(Havana) In the heart of Havana, a palace combining great luxury and profusion of technological tools has housed the Fidel Castro center for a few days, inaugurated five years after the death of the father of the Cuban revolution.
Impossible to miss it in the district of Vedado, of which it occupies a block of houses. For the occasion, even the pavements of the surrounding streets have been renovated.
This center, intended to preserve and disseminate the thought of Fidel Castro (1926-2016), is housed in a building built in 1894, once owned by a family of Catalan bankers.
Inaugurated Thursday in the presence of President Miguel Diaz-Canel, his Venezuelan counterpart Nicolas Maduro and General Raul Castro, it clashes with the wishes expressed by the Lider maximo during his lifetime.
Faced with criticism from his opponents who accused him of fueling a cult of personality, Fidel declared that he did not want monuments to be erected after his death.
A month after his death, Parliament passed a law prohibiting the use of his name “to designate institutions, squares, parks, avenues, streets and other public places.”
Ubiquitous image
But in fact, his image remains omnipresent in the streets of Cuba and he is quoted daily by the official press and the country’s leaders.
And the law had provided for an exception: “the use of his name to name an institution which, in accordance with the law, is built for the study and dissemination of his thought and his work”, such as this center whose entry will be free.
Huge stained-glass windows, crystal chandeliers and doors and stairs carved from precious wood have transformed the old building into a luxurious palace, equipped with the latest technology.
“We have a center which is functional, which can fulfill the high objectives it has, and which in no way opposes the criteria that the Commander (Fidel Castro, Editor’s note) could have in this direction, because […] he was a defender of things well done ”, assures the person in charge of the Preservation of the documentary heritage of the Palace of the Revolution, Alberto Albariño, during a guided tour open to the press.
Asked about the cost of the work, he gives no figure but assures that it is not a big expense for the Cuban state, faced with its worst economic crisis in nearly 30 years, a large part of the budget having been covered by “donations received from other countries”.
And “the effect that (the center) will have on education […] is very large compared to its economic value, ”he insists.
Virtual reality
To perpetuate the thought of the man who overthrew the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in 1959 to establish a socialist system still in force today, the center has nine exhibition rooms equipped with giant screens and touch tables allowing visitors to ” take virtual journeys through his life and his work.
The director of the center, the historian René Gonzalez, admits that a “high investment” has been made in technologies, but with a benefit: “very soon”, children and adolescents will be able, thanks to virtual reality, to navigate with Fidel on the Granma, the yacht that brought him from Mexico City to Cuba in 1956 with a handful of revolutionaries.
Virtual reality will also allow them to climb aboard the Soviet-made Gaz-69 jeep, displayed in the palace garden and with which Fidel traveled the island.
In the rooms, whose walls are adorned with phrases from the leader of the revolution, we find personal items, such as his olive-green uniforms, AKM grape-shot which accompanied him all his life and the telephone he used to give his gifts. orders during the Angolan war (1975-1991).
Reflections of his political friendships, some of his decorations, including that of Hero of the USSR, as well as gifts from foreign dignitaries, such as the bust offered by Chinese President Xi Jinping during his visit to Cuba in 2014, are also on display.