SANTIAGO, Cuba - Fidel Castro will be laid to rest on Sunday alongside the mausoleum of Cuban independence hero Jose Marti, ensuring that the polarizing nature of Castro's life will continue in death.



Castro and his leftist revolutionaries claimed Marti's mantle upon overthrowing a US-backed regime in 1959 and later married Marti's ideals to their brand of Soviet communism, enraging other nationalists, anti-communists and Cuban exiles who also claim Marti as their own.The interment ceremony, billed as solemn and simple, is due to start at 7 a.m. EST (1200 GMT). Nine days of national mourning come to an end at noon (1700 GMT).



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`; document.getElementById("linkPremium").innerHTML = cont; (function (v, i){ });</s>Castro and his leftist revolutionaries claimed Marti's mantle upon overthrowing a U.S.-backed regime in 1959 and later married Marti's ideals to their brand of Soviet communism, enraging other nationalists, anti-communists and Cuban exiles who also claim Marti as their own.

The interment ceremony, billed as solemn and simple, is due to start at 7 a.m. EST (1200 GMT). Nine days of national mourning come to an end at noon (1700 GMT).

Castro, who survived five decades of U.S. attempts to kill or overthrow him, died on Nov. 25 age 90, a decade after resigning from office due to an intestinal illness and ceding power to his brother, current President Raul Castro, 85.

Even in retirement, Fidel Castro was beloved by leftists and anti-imperialist's around the world and hated by political opponents who believe he ruined Cuba with a one-party state and socialist folly.

Hundreds of thousands of Cubans flooded plazas and lined highways in tributes to Castro as a funeral cortege drove his cremated remains some 600 miles (1,000 km) from Havana to Santiago, the city where Castro launched his revolution in the 1950s. Raul said "millions" came out to pay respects.

Marti, a leading poet and writer who penned the lyrics to the song "Guantanamera," provided intellectual heft behind the reasons for breaking from Spain and safeguarding Cuban sovereignty and national identity from foreign powers such the United States.

He died in battle in 1895 during Cuba's war of independence from Spain.

"The union of two ideas was very important for the Cuban people," said Maria Martinez, 50, who works in a museum. "Fidel is a follower of Marti's ideas."

Castro's cremated remains will be entombed next to Marti's castle-like mausoleum in Santiago's Santa Ifigenia cemetery.

Busts of Marti appear everywhere in Cuba, Havana's international airport is named after him, and there is a towering monument to him in Havana's Revolution Square.

But Fidel Castro will not receive similar treatment. Raul Castro announced on Saturday that, respecting Fidel's wishes, no streets, plazas nor public buildings will bear Fidel Castro's name, and no statues nor monuments will be built in his honor.</s>Fidel Castro: My Life book cover; Castro holding a flag during his visit in South Vietnam during the Vietnam war; and Castro with South Africa's Nelson Mandela. PHOTOS | FILE | AFP

Spanish writer and journalist Ignacio Ramonet counts himself among the lucky few who got to interview the late Cuban leader Fidel Castro — a man, who gave very few long interviews.

“After almost a year of waiting, I was told that he had agreed to my request for an interview, and it turned out to be the longest and most complete of them all,” Ramonet writes in the introduction to Castro’s spoken autobiography titled Fidel Castro: My Life.

According to Ramonet, Castro was perhaps the most charismatic and controversial former head of state in modern times. A dictatorial pariah to some and a hero and inspiration for many others.

“One of the objectives of these conversations with Castro was to allow him to have his say, to make his argument to the world,” Ramonet writes.

Before they sat down to work in the silence and semi-obscurity of Castro’s personal office — since part of the interviews were filmed for a documentary (Moi, Fidel Castro, 2004) — Ramonet wanted to get to know the public figure a little better, to see him handling matters of state and his personal life.

“We talked about the topics of the day, his past experiences, his present-day concerns, every subject imaginable, and without a tape recorder. I would later reconstruct those conversations in my notebook from memory and we had agreed that he would re-read and alter his responses before publication,” Ramonet recalls.

What Ramonet discovered during this time was a private, almost shy Fidel, a polite, affable man who paid attention to each person he talked to and spoke without affection, though he had the manners and gestures of an old-fashioned man, which earned him the title of “the last Spanish gentleman.”

Castro was always attentive to people — especially those he worked with — and he never raised his voice. Ramonet never heard him give an order. However, he exercised absolute authority wherever he was through “the force of his overwhelming personality,” Ramonet recalls.

Castro made all the decisions, big or small. Although he consulted the political authorities in charge of the party and the government, it was he who made the final decision.

There was no one within the circle of power that Fidel moved in, since the death of Che Guevara, who had an intellectual calibre comparable to his own. In that respect, he gave the impression of being a man alone, with no close friends or intellectual peers.

According to Ramonet, Castro was a leader who lived — as far as he could see — modestly, austerely, in almost Spartan conditions. There were no luxuries — his furniture was sober, his food frugal, healthy and macrobiotic. Most of his enemies admit that he was one of the few heads of state who did not take advantage of his position to enrich himself.

“Although his face is often in the press, there is no official portrait, nor is there a statue or coin or avenue or building or monument dedicated to Castro or any other living leader of the revolution,” Ramonet observed.</s>Reason Wafawarova

 If there is something that former Cuban leader Fidel Castro will be remembered for after his death on November 25, it is his potent symbolic stature as a spiritual beacon for the world’s oppressed and poorest, especially at the height of the Cold War.

Of course his detractors from the capitalist world will remember him as a loathed ultra-left communist.

From the time Fidel Castro took power from tyrant Fulgencio Batista on January 1 1959, he was determined to pursue his promise to share Cuba’s wealth among all Cubans, affirmatively targeting the poorest citizens.

There is no doubt that Fidel Castro is an internationally recognised iconic hero with legions of admirers and followers across the world, including hundreds of world leaders and statesmen. He was a man who would not hesitate to point his pistol at the powerful to get a fair deal for the poor — a never say die revolutionary so emulated by billions of followers across the world, admired across the ideological divide, especially across the community of university students.

He educated, fed and provided health care for his own people, and provided thousands of medical doctors to developing countries across the world, some of them on the payroll of the Cuban government. He did far more genuine charity work than the world’s hypocritical wealthy nations — the colossus of the North, as he called the capitalist coalition.

Fidel Castro’s Cuba survived 49 years of ruinous economic sanctions from the West, led by the United States, and he is said to have survived more than 600 assassination attempts from the CIA — controlling a vibrant communist state only 90 miles from the shores of the United States. The

United States has for years openly counted this ideological choice as gross provocation of unforgivable proportions.

His opponents often criticised Castro’s philanthropic gestures to the developing world as hypocritical, arguing that Cubans were worse off than the people to whom Castro was sending doctors and Cuban manufactured vaccines.

For nearly 50 years successive US presidents denigrated Fidel Castro as a courier of Armageddon, a blowhard nuisance, a dangerous dictator, a revolution fomenter across and around Latin America (if not globally), a serial human rights abuser, and later an irrelevant sideshow who somehow survived the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR at the beginning of the nineties.

He had one definition for the West, “imperialist enemies of the entire world.”

In 2006, the revolutionary leader transferred power to his brother Raul, on his own terms after reports of failing health, formally resigning from leadership in February 2008.

In March this year Barack Obama became the first US president to visit Cuba in more than 50 years, after announcing plans to restore full diplomatic relations with Havana. Fidel Castro was less than impressed with the overtures, but his brother played good host to the US leader.

 JF Kennedy could not stomach Castro at all. His hate for the Cuban revolutionary led him to his humiliating low when he sent a ragtag group of goons to invade the Bay of Pigs in 1961. They were spectacularly massacred and defeated by the Cuban forces.

The frustration on Kennedy’s part was sweet news to the Kremlin, who saw in Castro a brave and useful commander of a socialist state right on the doorstep of the imperialist US

In 1962, Castro allowed the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to base on Cuban soil missiles that could carry nuclear warheads to Washington or New York in minutes. The move almost resulted in the first ever world nuclear war.

There are no known self-adulating monuments or statues for Castro in Cuba, except in many countries of admirers across the world.

Instead the hero is symbolised in his homeland by catchy billboard slogans like “We will overcome!” “Toward Victory always!” or “Motherland or death!”

To other iconic communist/socialist heroes like Maurice Bishop, Samora Machel and Thomas Sankara, Havana became like what Jerusalem is for Christians, what Kingston is for Rastafarians, and what Mecca is for the Muslims — some kind of a Marxist Disneyland.

Every serious revolutionary paid pilgrimage to Havana at the height of Castro’s reign, especially during the Cold War, and that includes the mightily Western-hailed Nelson Mandela at a later stage.

To latter day revolutionaries like Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez, Castro was a political beacon and father figure to the rest of Latin America. He was a symbol of resistance to US capitalist hegemony.

There has always been deep and genuine loyalty to Fidel Castro from most Cubans — regardless of a noisy minority opposition always ready to magnify and exaggerate his shortcomings; perceived or real, often on little more than a whim. They even claimed he imprisoned opponents for crimes as simple as mentioning the word democracy.

Castro’s supporters were roundly condemned as an intimidated lot, brainwashed, gullible, or even plain stupid — and this is the script one has to respect in the West, unless one does not mind being labelled a communist sympathiser.

Criticism by Cuban immigrants to Miami has always been hailed in the West as hard evidence of Castro’s monstrous dictatorship, and many Cubans wishing to stay in America have over the years simply played critics for the sake of getting asylum visas, as has become common with all diplomatic wars pitting the West against any declared enemy state, like Zimbabwe or Venezuela.

There has been a significant shift towards economic liberalisation under Raul, but Cuba has not lost its state control of the economy, following in the footsteps of a liberalising communist China.

Like what has now become a systematic January ritual in Zimbabwe where President Mugabe’s opponents yearly yearn for a “biological solution”, by repeatedly announcing his death on holiday in the Far East, Miami Cubans also became notorious for endless death claims of Castro. Like President Mugabe, Castro would always answer to the demise speculations by making public appearances in healthy shape.

It appears like Castro skilfully managed his departure by preparing his country well for his demise, and he must have departed on his own terms.

Born to a Spanish immigrant, Castro never admired wealthy people in his upbringing, and that is believed to have led him to lead the guerrilla warfare leading up to the 1959 overthrow of Batista. It was a combination of youthful adventure and ideological passion.

Earlier in his life he participated in the fight to free the Dominican Republic from the dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas, and in 1948 he went to Colombia to protest against the Pan-American Union, later the Organisation of American States.

The man was a born revolutionary who started showing his passion for justice in primary school, heavily begrudging schoolmates flaunting family wealth at school.

A qualified lawyer from Havana University, Castro was always a political animal. So powerfully willed was Castro that he surprised many when he embarked on the unthinkable and reckless scheme to take over the army’s Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba.

The attempt was daringly amateurish and comical, resulting in Castro and most of his men being captured.

After being spared summary execution in the aftermath, Castro acted as his own attorney, and gave the ever-famous speech that ended with the popularly recited statement, “Condemn me, it does not matter. History will absolve me.” Generations and generations of Cubans have adored the quote over the years.

After serving two of his 15-year sentence, Castro was released, only to go to Mexico and start a guerrilla war with a group that called itself the July Movement, after the date of the fateful botched Moncada assault. This became the birth of the Cuban Revolution.

On Decemebr 2, 1956, Fidel Castro and 81 followers returned to Cuba from Mexico aboard a second-hand yacht called “Granma,” whose name was later adopted by the Communist Party newspaper in Cuba. All but 12 in the landing party were killed or captured almost immediately. Castro, his brother Raúl and an Argentine physician, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, escaped into the mountains and began organising a guerrilla army.

In the summer of 1958, Batista launched a major offensive against Castro’s guerrilla group. When it failed, it was clear that Batista’s days in power were numbered. He announced to a few close colleagues at a New Year’s Eve party in 1958 that he was leaving the country, and Fidel Castro and his followers triumphantly drove into Havana to take control of the country on January 1, 1959.

Fidel Castro attracted support from across the spectrum within and outside Cuba, including from renowned intellectuals like Ernest Hemingway and Bob Dylan.

He refused cautiously offered economic aid from the United States after he took over power, and from that time economic and political relations between Cuba and the US became increasingly difficult.

The United States claimed Castro had expropriated without compensation $1.8 billion in US property within the first two years of his reign.

From 1960 the economic and political relationship between Cuba and the Soviet Union blossomed, resulting in the United States imposing an embargo on all trade with Cuba in October 1960.

On January 3, 1961, diplomatic relations with the United States were broken.

This set the stage for one of Castro’s greatest triumphs: the defeat of the CIA-organised invasion by Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs, which US intelligence officials thought would set off a popular revolt against Fidel Castro.

Cuban military forces triumphantly put down the invasion by about 1 350 CIA-trained fighters; and about 1 200 of the invaders were captured.

 Africa will not forget the thousands of Cuban soldiers who came to fight along the Angolans and the Ethiopians in the 70s. Angola was under attack from apartheid South Africa, which was sponsoring Unita rebels in that country.

In addition Castro offered military training missions and thousands of physicians to more than 65 countries across the world.

In 1983 Cuban and US troops faced each other in battle when Ronald Reagan invaded Grenada, arguing that an airport under construction on the island was a threat to US interests and security, because it was partly being funded by Cuban money. Maurice Bishop was overthrown in the process.

This is probably the only war of invasion the United States has ever won. It was a great victory in a mighty war by a superpower against a country of 100 000 people without even an army.

Another of Castro’s notable visionary initiatives was industrialisation, initiating steel production in Cuba to reduce dependency.

For us Zimbabweans Castro was a comrade in arms and in freedom, helping with moral and military support during the liberation war, and with training of education and health professionals after independence, besides sending many physicians to the country.

Time and space permitting, I will pursue in detail the endless achievements of this heroic icon.

Rest in Peace Commandant Castro. Go well the beacon of the international revolution.

Cuba we are one and together we will overcome! It is homeland or death!</s>The ashes of Fidel Castro leave the Antonio Maceo plaza for its burial in a private funeral ceremony at the Santa Ifigenia cemetery in Santiago, Cuba Sunday Dec. 4, 2016.

MIAMI — In the heart of Miami's Little Havana, Cuban exile Armando Garcia said Sunday's funeral of Fidel Castro granted neither simple closure nor optimism for immediate change, but was a glimmer of hope for democracy in Cuba.

Garcia, 76, a retired electronics salesman who left Cuba in 1963, sipped espresso as others smoked cigars at the Versailles restaurant, a hub for exiles who fled political oppression or other hardships since Castro's communist revolution of 1959. Huge, noisy crowds had gathered for days after word spread last weekend of Castro's death, but had dissipated by Sunday.

"It's a light at the end of the tunnel," Garcia said of Castro's death, but he said he was not counting on moves toward democracy any time soon.

Garcia said it was painful to see leaders in some Latin American countries praising Castro "'for supposedly liberating the poor, when in reality he has enslaved the poor."

He joked that there was no sadness at the restaurant about Castro's funeral. "It's the best funeral ever. Look at us. No one is crying, everyone is happy, no need for handkerchiefs. It's a party," Garcia said.

Jose Llanes, 70, said nobody should be fooled by any images from Cuban showing thousands of people mourning. "When people are oppressed, they are told what to do."

Later Sunday, dozens of people gathered for a rally at the Cuban Memorial in Miami's Tamiami Park in honor of people who were victims of Castro's regime and those who died trying to overthrow him. People searched for names of deceased relatives on a black marble wall beneath an obelisk with a Cuban flag pattern.

It was important to gather here - Slyvia Iriondo, president of the group of Mothers and Women against Repression in Cuba, told the group - to remember those victims and to remember that, "Fidel Castro, the dictator, was not a hero."

The older generations of Cuban exiles have generally backed a hard line toward U.S. relations with the island, including an embargo and strict limits on engagement until the island shows moves toward democracy, but that view has softened among the younger generation.

Giancarlo Sopo, 33, founder of Miami-based CubaOne Foundation, which arranges trips for younger Cuban-Americans to visit the island, said in a telephone interview that for five decades Fidel Castro dominated the way people viewed Cuba. "It is now my hope that when people now think of Cuba they think of the hopes and dreams of the 11 million people who live there," he said.

"Both younger and older Cuban Americans care about Cuba, but we express that passion in different ways. My father was a Bay of Pigs veteran," Sopo said. "For his generation caring about Cuba meant supporting sanctions. My generation has taken a different approach. My generation wants to go to the island, meet their peers, reconnect with their families and learn about the cultural affairs. The focus has broadened, but we still very much respect their pain."

Aida Levitan, president of Artes Miami, a nonprofit organization that promotes Latino artists, said that the funeral "instills a little bit of hope for the Cuban people that this is the beginning of the end."

"Many people are not optimistic because Raul Castro still runs the country, but Fidel was the mythical figure and so it feels there is a difference," she said. "Like a Spanish expression goes: There's no evil that survives 100 years."</s>As a new day dawned Sunday in this city, the launching site for the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro was being laid to rest in a private ceremony for family and friends.

His ashes were to be interred in a crypt next to the 85-foot mausoleum of Cuban patriot José Martí in the Santa Ifigenia Cemetery.

Castro’s remains will join those of fallen rebels who took part in the assault on the Moncada Barracks, the attack that marks the start of the revolution, and other Cuban historic figures also are buried in the cemetery.

Thousands of mourners had kept vigil at the plaza overnight and then fanned out to surrounding streets to watch the passing of Castro's ashes one last time as the sun began turning the sky pink early Sunday.

“I've been here since yesterday morning,” said Ernesto Echevarria, 44, a who works at the University of Oriente. “I just left for some coffee and now I'm back to watch the funeral procession. I didn't sleep a bit.”

Echevarria, who sported a 26th of July armband made by university students, said he decided to keep the vigil because of a “sense of commitment. How could you miss a day like this?”

Just before 7 a.m., Cuban state TV described a somber morning, with mourners of all ages waving Cuban flags, chants heard in the background. “ That’s what we’re hearing on this sad day,” the correspondent said while the screen showed a rudimentary map of the procession route.

On the ground, the funeral procession arrived at the cemetery at 6:50 a.m., following the short 10-minute trip from the plaza. The Cuban military kicked off the private ceremony with a 21-gun artillery salute.

Just before 8 a.m., Cuban television showed images of his ashes, in a box wrapped in a Cuban flag, carefully being lifted from atop an olive-green trailer towed by a military jeep. Two soldiers, goose-stepping, carried the ashes into the cemetery in front of a row of saluting officials.

The cemetery is located in the northwestern part of Santiago, close to the bay. Castro's tomb had been a long-guarded secret. Construction began about two years ago, according to those who live nearby.

Cuban officials have said nothing about future access to Castro’s tomb, but its apparent location alongside Marti’s, a grand site heavily visited by tourists and Cubans alike, indicates that there will be some form of public access to the grave.

“It’s a privilege to have him here,” Cruz Maria Pardo, 64, who worked at the cemetery cleaning the mausoleums for more than 20 years and said she had seen trucks bringing in materials for a little over a year, told the Associated Press.

Beyond Cuban patriots, martyrs, celebrities and other important figures, Santa Ifigenia also houses the remains of prominent members of families who fled after the revolution such as Emilio Bacardi Moreau, who managed his family’s rum dynasty and died in 1922. The Bacardi family left Cuba in the early years of the revolution after their properties were nationalized by the Castro government.

The funeral service followed a night in which leaders of Cuban mass organizations from the Cuban Federation of Women to the Federation of University Students rose one by one to remember Castro at the Plaza of the Revolution Antonio Maceo.

Cuban leader Raúl Castro, who took over for his brother when Castro fell ill in 2006, was the final speaker of the homage Saturday night.

He told the tens of thousands of Cubans gathered in the plaza that his brother wasn't one who wanted a cult of personality to develop after his death. Even as the four-day caravan transporting Castro’s ashes across the island was broadcast live on national television, the burial was not. International media were also barred from the private ceremony.

“The leader of the revolution rejected any manifestation of a cult personality and was consistent with that through the last hours of his life, insisting that once dead, his name and likeness would never be used on institutions, streets, parks or other public sites, and that busts, statues or other forms of tribute would not be erected,” Raúl Castro said at the Saturday rally.

He added that legislation would be introduced in the next session of the National Assembly of People's Power, Cuba's parliament, to that effect.

But the interlude since Castro's death, announced by Raúl Castro on Nov. 25, gives the impression that a cult of personality has already developed. Cubans who lined the highways to watch the passage of a caravan carrying Castro's ashes from Havana to Santiago hugged portraits of Castro and painted " " (Fidel Lives) on their faces.

“ [I am Fidel] has become a national mantra since Castro's death.

“Why ? Fidel did everything for this country. Even though he's now dead, we would die for the same causes,” said Ernesto Lao, a technical professor. “My name is Ernesto, but now my name is Fidel.”

Miami Herald staff writer David Ovalle contributed to this report from Miami.</s>MIAMI (AP) — In the heart of Miami’s Little Havana, Cuban exile Armando Garcia said Sunday’s funeral of Fidel Castro granted neither simple closure nor optimism for immediate change, but was a glimmer of hope for democracy in Cuba.

Garcia, 76, a retired electronics salesman who left Cuba in 1963, sipped espresso as others smoked cigars at the Versailles restaurant, a hub for exiles who fled political oppression or other hardships since Castro’s communist revolution of 1959. Huge, noisy crowds had gathered for days after word spread last weekend of Castro’s death, but had dissipated by Sunday.

“It’s a light at the end of the tunnel,” Garcia said of Castro’s death, but he said he was not counting on moves toward democracy any time soon.

Garcia said it was painful to see leaders in some Latin American countries praising Castro “‘for supposedly liberating the poor, when in reality he has enslaved the poor.”

He joked that there was no sadness at the restaurant about Castro’s funeral. “It’s the best funeral ever. Look at us. No one is crying, everyone is happy, no need for handkerchiefs. It’s a party,” Garcia said.

Jose Llanes, 70, said nobody should be fooled by any images from Cuban showing thousands of people mourning. “When people are oppressed, they are told what to do.”

The older generations of Cuban exiles have generally backed a hard line toward U.S. relations with the island, including an embargo and strict limits on engagement until the island shows moves toward democracy, but that view has softened among the younger generation.

Giancarlo Sopo, 33, founder of Miami-based CubaOne Foundation, which arranges trips for younger Cuban-Americans to visit the island, said in a telephone interview that for five decades Fidel Castro dominated the way people viewed Cuba. “It is now my hope that when people now think of Cuba they think of the hopes and dreams of the 11 million people who live there,” he said.

“Both younger and older Cuban Americans care about Cuba, but we express that passion in different ways. My father was a Bay of Pigs veteran,” Sopo said. “For his generation caring about Cuba meant supporting sanctions. My generation has taken a different approach. My generation wants to go to the island, meet their peers, reconnect with their families and learn about the cultural affairs. The focus has broadened, but we still very much respect their pain.”

Aida Levitan, president of Artes Miami, a nonprofit organization that promotes Latino artists, said that the funeral “instills a little bit of hope for the Cuban people that this is the beginning of the end.”

“Many people are not optimistic because Raul Castro still runs the country, but Fidel was the mythical figure and so it feels there is a difference,” she said. “Like a Spanish expression goes: There’s no evil that survives 100 years.”</s>Santiago, Cuba (CNN) Fidel Castro's remains were laid to rest Sunday morning in a private ceremony in Santiago de Cuba, the city where he launched his communist revolution, Cuban officials told CNN.

Castro's ashes were interred in the city's Santa Ifigenia Cemetery where Jose Marti, the Cuban revolutionary leader from the 19th century, is buried.

Earlier in the day, people lined the streets to see Castro's remains carried to the cemetery in a box placed on a simple trailer and towed by a military Jeep.

The press was not allowed to attend the burial but a mix of world leaders, royalty, Marxist guerrillas and Hollywood actors were invited.

French Environment Minister Segolene Royal told the BBC there were no speeches at the gravesite. "It was very simple," he said.

Cuban officials said they wanted to protect the privacy of Castro's family. Many Cubans didn't know Castro had a family because he kept them out of the public spotlight.

Castro died November 25 at age 90. The burial ends nine days of mourning for the charismatic but polarizing revolutionary who led Cuba for more than half a century.

Castro's ashes arrived Saturday in Santiago de Cuba after a four-day tour across the island nation. Santiago is located on the eastern end of Cuba, about 880 kilometers (546 miles) from Havana.

The private funeral service stood in contrast to the public mourning for Castro.

Cuban President Raul Castro, who took over when his older brother fell ill in 2006, spoke at the event and praised Fidel Castro's accomplishments, especially his willingness to stand up to the United States.

Presidents from Latin American nations and Africa paid their respects. No representative from the United States attended the memorial or the funeral, despite a thawing in relations with Cuba under President Obama.

Raul Castro said his brother insisted that no public spaces or monuments be named after him, saying he wanted to avoid "a cult of personality."

In 1953, a young Fidel Castro led a group of about 150 rebels who attacked the Moncada military barracks in Santiago in an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow dictator Fulgencio Batista.

Castro later launched another revolt and declared victory January 1, 1959, from the balcony of the Santiago City Hall. He then made his way across the country to Havana.</s>SANTIAGO, Cuba -- A wooden box containing Fidel Castro's ashes was placed by his brother and successor on Sunday into the side of a granite boulder that has become Cuba's only official monument to the man who ruled with absolute power for nearly a half century.

The private, early-morning ceremony was attended by members of Fidel Castro's family, the ruling Politburo of the single-party system he founded, and Latin American leaders who installed closely allied leftist governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Brazil.

After nine days of fervent national mourning and wall-to-wall homages to Castro on state-run media, the government barred independent coverage of the funeral, releasing a handful of photos and brief descriptions of the ceremony later in the day.

The ceremony began at 6:39 a.m. Cuba time when the military caravan bearing Castro's remains in a flag-draped cedar coffin left the Plaza of the Revolution in the eastern city of Santiago. Thousands of people lined the 2-mile route to Santa Ifigenia cemetery, waving Cuban flags and shouting "Long live Fidel!"

The ashes were delivered to Castro's younger brother and successor, President Raul Castro, who wore his olive general's uniform as he placed the remains into a niche in the enormous grey boulder that will serve as Fidel Castro's tomb. The niche was sealed with a green marble plaque emblazoned with the name "Fidel" in gold letters.

The tomb stands to the side of a memorial to the rebel soldiers killed in an attack that Castro led on Santiago's Moncada barracks on July 26, 1953, and in front of the mausoleum of Cuban national hero Jose Marti.

As the funeral ended, martial music could be heard outside the cemetery, where Ines de la Rosa was among the mourners gathered. She said she would have liked to watch the interment on television, but "we understand how they as a family also need a bit of privacy."

The decision to keep the final farewell private came the morning after Raul Castro announced that Cuba would prohibit the naming of streets and monuments after his brother, and would bar the construction of statues of the former leader and revolutionary icon, in keeping with Fidel Castro's desire to avoid a cult of personality. In contrast, the images of his fellow revolutionary fighters Camilo Cienfuegos and Ernesto "Che" Guevara became common across Cuba in the decades since their deaths.

"All of us would like to put Fidel's name on everything, but in the end, Fidel is all of Cuba," said Juan Antonio Gonzalez, a 70-year-old retired economist in Cuba. "It was a decision of Fidel's, not Raul's, and I think he has to be respected."

Fidel Castro overcame imprisonment at the hands of dictator Fulgencio Batista, exile in Mexico and a disastrous start to his rebellion before triumphantly riding into Havana in January 1959 to become, at age 32, the youngest leader in Latin America. He inspired and supported revolutionaries from Latin America to Africa even as Cubans who fled to exile loathed him with equal measure.

One of those exiles, Armando Garcia, is a retired electronics salesman who left Cuba in 1963 for Little Havana in Miami. He said Sunday's funeral granted neither simple closure nor optimism for immediate change.

"It's a light at the end of the tunnel," Garcia said from the Versailles restaurant, a hub for exiles.

Garcia said it was painful to see leaders in some Latin American countries praising Castro "for supposedly liberating the poor, when in reality he has enslaved the poor."

He joked that there was no sadness at the restaurant about Castro's funeral: "It's the best funeral ever. Look at us. No one is crying, everyone is happy, no need for handkerchiefs. It's a party."

Jose Llanes, 70, said nobody should be fooled by any images from Cuba showing thousands of people mourning. "When people are oppressed, they are told what to do."

Aida Levitan, president of Artes Miami, a nonprofit organization that promotes Hispanic artists, said the funeral "instills a little bit of hope for the Cuban people that this is the beginning of the end."

"Many people are not optimistic because Raul Castro still runs the country, but Fidel was the mythical figure and so it feels there is a difference," she said. "Like a Spanish expression goes: There's no evil that survives 100 years."

Later Sunday, dozens of people gathered for a rally at the Cuban Memorial in Miami's Tamiami Park in honor of people who were victims of Castro's regime and those who died trying to overthrow him. People searched for names of deceased relatives on a black marble wall beneath an obelisk with a Cuban flag pattern.

Sylvia Iriondo, president of the group of Mothers and Women against Repression in Cuba, told the group that it was important to remember those victims and to remember that, "Fidel Castro, the dictator, was not a hero."

Information for this article was contributed by Fabiola Sanchez and Adriana Gomez Licon of The Associated Press.</s>Fidel Castro returned Saturday to the city where he and a band of rebels staged an assault on the Moncada Barracks, the beginning of the Cuba Revolution, and the place where he began his march into the history books.

Castro, the historic leader of the revolution, died Nov. 25, at the age of 90 after a lingering illness that resulted in his ceding power to his brother Raúl Castro in 2006.

A caravan carrying Castro's ashes arrived Saturday afternoon in Santiago — the "heroic city" and so-called cradle of the Cuban Revolution — on the final leg of a journey across Cuba that began on Wednesday from Havana. The journey retracked, in reverse, the triumphant march into the capital that made after the ouster of dictator Fulgencio Batista.

On Saturday night, tens of thousands of Cubans are expected to turn out for a final farewell to Castro at the Antonio Maceo Plaza on the eve of his internment at Santa Ifigenia Cemetery. He will be laid to rest next to the mausoleum of 19th century Cuban patriot José Martí, who fought for Cuban independence from Spain.

Cuban leader Raúl Castro was expected to give the main address at the nationally televised homage, which begins at 7 p.m.

Many in the plaza, which had begun to fill by mid-day, planned to spend the night in vigil and then fall into a funeral procession accompanying Castro's ashes to the cemetery where a private funeral is planned.

"We think Santa Ifigenia is a fitting place for him because Santiago is the city of heroes — Carlos Manuel de Cespedes (another independence hero from nearby Bayamo), José Martí and now Fidel," said Norma Arias, who runs a bed and breakfast overlooking Parque Cespedes.

From the balcony of the blue and white municipal building on one end of the park, Castro addressed all Cubans on Jan. 1, 1959, the day Batista was defeated.

"This time the revolution is for real," Castro said. "The revolution will not be an easy task; the revolution will be a tough enterprise and full of dangers..."

As she sat on a balcony of her home where she could get a clear view of the passing caravan that carried Castro's ashes in a small flag-draped chest, Arias became overcome with emotion.

"Really, his death has affected me a lot. Fidel was everything, everything," Arias said tearfully. "We feel like orphans, like something is missing."

For many Cubans, the only government they have known has been run by a Castro.

"Fidel is part of every one of us — an entire generation, more than 50 years," said Manuel Rondón Medina, Arias' husband.

But Cuba is also very much a nation divided with many of its former residents in exile in Miami and around the world decrying its revolution as one of betrayal.

Those in exile point to human rights abuses, firing squads after the revolution and imprisonment of Castro opponents, and the losses they suffered after the nationalization of their homes and businesses.

Cubans who turned out to see the remains of Castro pass in the "Caravan of Liberty" chose to focus on advances in education, free medical care and other social benefits of the revolution.

Thirty foreign delegations were expected to attend the events in Santiago, including a Haitian delegation led by Interim President Jocelerme Privet. But the United States isn't among them. U.S. officials attended an homage at the Plaza of the Revolution in Havana earlier in the week but said they wouldn't be in Santiago.

Ex-presidents from around Latin America also are flying in for Castro's funeral service and even former Argentine soccer star Diego Maradona came.

"I come to be with my second father," he told Cuba state television. "There are many players but he was the leader of the [World Cup] team of politicians."

There was palpable excitement in Santiago and in the small towns along the Central Highway from Bayamo, where Castro's ashes spent the night. On Friday, people were busy arranging white rocks on hillsides along the route that spelled out " " (Fidel lives), "Fidel will always be among us" and other revolutionary slogans.

Buildings and curbsides were being painted and townspeople were sweeping the streets, hacking away brush and sprucing up their yards in anticipation of the passage of the caravan as it headed to Santiago. En route, it passed El Cobre where the Basilica of Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre, Cuba's patron saint, is located.

Santiago is full of landmarks weighted with revolutionary significance. But the Moncada Barracks where the Castro brothers and a group of rebels attacked at dawn on July 26, 1953 tops the list.

The plan was to capture the barracks, distribute arms to the population and begin a nationwide insurrection.

The attack failed miserably but it is the event that set in motion the Cuban Revolution.

In memory of Castro, some Santiago residents have been wearing homemade versions of the red and blacks arm bands of the 26th of July Movement.

Now the mustard-colored barracks has been converted into a museum and a scholastic center, housing several primary and secondary schools.

School kids and their teacher lined the blocks around the barracks to watch the passage of the caravan. Some had written "I am Fidel" and "Fidel Lives" on their foreheads and cheeks with marker.

Yoaleni Martínez, a teacher at another elementary school, carried a sign reading: "Who says Fidel has died? He lives, grows and multiplies himself. He lives in the heart of every Cuban."

"Here at this barracks we have the blood of many Cuban revolutionaries and today it is a school. Imagine that," said Martínez. "And this girl standing next to me, how much would the medicine that saved her life have cost elsewhere? She had a serious bacterial infection and the medicine was free. Now she's 12 years old."

Just after the caravan passed the barracks, the military vehicle pulling the trailer containing Castro's ashes stalled, and members of his honor guard jumped off to give it a push. The caravan continued through the streets of Santiago.

Even those who chose not to witness the passage of the caravan, remembered Castro in their own ways.

Ninety-six-year-old María Estrella Estévez Blanco dug out an old picture of Castro who lived in a blue and yellow house next door to hers at 6 Gen. Jesús Rabí St. when he was sent to Santiago to study as a child.

She didn't know him as a youngster, but met him several times over the years.

"He always liked to visit that house when he came to Santiago," she said. "This is a picture with my grandchildren from the last time he visited."

In the image, Castro can be seen leaning toward the porch of Estévez's home to talk with her. It was 2003 — three years before Castro took ill.
The remains of former Cuban leader Fidel Castro are interred beside independence leader José Martí.