and i m martin savidge in for victor blackwell. cuba has declared nine days of mourning after fidel castro has died at the age of 90. his brother raul castro announced his death last night and said that cast throw will be cremated early this morning. translator: dear people of cuba, with profound pain, i have to sadly inform you, to our friends from our america, and to the world, that today, november 25th, 2016, at 10:29 in the evening the commander and leader of the cuban revolution, fidel castro died. the word of castro s death came to miami. the fills of streets of exiles where many viewed him as an enemy of human rights. they were popping champagne, waving the cuban flag and chanting freedom.
guess the overwhelming of it all. the fact they never thought this moment was going to come. being in the market when i was in local news for five years, you would constantly get tales of hopes that fidel castro had passed on. some sort of indication, i assume for what was lost when people were pushed out of their homeland. so the tears shed are not for the loss but more so for the overall moment. alejandro following the situation in miami where as we are hearing and seeing from our affiliates that people are celebrating in the streets that the former cuban leader fidel castro died at the age of 90 years old. cue hours ago, castro informed the cuban people in a statement in of the death of his
stroking a beard. that has changed. now people are a little bit more open, not critical, but you can have certain conversations you couldn t have when i first started coming here. there is a lot of double speak, any kind of representation of fidel castro is very tightly controlled. i talked to his son just a few months ago, alex castro, he is a photographer who has documented the fin years of fidel castro s life. i said, why doesn t your father have more statues of him like there are of che caverro. he said, my father is a simple man, he doesn t want that. it is much more subtle. when you are a child in cuban school, of course you have to go to government school but it is the only school also cuban children are allowed to go to. you have to memorize many of fidel castro s speeches, his school of thought, his life.
fire in the streets, maybe the army would divide against itself, there would be pro an-liberalization people, there would be years and years of pent-up frustrated ambitions on the part of less senior cuban officials that would certainly break into the open. and now that it has happened? reporter: well, what happened was we really had kind of a slow motion transition that nobody recognized as a transition for a while. in 2006 fidel castro became ill. there was a sort of two-year twilight zone there, and then one day we woke up and he was no longer the leader. meanwhile, his brother raoul, who it must be said for a long time was not a well-known figure and thought to be mostly a non-entity in cuba was actually in control.
and there will be revolutionaries who will mourn his death. there are those also in miami as you rightly point out who are celebrating in the streets. i would ask you to stay with us because we d like to speaking with you much more throughout the evening. i also want to bring in our correspondent rafael romo to get your thoughts on what you are hearing from mr. sag earo. i understand what he is saying because you have to think about the hundreds of thousands millions of people who had to leave cuba with nothing, absolutely nothing, either because they didn t have anything to eat anymore or because they were people who were politically persecuted. think about the marrier boat in the 1980s. the peter pan kids, they were 6 or 7 whose parents said it is better for me to let my children go to the united states even if