Díaz-Canel vows resistance to U.S. sanctions as blackouts persist
Cuba opened a weeklong celebration Thursday for the centenary of Fidel Castro’s birth, with ballet performances, poetry and more than 300 academic papers and panel discussions devoted to the impact of “Castro Thought” on everything from education and science to sports. The events unfolded while the island contends with widespread power failures, water shortages and mountains of garbage on Havana’s streets.
Hundreds of representatives from left-wing and Communist parties around the world came to Havana for the commemoration of the man who ruled Cuba for nearly five decades before his death in 2016. Outside the conference halls, there was little cause for celebration: garbage piled along the streets, some of it set ablaze by residents protesting their living conditions, and electricity and water disappearing for days at a time.
The contrast between ceremony and conditions is exactly what the government wants to obscure, according to Yoani Sánchez, an independent Cuban journalist who wrote on her blog that the government wants to give the impression that everything is fine. “This event is an extraordinary example of political necrophilia — a celebration of dead ideas, zombie ideas that don’t work,” said Moisés Naím, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
President Miguel Díaz-Canel opened the festivities, praising Castro’s life as an example to revolutionaries and vowing to resist U.S. aggression. His remarks drew an ovation from 1,500 guests at Havana’s Palace of Conventions, including delegates from Communist parties stretching from Chile to China. “As Fidel said more than once, we are ready to resist the imperialist blockade for as many years as necessary,” Díaz-Canel said.
A handful of former leftist Latin American leaders paid tribute to Castro. “Fidel was for my generation of Latin Americans a living symbol of the struggle for social justice, liberty and sovereignty,” former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff said in a statement.
For many Cubans, the festival has been barely visible. Power failures have cut television, radio and internet, leaving few Cubans aware of the events. “They are honoring the man who killed the country,” said Luis Fonseca, a day laborer and would-be barber who unloads trucks at a market in colonial Havana. He and his friends knew nothing about the commemoration. “No one is talking about it.” Boris Gonzalez, a writer and historian, woke up one recent day without electricity or water; his 20-year-old daughter was sick with dengue. “People don’t give a damn about the event,” he said. “Nobody is talking about Fidel. We are beyond that.”
Castro, nicknamed “El Caballo,” or “The Horse,” still has admirers, mostly among older Cubans. Some people waiting in food lines say they miss the leadership of a man who bestrode the island in his trademark green military fatigues. “You will hear people say this would not be happening if Fidel were alive,” said Carlos Alzugaray, a retired Cuban ambassador. But Alzugaray said most Cubans have other priorities. “They only want the lights to be turned on again,” he said.
There are no statues of Castro in Cuba, and no streets, schools or government buildings named after him — a prohibition he imposed shortly after his guerrillas overthrew Fulgencio Batista in 1959. “There is no cult of personality around any living revolutionary. The leaders of this country are human beings, not gods,” Castro said in 2003. He went on to build an enormous personality cult. Billboards across the island still show him in camouflage, rifle in hand, leading the revolution, and Granma, the Communist Party newspaper, keeps his image on its website’s home page. “Fidel will never leave us,” it says.
Castro’s impact extended well beyond Cuba. He turned the small island into a geopolitical power, promoted guerrilla movements throughout Latin America, and leveraged his alliance with the Soviet Union to send tens of thousands of Cuban soldiers into Africa. After the fall of the Soviet Union, he became a power broker in oil-rich Venezuela. For decades he was Washington’s most tenacious adversary.
Even now, running on empty, Cuba remains a focus for Washington. The U.S. State Department last month issued a 99-page report that branded the island a unique national-security threat still bent, under Castro’s influence, on “conquering the neighboring United States.”
“Call it megalomania, genius, madness, audacity, irresponsibility, whatever you want,” said Jorge Castañeda, a former foreign minister of Mexico who once tangled with Castro. “But there is no doubt that he turned Cuba into a global player — at great cost to Cubans who are still paying the price.”
At home, Castro’s record included unorthodox economic experiments. He sought to create a selfless “New Man” and tried to abolish money. He nationalized businesses, and the island was left dependent first on the Soviet Union, then on Venezuela. His agricultural policies created a chronic milk shortage that he sought to end by cloning Ubre Blanca, a champion milk cow. When the cow died, Granma published her obituary on its front page, a marble statue of her was erected, and her embalmed remains are still displayed. Castro even mused about breeding miniature cows for Havana families to keep at home — the tiny cows never materialized.
“History will absolve me,” Castro said in a famous speech defending himself after his failed 1953 attack on a military barracks. “History won’t absolve him,” Gonzalez, the historian, said. “I hope we don’t repeat the error that has lasted for almost 70 years.”