HAVANA, July 7th A new book called “Fidel in Love” reveals the secret love story between Cuba’s ‘Lider Maximo,’ Fidel Castro, and Anna Maria Traglia, the niece of the Cardinal Vicar of Rome. Read more
Tag Archive for: Fidel Castro
HAVANA, Sept. 4 Mistress of Fidel Castro at age 19, Marita Lorenz was “returned” by the CIA for the murder. Deceased at the age of 80, she told us about this extravagant adventure.
HAVANA, Dec. 4 
HAVANA, August 15th
HAVANA,July 27th (EFE) Cuba celebrates Tuesday its National Rebellion Day, one of the most important events on the country’s revolutionary calendar, with massive festivities in the central Cuban city of Sancti Spiritus honoring the ex-president and “historic leader of the revolution,” Fidel Read more
Photo August 2015
HAVANA, May 22th (Reuters) Retired Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Bolivian President Evo Morales discussed “imperialist efforts” to undo leftist progress in Latin America during Morales’ two-day visit to the Communist-ruled island, Cuban state television reported on Saturday.
Two major powers in the region have moved to the right in recent months. Argentina’s Peronists were voted out of office late last year while in Brazil, Dilma Rousseff of the Workers Party was suspended as president earlier this month due to impeachment.
Leftist countries such as Cuba have called Rousseff’s suspension a “coup” while the president of El Salvador went as far as to say he would not recognize the centrist interim government.
Morales and Castro spoke “of the events happening in Latin America and the imperialist efforts to revert the political and social movement in our region,” state television reported. No images of the encounter were shown.
One of Cuba’s closest allies is Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, who is under fire over a deepening economic crisis and facing protests in favor of a recall referendum.
Morales faced a setback earlier this year when he was defeated in a referendum that would have cleared the way for him to run for a fourth term in 2019.
The Bolivian president met with Cuban President Raul Castro, younger brother of Fidel, on Friday and attended a ceremony during which government officials of both countries signed bilateral agreements on health, education, culture and the economy.
HAVANA, march 28 (AFP) – Cuba’s Fidel Castro signaled continued resistance to rapprochement between Washington and Havana, writing in an opinion piece on Monday that his country “has no need of gifts” from the United States.
The former president, 89, remained out of sight during last week’s historic visit to the communist island by US President Barack Obama which aimed to cement normalization.
In his first published remarks about the visit, Castro seemed unwilling to forgive and forget more than a half-century of enmity between the two countries, declaring in the Granma newspaper that Cuba “has no need of gifts from the empire.”
He made his remarks in a piece entitled “El Hermano Obama” — “Brother Obama.”
“Listening to the words of the US president could give anyone a heart attack,” Castro said, in an ironic barb.
“Nobody has any illusion that the people of this noble and selfless country will surrender glory and rights and the spiritual wealth that has come through the development of education, science and culture.”
Obama during last week’s three-day visit — the first by a US president in 88 years — thrilled Cubans by calling for democracy and greater freedoms, and took part in baseball diplomacy during a match between Cuban and American professional players.
The landmark visit was spearheaded by the US president and Cuba’s current leader Raul Castro, who has proven to be far more reform-minded than the revolutionary icon brother whom he succeeded as the island’s president a decade ago.
Since handing the presidency over to his younger brother, Fidel Castro has spent his time writing reflections which occasionally appear in the party press.
HAVANA, April 29 (EFE) “No contact with Manila,” Ernesto “Che” Guevara wrote several times in his diary as he marched to his death in Bolivia and, behind the phrase, is Cuban leader Fidel Castro’s betrayal and abandonment of the legendary guerrilla fighter, Cuban journalist Alberto Müller said.
“Manila” was the codeword for Cuba, Müller told Efe in an interview ahead of the presentation at the Buenos Aires International Book Fair of his book “Che Guevara. Valgo más vivo que muerto,” or “Che Guevara: Valued more alive than dead.”
The title comes from a phrase attributed to Che when he was found in the Bolivian village of La Higuera and contrasts the guerrilla’s desire to live with Castro’s order to avoid being captured alive, highlighting the “great differences” existing in 1967 between the two revolutionaries, Müller said.
Müller said there was a guerrilla unit in Havana ready to deploy and rescue Guevara, but “Fidel never authorized the mission,” abandoning the guerrilla leader to his fate.
Che was shot dead on Oct. 9, 1967, in La Higuera.
“He died in a pitiful manner. Without medications for his asthma, without boots and only rags wrapped around his feet, without water, without food and without allies,” Müller said.
To understand why Castro withdrew his support from Guevara, the author takes the reader back to what he considers a turning point in the relationship between them, the 1965 Afro-Asian Conference in Algiers.
Guevara’s address to the assembly meant “a break up with the Soviet Union that harmed Che’s relationship with Fidel,” the author said.
Guevara criticized Moscow, accusing the USSR, without mentioning it by name, of being “accomplices of U.S. imperialist exploitation,” just when the Cuban leader was about to conclude agreements on military cooperation with the Kremlin.
The estrangement between Guevara and Castro increased over time, and deepened when the Cuban leader, without consulting the Argentine-born guerrilla, decided to withdraw Cuban fighters from the Congo, leading to the mission in Bolivia that Müller describes as an “induced suicide.”
“Why Bolivia?” Müller would ask Castro if he were to interview him.
“Che’s posture ran against Fidel’s interests,” the author said. “Che became a pest, an inconvenience for the Cuban Revolution, a pebble in the shoe.”
Müller said several historians and Che biographers that helped in his research agreed with him that “Guevara wanted to go to Argentina, his homeland, to liberate it, and in Havana they invented the Bolivia campaign for him.”
The author said he found out that two years before Guevara’s final mission, Castro had acknowledged that Bolivia “didn’t have conditions for a guerrilla movement” and the peasants there did not need a revolution because agrarian reform in the 1950s had given them ownership of the land.
Even so, the Cuban leader sent Guevara to Bolivia and months later cut off the link with supporters in La Paz, increasing the guerrillas’ isolation and worsening their situation.
“I think Che must have died being very aware of his betrayal,” Müller said.