survived the fall of the Berlin Wall, but at the cost of more than a decade of great economic hardship that was relieved by the largesse of his political disciple, the late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez.
“In the unipolar world, the one of transnationals that arose after the fall of the socialist bloc, the permanent lesson of Fidel is that, yes, it can be done, man is capable of overcoming the most difficult conditions,” Raul Castro said.
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