Cuba formally inaugurates US-sponsored statue honoring hero
By MICHAEL WEISSENSTEIN, ASSOCIATED PRESS
HAVANA — Jan 28, 2018, 3:03 PM ET
Joseph Mizzi, the chairman of the Bronx museum's board of trustees, speaks at the ceremony to unveil a replica of a New York statue of Cuba's independence hero Jose Marti in Havana, Cuba, Sunday, Jan. 28, 2018. The monument was unveiled on the 165th anniversary of the birth of the Cuban independence hero in a ceremony attended by a delegation of U.S. organizers of the event and top officials of the Cuban Government, including President Raul Castro. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa)
President Raul Castro and his expected successor attended the formal unveiling of a U.S.-sponsored statue of independence hero Jose Marti on Sunday in a sign of Cuba's focus on maintaining ties with the United States despite a chill in relations under President Donald Trump.
Castro and Vice President Miguel Diaz-Canel sat in the front row of the sunrise ceremony along with Democratic members of Congress Barbara Lee and Karen Bass of California and Kansas Republic Roger Marshall, who were the highest-ranking Americans at the ceremony. Castro makes relatively few public appearances, endowing the ceremony with a stamp of particular importance in a country where the movements of high officials are closely scrutinized for clues to government plans and intentions.
The bronze statue of Marti on a rearing horse was funded with $2.5 million raised in the United States in a project started by the Bronx Museum of the Arts, which has longstanding ties with Cuban state cultural institutions. The 18.5-foot (5.6-meter) long, 8-ton work is an exact copy of a sculpture installed on the south end of New York's Central Park in 1965.
Sunday was the 165th anniversary of the birth of Marti, a renowned poet, journalist and fighter for Cuban independence who was fatally wounded in an 1895 battle for independence from the Spanish.
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