Turkey’s main opposition party to attend Castro’s funeral

ANKARA

A delegation from Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) will travel to Cuba to attend the funeral of Cuba’s iconic late leader Fidel Castro on Dec. 4. 

The will be headed by CHP Deputy Chair Veli Ağbaba, Istanbul deputy Sezgin Tanrıkulu and Kocaeli deputy Tahsin Tarhan, the party announced on Nov. 29. 

The delegation from the social democratic CHP will attend a rally in the memory of Castro in Santiago on Dec. 3 and will later attend his funeral ceremony again in the same city on Dec. 4. 

The legendary leader of communist Cuba, Castro, died on Nov. 25, at the age of 90. Wearing a green military uniform, a somber Raul Castro, Fidel’s younger brother aged 85 and to whom Fidel formally ceded power in 2008, appeared on state television on the night of Nov. 25 to announce Fidel’s death. That was 60 years to the day since the two brothers and dozens of supporters left Mexico on a boat to bring revolution to Cuba against the dictator Fulgencio Batista.

Castro was cremated on Nov. 26, and starting Nov. 30, his ashes will follow the trace the journey he made after his band of bearded rebels won power in 1959 in a solemn procession to his final resting spot.

Since Nov. 28, hundreds of thousands of Cubans have been bidding farewell to Castro outside Havana’s Plaza of the Revolution, the heart of government power, pledging allegiance to his socialist ideology and paying tribute before images of the leader as a young guerrilla gazing out over the country he would come to rule for nearly a half century.

Tribute sites were set up in hundreds of places across the island as the government urged Cubans to reaffirm their belief in a socialist, single-party system that in recent years has struggled to maintain the fervor that was widespread at the triumph of the 1959 revolution.