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HAVANA. — President Raul Castro led May Day celebrations yesterday in Cuba, where officials spoke out in support of Venezuela’s embattled president Nicolas Maduro.
Dressed in a traditional white button-down guayabera shirt, Castro waved at the parade from Revolution Square in Havana, where some 600 000 workers joined the parade, according to an official estimate.
Some 3 000 government buses had transported the workers to the capital of the Communist-run state for the holiday, a traditional spring festival that has also been turned into a celebration of the international labour movement.
“We’re showing our full support for the Bolivarian, Chavista revolution, and its constitutional president Nicolas Maduro, in the face of destabilising actions by the reactionary right,” said Ulises Guilarte, the secretary general of Cuba’s workers union, CTC.
Venezuela has seen more than two months of anti-government unrest which has killed 41 people and injured more than 700. The protests have been led by students and other demonstrators denouncing rampant crime, inflation, widespread shortages of basic goods and other economic woes.
Guilarte also expressed support for reforms recently introduced by Castro, who took over the presidency from his brother Fidel in 2006.
Castro has called over the past month for Cubans to join the May Day parade, urging them to “make the Cuban land shake with the workers’ march. —AFP.
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