The Audacious Funeral and Quiet Afterlife of Fidel Castro

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The funeral cortège of Cuba's former President Fidel Castro ended in Santiago’s Santa Ifigenia cemetery.The funeral cortège of Cuba’s former President Fidel Castro ended in Santiago’s Santa Ifigenia cemetery. Credit PHOTOGRAPH BY IVAN ALVARADO / REUTERS

The burial of Fidel Castro’s remains this morning, in Cuba’s second city of Santiago, at the far end of the island from Havana, is a symbolic homecoming for the late revolutionary leader.

Santiago is the city nearest to the feudal rural landholding of Birán, where Castro grew up as the son of a Spanish emigré who made good, and where he attended Catholic-run boarding schools from the age of six through high school. Santiago is also where, on July 26, 1953, Fidel formally initiated his bid to overthrow Fulgencio Batista, who had seized power in a military coup the previous year.

After conspiring and gathering up weapons for months, Fidel, who was by then a politically active lawyer of twenty-six, led a group of a hundred and sixty-five young people that included his younger brother, Raúl, in an assault on Santiago’s Moncada army barracks. It was, as it turned out, a characteristically audacious move by Fidel. Intended as the first step in a nationwide revolt, it failed miserably: a number of the inexperienced rebels were gunned down in the attack, while dozens more were captured and executed, some after being tortured. The Moncada barracks today are a children’s school and a museum, but the thick, yellow-painted walls have been left pockmarked from the bullets fired during the fateful attack that took place sixty-three years ago.

Fidel himself was caught and sentenced to fifteen years in prison for his efforts, but only after a trial in which he made himself a national figure by defending himself with a long and dramatic speech entitled “History Will Absolve Me.” It was a daring manifesto, and it became his defining statement, the one against which all of his subsequent actions were measured. Luck was also something that accompanied Fidel throughout his life: After serving a mere two years of his sentence, he was set free in an amnesty granted by Batista. It was not one of the dictator’s wiser decisions.

Fidel soon left Cuba for Mexico, where he promptly began organizing a new armed revolt. That effort, which led to a two-year guerrilla war in the Sierra Maestra mountains, west of Santiago, in the part of the country that he knew best, ultimately proved successful, after Batista and his entourage fled Cuba on the night of January 1, 1959. Fidel and his bearded rebels, los barbudos, as they were called, triumphantly took over Cuba. Savoring his victory, Fidel took his time to reach the capital, travelling in a procession of rebel-packed vehicles that began in Santiago and ended in a victory parade in Havana, on January 8, 1959.

From start to finish, Fidel’s funeral was choreographed with Big History in mind. First, there were the two days of public mourning by well-wishers who stood in lines to pay their respects to his flag-bedecked coffin, guarded by solders at the foot of the monument to José Martí, the country’s nineteenth-century independence hero, in Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución. (In a recklessly heroic action that set the tone for Fidel’s own attack on Moncada, Martí, a poet and journalist, was killed while leading a suicidal horse charge against colonial Spanish troops, on May 19, 1895.) Dominated by a great obelisk erected in honor of Martí—“El Apostól,” as he is known nationally—and surrounded by government ministries and the council of ministers, the Plaza is at once Cuba’s national hearth and its ultimate seat of political power, the place where Fidel made many of his most famous speeches over the decades. It is to Cubans what the steps of the Capitol building and the Washington Mall are to Americans.

After the mourning came the big event in the Plaza on Tuesday night, and the speeches by a slew of foreign dignitaries on the political left, all of them lauding Fidel and his revolution: Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela, Rafael Correa of Ecuador, Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, Alexis Tspiras of Greece, and others from Asia, the Caribbean, Africa, and the Middle East. The Bolivian leader Evo Morales cast a plaintive note in his speech, calling out, “Fidel, what will we do without you?”

Indeed, the occasion had a valedictory atmosphere in more ways than one, with Fidel’s death coming just as the political left he had championed has begun to collapse across Latin America, and as a blustering, threatening Donald Trump comes to power in Washington. The event was also notable for an absence of any first-tier political leaders. Russia, France, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States dispatched senior officials, while their bosses sent condolence messages and stayed home. Gone were the global figures who had been proud to stand next to Fidel when he was in power—Che, Mandela, Krushchev, Arafat, Chavez—and other icons of earlier eras.

Beginning on Wednesday, the four-day funeral procession of Fidel’s casket, in the glass-encased cargo bay of a Russian military jeep, followed the same route as his victory march to Havana, fifty-eight years ago, in reverse order. After arriving yesterday in Santiago, to crowds of emotional onlookers and the arrival of more foreign dignitaries—Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff from Brazil, and Diego Maradona, the Argentine soccer legend—Fidel’s ashes were buried today, according to his wishes, in Santiago’s venerable Santa Ifigenia cemetery, the most symbolically potent of Cuba’s graveyards.

Appropriately, Santa Ifigenia first opened its gates in 1868, the same year that Carlos Manuel de Cespedes, the founding father of Cuba’s national independence movement, initiated hostilities against colonial Spain. A series of inconclusive but extremely bloody insurrectionary wars followed; it would be thirty more years before Cuba finally won its independence. Santa Ifigenia houses the tomb of Cespedes, who was killed by the Spaniards in 1874, and of many more Cuban patriots who fell in those long-ago battles, as well as the bodies of most of the young men killed when Fidel led them against Moncada, and of others who fought alongside him during the guerrilla war against Batista.

A spot in the cemetery has been found for Fidel next to José Martí, who resides in pride of place at Santa Ifigenia, in an imposing stone mausoleum, attended by a permanent military honor guard as well as an eternal flame. In his final goodbye to Fidel yesterday, Raúl announced that it had been his brother’s dying wish that a cult of personality should not be allowed to flourish after his death. Raúl said that a special law would be decreed to enshrine that final wish of Fidel’s. Unlike many of the historical figures whom Fidel so admired, in other words, there will be no avenues, statues, or public buildings named after him in Cuba. In death, as in life, therefore, Fidel will continue to be nowhere, and yet everywhere, all at once.

In Santiago, meanwhile, the official Cuban slogan created for Fidel’s sendoff, complete with a Twitter hashtag and scrawled in colored markers on thousands of children’s foreheads and T-shirts and placards, was “YoSoyFidel”—“I am Fidel.”

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