Iconic leader
Fidel Castro’s 90th birthday celebrated
Fidel’s admirers say he freed Cuba from tyranny, but the revolution wasn’t about just one guy.
Yet as he marks his 90th birthday this Saturday, popular reverence for the ex-guerrilla is strong.
So strong, it is drawing thousands of tourists to Cuba — including more and more from its old enemy, the United States.
“I am hostile to anything that resembles a personality cult,” he said in an interview published in 2006 in a book by Spanish journalist Ignacio Ramonet.
“There is not a single school, factory, hospital or building that bears my name. There are no statues of me. There are practically no portraits.”
But although formal portraits may be few, the bearded, cigar-chomping revolutionary smiles out from countless billboards across the island.
Local sociology student Juan Carlos Cabezas, 25, says he is struck by how many images of Castro’s face he sees around Havana.
“He has become like an icon, a symbol,” Cabezas said. “He is no longer just a person. He represents something more.”
In the central town of Sancti Spiritus, a poster bears three photographs of Fidel: as a young rebel, a middle-aged statesman and a grayhaired elder.
“Fidel is a model that will be alive forever for all Cubans,” said passerby Celia Gomez, a 27-yearold psychologist.
In the run-up to his birthday, Cuba’s media published a series of photographs and articles about Castro, entitled “Fidel With Us.”
A university in the province of Santa Clara even launched an online application of the same name with information and quotations from the ex-leader — despite limited internet access on the island.
There is no museum dedicated to Fidel, though relics of his life are scattered around various historical venues.
Key sites in Castro’s life are preserved in his birthplace in the eastern village of Biran, the old barracks in Santiago de Cuba and an apartment in Havana where he planned a failed attack.
His crushing of the US-backed counter-revolutionary invasion in the Bay of Pigs in 1961 is commemorated in a museum at Playa Giron, a beach on the south of the island, with old weapons and uniforms.
And Castro could not have imagined as a young rebel commander in the 1950s that decades later his face would be sold printed on T-shirts.