Fidel Castro’s 90th birthday is coming up on August 13th. And Cuba is gearing up with a series of new books, documentaries, songs, and photo exhibits.
One place that’s gaining special interest is the farm where Fidel Castro was born.
CCTV America’s Michael Voss reports.
Fidel Castro\'s birthplace turn into a popular museumFidel Castro's 90th birthday is coming up on August 13th. And Cuba is gearing up with a series of new books, documentaries, songs, and photo exhibits. One place that's gaining special interest is the farm where Fidel Castro was born. CCTV America's Michael Voss reports.
The house and farm buildings where both Fidel and Raul Castro were born have been restored and turned into a museum. It’s at the end of a dirt track in a remote rural region of eastern Cuba, 800 kilometers (497 miles) from the capital Havana.
But the distance hasn’t deterred some 22,000 people from traveling here in the first six months of this year, almost double the number who came last year.
Fidel Castro was born in 1926. His parents both came from humble origins, his mother a domestic worker- his father, a Spanish immigrant, who through hard work became a wealthy landowner.
Conditions for the farm laborers, especially immigrants from Haiti, were basic; living in huts on the edge of the estate. But their barefoot children would sit alongside the young Castro’s in this one roomed school house on the farm.
The classroom was open to everyone living there from the children of the poorest farm laborers to the family of the wealthy landowner. And it’s believed that is where Fidel first became aware of the vast differences in wealth that existed in the Cuba of those days.
They are still growing sugarcane in the fields around the farm, only now it belongs to a workers cooperative. The family estate was one of the first farms Fidel Castro nationalized shortly after the revolution he led back in 1959.