On Castro’s Birthday, Cuba Honors His Guerrilla Spirit

Cuba honored President Fidel Castro on his 79th birthday Saturday, revisiting his nearly five decades in power on the communist island with tributes in state-run newspapers and a documentary at a theater.

Dozens of Cuban children danced and cut an enormous blue-and-white cake for Castro, the world’s longest-ruling head of government, while front pages bore his photo and loving words about him.

“We celebrate as your own, with the affection and immense admiration that children feel for the most noble, wise and brave father,” a letter to the “Comandante” said on the front page of the Communist Party daily Granma.

Signed “your people,” the letter called the president the “dearly loved Fidel” and highlighted his “special sensitivity for others” and “guerrilla spirit of just ideals.”

A documentary shown in an Old Havana theater featured some of Castro’s most impassioned public speeches, from his assumption of power in early 1959, through the Cuban missile crisis and fall of the Berlin Wall, to more recent remarks backing socialism against what he called the threats of capitalist superpowers like the United States.

Though Castro clearly ages throughout Rebeca Chavez’s “Momentos con Fidel,” or “Moments with Fidel,” he also maintains his characteristic intensity throughout the decades, walking briskly, and pounding tables and wagging his finger when speaking.