Mexico City bids adiós to monument to Castro and ‘Che’ Guevara

Mexico – Goodbye, Fidel.

Hasta la vista, che.

The denunciations and distinctions praised the brutal withdrawal this month of a controversial monument in the Mexican capital commemorating the two revolutionaries, Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

The monument, a pair of bronze and life -size sculptures of Castro and Guevara relaxing on a bench, remembers a consecutive moment in Mexican and Cuban history – the couple’s first meeting, which took place in an apartment in Mexico in June or July 1955, according to historians.

At the time, the two were twenty -year -old activists in the formative stadiums of their transformation into left icons that would inspire a world generation of revolutionaries and activists.

Fidel Castro made a television address to the Cuban people in 1960, a year after having deposited Fulgencio Batista.

(Associated Press)

A left -wing government of Mexico City installed the monument in 2017 in a small park in the Capital Colonia Tabacalera district, not far from the place where the legendary duo met for the first time during a cold war meeting which took almost legendary dimensions among many on the left.

In the two sculptures, the two men look straight and are dressed in light combat clothes – Guevara in his brand beret (an immortalized look on t -shirts around the world) and Castro sporting a cap of a fighter. His legs meet, Castro grabs a cigar in his left hand and a book to his right. Guevara’s right hand secures a pipe.

The sculpture has long triggered controversy: while the left members have generally applauded it and some visitors would leave flowers, criticisms began the work of art as a tasteless sanctuary with a bloody communist dictatorship.

Alessandra Rojo de la Vega, president of the conservative borough of the central cuauhtemoc district of the capital, was the spearhead of his dismissal, president of the district of the Cuauhtémoc district of the capital of the Cuauhtemoc district of the capital. Enclosure or meet) was located.

His decision, Rojo de la Vega, initially explained on social networks, was based on legality – not politics. She said that there was not “one article” authorizing the installation of the monument. Its withdrawal, she added, would allow the inhabitants of the park to walk in “freedom and security”.

She has published images of workers from the city drawing the two characters from the bench and the Bronzé Castro and Guevara being ignominantly transported in a bulldozer.

But the president of the district subsequently pivoted a more ideological justification.

“This city cannot … Promote or refuge the personalities who have injured human dignity, whether in Mexico or in the rest of the world,” Rojo de la Vega on Radio Formula said.

Regarding the fate of double bronzes, she said that managers can consider a sale, using the product – probably left -handed buyers fascinated by the Cuban uprising – for the maintenance of the park.

“If we sell them at auction, it will mark a first – the Communists will use their Money, not that of someone else, “said Rojo de la Vega.” If they love them so much, they can put them in their garden or terrace. “”

Claudia Sheinbaum, the leftist president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, said that she would speak to the mayor of Mexico – a political ally – to place the monument elsewhere.

The question is not to know if we kiss or reject the views of the two protagonists, Sheinbaum argued to journalists on Thursday. The Castro-Cheers meeting, said the president, recalled “a historic moment” which took place in Mexico and deserved a memory demonstration.

The counter-impression here echo the nodes in the United States on monuments glorifying the Confederate Generals: critics denounce exhibitions as exhilarating and white supremacist treasures, while others argue that the statues reflect history.

In the case of the resemblances of Castro and Guevara, Sheinbaum suggested that their withdrawal was the return of partisan reimbursement for its own moment of signing monument – the banishment of one of the most illustrious benchmarks in Mexico,, A virtual symbol of the city.

In his old post, as mayor of Mexico City, Sheinbaum ordered the withdrawal of an arrow bronze from Christophe Columbus, who, for more than a century, honored a pedestal in the elegant Pasteo of the capital reforma. The stylized painting represented Columbus as a conquering nobleman: a hand lifted on the horizon, the other lifting a veil from a globe.

For years, indigenous militants and others organized demonstrations at the statue, labeling columbus and other conquitadores as authors of genocide. In 2020, Sheinbaum finally ordered that the Columbus monument was removed for renovations; He has never been returned to his high perch.

Its ejection rapped the admirers of Columbus and others who considered the monument as an integrated marker of the Mexican capital. They accuse Sheinbaum of bowing before the politically correct.

The circle of traffic where Columbus Long has lent its presence has now been renamed women who fight the roundabout, a rallying point for indigenous, feminist and other demonstrators.

The figure of grandiose Columbus, in the meantime, remains out of the public in the storage of the museum.

The Castro-Guevara bench, located in an easy-to-miss park, has not compared size or meaning to the imposing columbus of the Elegant Reforma Paseo. But its suppression illuminated social media,, Rekindling Historical Inhités.

“An intention to erase the symbols of the battle, the resistance, the Mexican-Cuban humanity,” wrote César Huerta, a leftist journalist, exploding the action as “ideological censorship”.

A radio commentator, José Luis Trueba Lara, offers a good storage room, calling Guevara “an assassin with a good press” and Castro a “blood currica dictator”.

Carlos Bravo Regidor, a columnist, reprimanded the left to be more concerned “by the retirement of certain miserable statues of Fidel and El Che that for misery suffered by those who live under the yoke of the Cuban dictatorship. »»

At the time of his 1955 meeting with Guevara, Castro, then 28 years old, was not leaving a Cuban prison for an insurgent attack on the Cuban dictatorship supported by the United States of Fulgencio Batista.

Guevara, a year less, was a doctor of an education in Buenos Aires of middle class overflowing with revolutionary fervor – and a vision of an American socialist union Pan -Latin,, Free of us “imperialism”. The two young men immediately struck, according to historians, embarking on a friendship and a life collaboration in the revolutionary project.

The two would be among the 82 fighters aboard the yacht granma which, in November 1956, stood in Cuba from the Côte du Gulf du Mexico. Their trip and subsequent guerrilla campaign would end in 1959 in a historical reversal in Batista and the imposition of a communist government in Havana.

Fidel and El Che Has left for a long time and the Book of Cold War officially closed over a quarter of a century ago. But, as illustrated by the fiery debate on an unpretentious bench statue, the ideological flaws of the Cold War are far from completely obscured, at least not in Latin America.

The special correspondent Cecilia Sánchez Vidal contributed.