Hasta la victoria siempre?

The new leaders will have to shelf the revolutionary rhetoric of the past.

Cuba’s revolutionary communist dream began with a motto that still remains etched on the Plaza de la Revolucion in Havana. At first attributed to Che Guevara, after the 1960s it became one of President Fidel Castro’s mantras: “Hasta la victoria siempre!” (“Ever onward to victory!”) There has been no public address in which the “Líder Máximo” (and later his brother, Raul Castro) forgot to repeat this motto. Sixty years on since the inception of the Marxist regime, after the death of its founder and the demise of the first generation of revolutionaries, it’s worth wondering whether that “siempre” will still have a place in the island’s future political model now that Raul Castro has relinquished his hold over the country .

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