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Fidel Castro (1926 - 2016)
Fidel Castro (1926 - 2016)

[OP-ED]: Do young people even care about Fidel’s death?

When we finally thought we’d scape Donald Trump’s face in every cover page, now it seems impossible to flip through a newspaper or surf any media through the web without encountering Fidel Castro’s face.

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When we finally thought we’d scape Donald Trump’s face in every cover page, now it seems impossible to flip through a newspaper or surf any media through the web without encountering Fidel Castro’s face.

 The death of the Commander in Chief seems to have shock the world, at least in those media that can’t stop repeating the old story of his decease. For most young western people, Fidel Castro was only that old man with a beard, that appeared in TV dressed up in an Adidas tracksuit, giving endless speeches, not knowing exactly why. And by “young people”, we are referring to those who were born after 1975 and that therefore can’t remember suffering the terrors of the Cold War or the armed conflict with the URSS, during their childhood.

 “We have to travel to Cuba before it’s too late”, has been the most frequently listened phrase among young Americans and Europeans during the past two summers.

 Since the President of the United States Barack Obama announced the reestablishment of the diplomatic relations with Cuba, the fear of missing the “true Communist Cuba” has multiplied the trips to the Island.

 Hundreds of pictures of parties in La Habana, paradisiac beaches and dinners in paladares (an exclusive Cuban system of “freelance” restaurants) are all over Instagram and Facebook.

 Nobody wants to miss the chance to walk by a disheveled boardwalk or riding an old 50’s Cadillac before the liberalization of the automobile market replaces them with Toyotas Corolla or the brand new Ford SUV.

 The acclaimed blogger Yoani Sánchez wrote on this weekend’s editorial letter published by El País: “the Cubans that had at least 15 years old in July 2006, when the sickness of the then President was announced, could hardly remember his tone of voice”.

 “They only know the pictures in which he appeared lately when some foreigner guest visited him or through his increasingly foolish reflections”, she says.  

 “This is a generation that never trembled with his rhetoric or supported his terrible cry for paredón! (Courtyard) with which he made the Revolution Square roar”.

 Around the world, young people will remember Fidel Castro with the same or even worst indifference. 

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