SANTIAGO, Cuba -- A wooden box containing Fidel Castro's ashes was placed by his brother and successor on Sunday into the side of a granite boulder that has become Cuba's only official monument to the man who ruled with absolute power for nearly a half century.
The private, early-morning ceremony was attended by members of Fidel Castro's family, the ruling Politburo of the single-party system he founded, and Latin American leaders who installed closely allied leftist governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Brazil.
After nine days of fervent national mourning and wall-to-wall homages to Castro on state-run media, the government barred independent coverage of the funeral, releasing a handful of photos and brief descriptions of the ceremony later in the day.
The ceremony began at 6:39 a.m. Cuba time when the military caravan bearing Castro's remains in a flag-draped cedar coffin left the Plaza of the Revolution in the eastern city of Santiago. Thousands of people lined the 2-mile route to Santa Ifigenia cemetery, waving Cuban flags and shouting "Long live Fidel!"
The ashes were delivered to Castro's younger brother and successor, President Raul Castro, who wore his olive general's uniform as he placed the remains into a niche in the enormous grey boulder that will serve as Fidel Castro's tomb. The niche was sealed with a green marble plaque emblazoned with the name "Fidel" in gold letters.
The tomb stands to the side of a memorial to the rebel soldiers killed in an attack that Castro led on Santiago's Moncada barracks on July 26, 1953, and in front of the mausoleum of Cuban national hero Jose Marti.
As the funeral ended, martial music could be heard outside the cemetery, where Ines de la Rosa was among the mourners gathered. She said she would have liked to watch the interment on television, but "we understand how they as a family also need a bit of privacy."
The decision to keep the final farewell private came the morning after Raul Castro announced that Cuba would prohibit the naming of streets and monuments after his brother, and would bar the construction of statues of the former leader and revolutionary icon, in keeping with Fidel Castro's desire to avoid a cult of personality. In contrast, the images of his fellow revolutionary fighters Camilo Cienfuegos and Ernesto "Che" Guevara became common across Cuba in the decades since their deaths.
"All of us would like to put Fidel's name on everything, but in the end, Fidel is all of Cuba," said Juan Antonio Gonzalez, a 70-year-old retired economist in Cuba. "It was a decision of Fidel's, not Raul's, and I think he has to be respected."
Fidel Castro overcame imprisonment at the hands of dictator Fulgencio Batista, exile in Mexico and a disastrous start to his rebellion before triumphantly riding into Havana in January 1959 to become, at age 32, the youngest leader in Latin America. He inspired and supported revolutionaries from Latin America to Africa even as Cubans who fled to exile loathed him with equal measure.
One of those exiles, Armando Garcia, is a retired electronics salesman who left Cuba in 1963 for Little Havana in Miami. He said Sunday's funeral granted neither simple closure nor optimism for immediate change.
"It's a light at the end of the tunnel," Garcia said from the Versailles restaurant, a hub for exiles.
Garcia said it was painful to see leaders in some Latin American countries praising Castro "for supposedly liberating the poor, when in reality he has enslaved the poor."
He joked that there was no sadness at the restaurant about Castro's funeral: "It's the best funeral ever. Look at us. No one is crying, everyone is happy, no need for handkerchiefs. It's a party."
Jose Llanes, 70, said nobody should be fooled by any images from Cuba showing thousands of people mourning. "When people are oppressed, they are told what to do."
Aida Levitan, president of Artes Miami, a nonprofit organization that promotes Hispanic artists, said the funeral "instills a little bit of hope for the Cuban people that this is the beginning of the end."
"Many people are not optimistic because Raul Castro still runs the country, but Fidel was the mythical figure and so it feels there is a difference," she said. "Like a Spanish expression goes: There's no evil that survives 100 years."
Later Sunday, dozens of people gathered for a rally at the Cuban Memorial in Miami's Tamiami Park in honor of people who were victims of Castro's regime and those who died trying to overthrow him. People searched for names of deceased relatives on a black marble wall beneath an obelisk with a Cuban flag pattern.
Sylvia Iriondo, president of the group of Mothers and Women against Repression in Cuba, told the group that it was important to remember those victims and to remember that, "Fidel Castro, the dictator, was not a hero."
Information for this article was contributed by Fabiola Sanchez and Adriana Gomez Licon of The Associated Press.
A Section on 12/05/2016