Moscow.- Hundreds of Russians gathered this Thursday, with Cuban flags, bouquets of red flowers, and much nostalgia for Soviet times, in front of the statue of the leader of the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro, to pay tribute on the occasion of the centenary of his birth.
“For us, Fidel Castro is a model and an example to follow (…) in these difficult times, to achieve victory over the most evil forces in history,” declared the leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), Gennady Zyuganov, at the foot of the monument, wearing a red jacket with a hammer and sickle.
In his words, which stood out for their electoral nuance ahead of the upcoming parliamentary elections in September, the references to the role of his political party in Russian history and the need to regain political leadership, he recalled that even U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower threatened Fidel, and later “nine U.S. presidents tried to strangle him, to suffocate the Cuban people.”
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“He defeated everyone, he showed us the example of how one must fight, live and win,” he maintained.
The ceremony, organized by the Embassy of Cuba in Moscow and the CPRF, was also attended by Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, who emphasized the “historical stature” of Fidel’s figure and the “strategic alliance” between Havana and Moscow.
“Castro will always be one of the clearest symbols of our time, a figure of truly global scale. He was a convinced supporter of a new multipolar world order, and although in his time these terms were not used, he led and foresaw much of what is happening and will happen on the path toward liberation from imperialist moorings,” he said.
He also referred to the U.S. blockade imposed nearly seven decades ago, noting that “the implementation of new restrictive measures is a manifestation of the impotence of the United States, which cannot break the will of the Cuban people.”
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“We categorically do not accept such a policy. We express our unwavering solidarity with our Cuban friends,” he maintained.
During his lifetime Fidel prohibited statues from being erected in his honor, which is why the Moscow monument is a ‘rara avis’, with similar sculptures only in Nicaragua, Mexico, Venezuela, Vietnam, and South Africa.
At the foot of the statue, the attendees, many of them wearing t-shirts allegorical to the centenary of the revolutionary leader, were able to listen to the translation of the lyrics of the song ‘El necio’ by the Cuban singer-songwriter Silvio Rodríguez, and the track performed by the Russian group Grenada.
At the end of the ceremony, Ryabkov and the Cuban ambassador to Moscow, Enrique Orta González, unfurled the ribbons of the floral offerings placed before the monument.
Russia, a political ally of Cuba since the Cold War and one of the island’s main trading partners, defends its ties with Havana as a “strategic partnership” and has repeatedly condemned Washington’s trade embargo on the island, which worsened after the arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by the United States earlier this year.
In order to alleviate the deep energy crisis suffered by the largest of the Antilles, Russia sent a ship with about 730,000 barrels of oil to the island last March.
