Fidel completes 82 years: Santería priests and priestesses in Cuba carried out yesterday, Wesnesday, a ritual in which they prayed again for the health of the veteran leader, for whom they wished “long life”. The ceremony included calling upon the African deities and Fidel’s guardian angel amid a strong touch of drumming, sacrifices of animals, and the planting of a ceiba tree. – Por Estó de Quintana Roo, Chetuaml, Q. Roo, Mex., 12 August 2008.
And as the photo clearly shows, his is still bigger than Bush’s!
Thanks to Mariann Wizard / The Rag Blog
Thanks for that encouraging portrait of a great man, orator, stateman, friend and companion.
I lived and worked in and for Cuba for eight years, 1988-96, the greatest time and productivity of my life, alongside those important months in Mississippi Freedom Summer 1964.
Ron Ridenour
http://www.ronridenour.com
Doesn’t he look great? We have been burning a voodoo candle for El Lider here on TRB everytime the US press starts saying he is “near death”; so far, so good!
“Unlike some others, I do not admire Fidel Castro just because he is an “enemy” of George Bush. If you seriously look at the record, you will see that Castro is a tyrant and that the revolution he started has turned out quite badly. The Cuban people are suffering, and to blame it all on the U.S. is disingenuous. Cuba, despite the attempt by the U.S. to isolate it, has unfettered economic and political relations with Canada, Mexico, and most of the other nations of Latin America and Europe. The revolution has failed for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the corrupt nature of Cuba’s leadership which morphed from free-wheeling at its beginning to the Stalinist model. The persecution of gay people (though somewhat lighter in recent years), lack of basic civil liberties, lack of a free press and freedom of assembly, the use of the death penalty, increased militarism including the futile Cuban involvement in Angola some years ago, and the continual holding of dissidents in medieval jails — these are only some the things that should make a reader of the Rag think twice before praising Castro.”
Allen Young.