Probably the reluctance of the maximum leader to be dedicated to statues was to prevent one day from his enemies could knock them down and desecrate them.
In 1959, a few weeks after his triumphal entry into Havana at the head of the guerrilla army that overthrew the Fulgencio Batista regime, Fidel Castro He ordered to withdraw from 41 street, near the Columbia military camp, in Marianao, the statue that the Italian sculptor Enzo Gallo had made and issued a law to avoid the cult of his person.
Before he died, on November 25, 2016, he left will not be made monuments and that his name was not used to baptize anything.
Probably the reluctance of the maximum leader to be dedicated to statues was to prevent one day from his enemies could knock them down and desecrate them.
In Cuba there are no statues of Fidel Castro. Neither is missing. His bearded face, usually with thirty or forty years less than the 90s he had when he died, is present at each step in Cuba: in the first flat of the newspapers, on TV, in fences and posters in the streets, in photos placed in prominent sites in offices, schools, hospitals or police barracks. Since 1959 it has been like this
In the absence of a statue, Fidel Castro has a funeral monolith in the Santa Figenia cemetery, in Santiago de Cuba, where their remains lie, near José Martí, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes and Mariana Grajales. He has a permanent honor guard and is a mandatory place for pilgrimage for the faithful of Castroism. Some of the visitors seem to fall into a trance. And the sculptor who did the monolith says that Fidel appears and talks to him.
If Fidel Castro wanted to avoid the cult of personality and to endorse him like Mao Zedong and Kim Il Sung, he did not do much to prevent it. On the contrary.
Terco, tireless, thought of everything, was present everywhere, the same in hurricanes as in scientific congresses. His word was law, his orders were not discussed, woe to whom he dared to contradict him!
Their speeches, which lasted three, four hours or more, were the same as economy as international politics, or livestock. Shortly before his disease retirement, in the Table Redonda television program he explained how to use Chinese pots and recommended to soak the beans several hours before cooking them.
It was always extolled, considered infallible. It was the personification of the government, the State, the party, of “the homeland, the revolution and socialism.” You had to thank you every and every one of “the achievements of the revolution.”
His funerals, to the North Korean, with rigorous mourning, lasted nine days. His remains, in an olive green harmony, toured the entire country before being deposited in the rock of Santa Ifigenia.
The cult of Fidel Castro was reinforced with his death. The posthumous counting of his facts and speeches was what he needed to oxygenate.
In his last years he did not please the image of a stubborn and fragile old man who wrote editorial confuses for Cubadebate and the Granma newspaper that called reflections and signed as “fidel fellow”, in which he made apocalyptic predictions and use and abuse of the short and paste.
Death came to give the figure of Fidel Castro the second air he needed. And what a second air!
The continuators of their regime, although they usually contradict their policies, do not stop invoking Fidel Castro and cite phrases of their speeches, come to the case or not.
The disaster in which the mandamases of continuity have suggested the country has caused the followers of Fidel Castro, to multiply their number among the people, especially old women, that forgotten of the disasters of yesterday, of the many times that the setbacks had to convert the victory or something that seems, repeat that “with Fidel these things did not happen”.
This year, as is the case every time it is approaching on August 13, the day Fidel Castro was born in Birán, in 1926, the official media have been overwhelmed with the counting of the acts and anecdotes of the commander and the loas to “his legacy”. And you can imagine what the Cantaleta will be next year 2026 when your centenary is.
