A mayor expels Fidel Castro and Che Guevara from the Mexican capital

Havana/Fidel Castro and Che Guevara are prohibited, for the moment, to sit again at the Bank of the Tabacalera Jardín Park, in Mexico City. As if it were intensive care patients, the heavy sedent statues were loaded in several workers on Wednesday and withdrawn from the place, after years of controversy over their “irregular” installation.

“Neither Che nor Fidel requested authorization to settle in Cuba … and neither in the tobacco company,” public This Thursday in X Alessandra Red de la Vega, the combative mayor of Cuauhtémoc, one of the 16 territorial demarcations in which it is divided from Mexico City and where the monument was nestled.

According to the policy, chosen by an opposite coalition to the ruling that governs in the capital and in the country, the placement of the figures in 2018 did not have the necessary documentation of the Committee of Monuments and Artistic Works in public spaces and the process for the installation was never completed. To this he added that his mayor’s office does not have “a single role” that authorizes the presence of the statues in the park and “are under the irregular shelter of a worker from the Mayor’s Office without any legal history for that”, so the urban services of the demarcation withdrew the monuments.

“Thus, things are not done,” criticized the Mexican businesswoman, in reference to the “personal whims” of those who ruled the district in 2018, despite the requests of the residents of the Cuauhtémoc to recover the park of the park that housed the Cuban and the Argentine.

It is not the first time that Castro and Che Guevara take their seat. In 2019 the statues were reinstated in the same site after they were also removed by irregularities in the process, but then the correct procedure was not followed either. Now, the Mayor’s Office communicated, they will be protected and will be assessed to send them to another destination.

In X, the mayor’s announcement unleashed all kinds of controversies and comments among those who saw the measure as an offense and assured that “Che and Fidel will be back”, and those who celebrate the eviction of the “responsible for the misery that a town as beautiful as the Cuban today lives today.”

Others, ironizing, proposed to send the statues to the regions governed by Morena, the party of Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Claudia Sheinbaum that controlled the Cuauhtémoc when the bronze sculptures were located.

Known as Monument Encuentro, the figures of Guevara and Castro – Tabaco in hand, and both with their military uniform after 1959 – commemorated the exile of both in Mexico, where they met before sailing towards Cuba aboard the Granma. Since its installation has been the target of complaints among those who frequent the tobacco garden not only for representing a totalitarian power, but for being an obstacle in urban harmony.

Known as Monument Encuentro, the figures of Guevara and Castro commemorated the exile of both in Mexico

Red was appointed last year as mayor candidate by force and heart for Mexico, a coalition formed by the three main opposition parties. Before winning the election, his vehicle received five shots from an individual who later confessed that he had been hired to “scare” politics. In the elections he won in front of the candidate of the official Morena, Catalina Monreal – Hija de Ricardo Monreal, former mayor of Cuauhtémoc, during whose mandate the statues were installed – who tried to reverse the result accusing red of alleged irregularities in the elections.

In July 2024, 14ymedio He published a report On the monument I find that, located in a central area of the capital, has suffered vandalisms – they were bathed in white paint – and served as a tendard for those who wash themselves at the source of the park.

“For me it is an aberration to have these statues here. We have countless national heroes, why are we going to have these individuals, if Castro was a dictator,” a neighbor of the neighborhood then told this newspaper. Another, attracted by the conversation, replied: “Shouldn’t they be elsewhere? In Cuba, for example?”

At the moment, however, Castro and Che rest in a deposit of the Mayor’s Office. An empty bank and two spots on the crossbars are left in the park: they are the footprint, neither epic nor heroic, of the expulsion.