MIAMI, United States.- The politician and last president of the Soviet era Mikhail Gorbachev (Mikhail Gorbachev), a friend of Fidel Castro, and who put an end to the Cold War, died this Tuesday at the age of 91, reported the news agency news Reuters.
“Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev passed away tonight after a long and serious illness,” said the authorities of the Russian Central Clinical Hospital, where he had arrived this week to undergo hemodialysis, as he had kidney problems.
according to several Press media Russians, citing a source close to the relatives of the deceased, Gorbachev will be buried in the Novodevichy cemetery in Moscow, in a tomb next to the remains of his wife Raísa.
Gorbachev, during his time as president of the former Soviet Union (USSR), forged arms reduction agreements with the United States and alliances with Western powers to remove the Iron Curtain that had divided Europe since World War II and bring about reunification. from Germany.
The politician is considered responsible for the fall of the Berlin Wall and the architect of ‘perestroika’, the project of political and economic reform of the USSR.
When pro-democracy protests swept through the Soviet-bloc nations of communist Eastern Europe in 1989, he refrained from using force, unlike previous Kremlin leaders who had sent tanks to crush uprisings in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.
The protests fueled aspirations for autonomy in the 15 republics of the Soviet Union, which disintegrated over the next two years.
Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990 and is one of the most prominent figures in 20th-century politics.
Mikhail Gorbachev led the Soviet Union during his last seven years as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1985-1991), the sixth in state history, and as President of the USSR (1990-1991), the first and last in the history of the country.
The president, who created the concepts of ‘glasnost’ (transparency and freedom of expression) and ‘perestroika’ (reconstruction, reform), was not forgiven by many Russians who consider him responsible for the end of a superpower, in addition to the turbulence that his reforms unleashed.
On June 30 this year, liberal economist Ruslan Grinberg told the armed forces news outlet Zvezda, after visiting Gorbachev in hospital: “He gave us all the freedom, but we don’t know what to do with it.”
Gorbachev was born on March 2, 1931 in Privólnoye, in the Stavropol region, in southwestern Russia, to a peasant family.
His relationship with Cuba
The former Soviet president had a close relationship with Cuba and with Fidel Castro, which suffered after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the suppression of the financial aid that the USSR had offered the island for decades.
The British historian Mervyn Bainprofessor at the University of Aberdeen and author of Moscow and Havana 1917 to the Present: An Enduring Friendship in an Ever-Changing Global Context, He assures that the great rupture between Havana and Moscow occurred when the process of perestroika and glasnost began, “because Castro did not like the reforms that Gorbachev began to implement and criticism of those policies began to be made.”
Despite the criticism against Gorbachev, the Russian politician maintained his admiration speech for Cuban dictator Fidel Castro when he died in November 2016.
“Fidel resisted and strengthened his country during the toughest US blockade, when there was colossal pressure on him, and he still brought his country out of that blockade onto a path of independent development,” said then Gorbachev.
“In recent years, even when Fidel Castro was no longer formally in power, his role in strengthening the country was enormous,” he added.
Castro will be remembered as a “prominent politician” who managed to leave “a deep mark on the history of humanity,” he said.
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