‘We can dream’: Inside Fidel Castro’s new Cuban museum | Articles and Culture Issues

Havana, Cuba – In the city of crumbs where the roots of jaguey trees cross the street, one of Havana’s largest houses has been restored to its former glory in the name of the Cuban controversial boy.

Centro Fidel Castro Ruz opened last week with 10,000 plants from over 1,300 species, three years after the project began and five years to the next day. The Cuban leader has died.

At a ceremony attended by Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on November 25, Fidel’s 90-year-old brother, Raul, received the new museum, calling it “the most wonderful thing I’ve ever seen in my life”.

The opening comes at a time when Cuba is struggling to recover from the epidemic and the like financial problems is exacerbated by poor government care and a 60-year US ban.

It comes as the government celebrates the ban the most talked about demonstrations scheduled for mid-November.

Two blocks from the museum, the line is made daily for food buyers. When questioned, Yanet Hernandez said he had never heard of the new location but had waited two hours to find out. “Fidel would not allow this,” he said.

Museum

The center has 190 exhibitions and a theater. In the garden, a spring pours out of rocks from Rio La Plata, a river whose origins are in the mountains where Fidel first took office in 1958 as leader of a rebel army.

There is a section of plants gifted with “paises amigos”, friendly countries such as Venezuela, their leader. Hugo Chavez helped Cuba after the economic crisis that the Soviet Union ended.

The only house, located on one of Vedado’s best-selling leaflets – “the heart of the city”, according to architects – was once owned by the socialite Lily Hidalgo Borges.

Stained glass windows, colonial tires, sturdy wooden stairs and wooden doors have all been carefully remodeled. Hidalgo Borges married Enrique Conill, a banker who owned a tobacco company, but the couple fled to the United States after the Cuban revolution.

Now the rooms offer shows like “Fidel and Fidel”, in which the writings of Chavez, poet Roberto Fernandez Retamar and Old Havana’s great restorer, Eusebio Leal, all of whom are now deceased, pay tribute.

Time Fidel funeral, Raul stated: “No statues will ever be raised against his brother: That is why the new museum presents itself as a place of learning and a library.

Fidel Castro and Jose Marti

Developers have tried to address this with shows like “Fidel and the world”.

There is a lectern where Fidel uttered his famous words; there are displays of the AK47 he used to carry, and the displays also make war as Bay of Pigs using computer game technology.

Although Castro is a well-known name in Cuba to other countries, the makers are trying to put his name on it with the great independent hero and poet Jose Marti, whose explosion adorns every park on the island.

An electronic image with a photo of Marti on the front door enters Castro and back again.

“Cubans in the US are terrified because Marti is a hero for everyone,” Ada Ferrer, author of a recent Cuban book: American History, told Al Jazeera. “Interestingly, during this difficult time when they are fighting the technology, they are still fighting the past.”

Rene Gonzalez Barrios, a historian and veteran of the Cuban army who is the commander of the new facility, told Al Jazeera that foreign investors had donated money to the museum but wanted to remain anonymous. He did not say how much money was spent.

The new museum, which seems to be more expensive, is different from other museums in Cuba.

The museum, located in the presidential palace, has been undergoing renovations for decades without further ado.

“Now we can dream,” said one superintendent, who was not named because he was not allowed to speak to reporters. “Now we must not say, ‘there is a museum in Boston’ or ‘there is a place here in Frankfurt’. Instead we can say: ‘Have you seen the Centro de Fidel Castro Ruz? We can do this here’.