There will be no Fidel Castro streets or plazas in Cuba, in keeping with the late revolutionary leader's wishes, as spelled out in a law Cuban legislators passed on Tuesday.
President Raul Castro, 85, said that before dying at the age of 90 on November 25, his brother Fidel had requested that no monuments or statues be erected in his honor, and that no streets or buildings be named after him.
Lawmakers adopted the bill implementing his wish unanimously on Tuesday.
While he was an omnipresent figure in the lives of Cubans after taking power in 1959, Fidel Castro always opposed the erection of statues in his likeness. No streets or buildings are named after him in the Communist-led Caribbean country.
He also decreed that his name and image not be used for commercial or advertising purposes.
However, he did make an exception that would allow artists to use his name, people to cite it at political rallies and workplaces, and for a research institute on his role in history to bear his name.
Official media reports did not immediately make clear what penalties those breaking the law would face.
Fidel Castro’s death last month came as the Communist-ruled island restores ties with the US and slowly opens its economy. FRANCE 24 spoke to Miriam Leiva, an independent journalist, about Cuba’s historic leader and the prospect of political change.
After nine days of national mourning following Castro’s death on November 25, and widespread coverage of the leader's legacy and posthumous ceremonies, life has returned to normal in the country. Cuba's economic hardships continue, while a small, but increasingly vocal opposition, demands more meaningful changes.
Leiva, 69, is a former high-ranking Cuban diplomat and the widow of the economist Oscar Espinosa Chepe, who worked as an advisor to Castro until he was declared a “counter-revolutionary” by the government. Espinosa was fired in the 1990s and became a political prisoner in 2003. Leiva was also fired from her ministry job after refusing to disavow her husband.
In 2003, she co-founded the Ladies in White opposition group, but left in 2008 to dedicate herself to writing. She was among a group of Cuban opposition figures who met President Barack Obama during his historic visit to Havana in March, 2016.
FRANCE 24: Who was Fidel Castro for you?
Miriam Leiva: Fidel Castro was the most loved politician in Cuba in the first years of the revolution. But his hunger for notoriety and absolute power brought economic, political and social chaos to Cuba. He divided Cuban families, fuelled exile, and destroyed the economy with his gigantic and unproductive plans. He banned everything, made everything illegal in Cuba.
F24: What do you think about Fidel's last wish, rejecting a cult of personality around him?
F24: How has this time of improved relations with Washington and Fidel Castro’s death been for political dissidents in Cuba?
Leiva: I have always backed lifting the US embargo on Cuba and the end of the island’s isolation, because totalitarian governments need that isolation. The Cuban government exploited the confrontation with the United States to justify all the disasters here, which they would always blame on the threat of “Yankee imperialism” and the embargo.
Obama's measures have helped ordinary Cubans, from receiving remittances to closer contact between Cubans and Americans, both here in Cuba and abroad. In the case of the opposition, Obama directly expressed to Raul Castro the need to stop the repression and to open new spaces for dialogue. [Obama] said it publicly at the press conference with Raul, and repeated it when he met us in person.
Raul Castro started implementing a new kind of repression starting in 2006. Instead of long-term detentions or the firing squad, the regime is using short-term detentions that last hours or days. So the system is the same, and the people running the country are the same, and no foreign country is going to end that. Foreign countries can help change things, diminish repression, but the regime is not going to renounce its power. I believe that neither Obama nor any government can completely eliminate repression in Cuba. They can help, but real change depends on Cubans; it really all depends on Cubans themselves.
F24: What would you like the future to look like for Cuba?
Leiva: I hope that one day all Cubans can participate in the political, economic and social decision-making in their own country. Participate in all decisions.
I think a hopeful sign is the “oath” to Fidel that Cubans were invited to sign after his death, and I think the words they chose are important. The text comes from a speech in which he said “revolution is seizing the historical moment, to change everything that needs changing”. Of course it’s much longer than that, but supposedly it has also been written next to his tomb.
Raul Castro's economic reforms have been too slow, with practically no positive results so far. But in April of this year he told the [Communist] Party Congress that the major barrier on change was to cling to the past and to obsolete ideas.
Those words by Fidel, and what Raul has said, it gives me hope. Hopes are always dashed here in Cuba, but anyway, if they truly embrace that idea and they even wrote it on Fidel’s tomb, maybe change will come.
FIDEL CASTRO, Cuba’s communist former dictator, died on November 25th 2016, aged 90. After a bloody revolution in 1959, he ruled his country with an iron fist until 2008, when his brother Raúl replaced him as president. The imagery of Mr Castro—particularly his beard and green fatigues—has long stood for heroic rebellion for many. But not all: in the hours after his death, Danilo Maldonado Machado, a Cuban graffiti artist and dissident, was reportedly detained by authorities after spraying a simple message on a wall in Havana: Se fue (“He’s gone”).
It seems the regime that Mr Castro installed still understands the power of propaganda. It tightly controls all aspects of the media, even the walls of public spaces. Political slogans (particularly “Patria o Muerte”—“Homeland or Death”), combined with arresting visuals, quickly became a rallying cry from the government to its people after the revolution. Dissenting voices, such as Mr Machado’s, are quickly scrubbed away. And Mr Castro’s face has also cropped up on murals in friendly Latin American countries, from Venezuela to Nicaragua.
A worker in Cuba Square in Managua, Nicaragua, sweeps the floor in front of a mural depicting Castro and Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega
A mural depicting American author Ernest Hemingway shaking hands with Fidel Castro decorates the wall of a car park in Havana
For 57 years, iconography featuring Castro has stood for socialist rebellion. Here, Cubans walk past a mural in Havana in 2008
A roadside billboard emblazoned with the slogan “Patria o muerte” (“Fatherland or death”) celebrates the 40th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution in 2006
The face of the leader known as “El Comandante” is central to Cuban revolutionary iconography, as in this mural in Cienfuegos, Cuba, 2007
A painting of Fidel Castro adorns a factory in Havana. The slogan “Socialismo o muerte” (“Socialism or death”) was taken up by Cuban revolutionaries in 1957
A mural of Castro alongside the late president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, with a message reading: “Mejor amigo” (“Best friend”), Caracas, Venezuala
