At 90, Fidel Castro - symbol of Cuban resistance to change

HAVANA:

White-haired, thin and bent at nearly 90, Fidel Castro in person is a faint echo of the man who remade his country, defied the United States and fueled socialist uprisings around the world. But 10 years after he handed control to his brother Raul, Cuba’s former leader has taken on a powerful new role in a country suffering an economic crisis and debating its direction in a new era of normalization with Washington.

After a decade out of the public eye, Fidel Castro has surged back in the run-up to his Aug 13 birthday as the inspiration for Cubans who want to maintain strict Communist orthodoxy in Cuba in the face of mounting pressures to loosen political control and allow more private enterprise. “We reiterate our commitment to stay faithful to the ideas he’s fought for throughout his life and to keep the spirit of resistance, struggle and dialectic thought alive,” Jose Ramon Machado Ventura, the hard-line second secretary of the Cuban Communist Party told the nation Tuesday at the celebration of Castro’s 1953 attack on a government barracks.

The peak of Castro’s return to public prominence came April 19 at the closing session of the Cuban Communist Party’s 7th Congress. The three-day gathering featured a string of speeches denouncing President Barack Obama’s visit to Cuba the month before, in which the US leader called on Cubans to look toward a future of reconciliation and greater freedom. Castro opened with a defense of his communist ideology, declaring the Russian Revolution of 1917 to be “a grand social revolution that represented a great step forward in the fight against colonialism and its inseparable companion, imperialism.”

During 47 years in power, Fidel was a constant presence for Cubans but prohibited the statues, portraits and other tributes beloved by other total leaders. Today, his image is everywhere as the country fills with tributes to him on his 90th birthday. Fidel is now mentioned by hardliners in the same breath as Jose Marti, the 19th century poet and revolutionary fighter whose status is similar to that of the founding fathers in the US. “In the ideology of Marti, and the path of Fidel, we’ve been warned about the need to prepare ourselves for a war of ideas, and to be informed, so we can’t be confused,” the head of Cuba’s official journalists’ union wrote Sunday. “We have the historic privilege of having shared our fate with Fidel.” — AP