A veteran-cigar maker has celebrated Fidel Castro’s 90th birthday by rolling what is believed to be the world’s longest cigar.
At 90m long, it took Cuban cigar roller, Jose Castelar, 10 days to make and he hopes to gain his sixth Guinness record from the feat.
“I haven’t smoked in many years,” Mr Castelar told USA Today. “But our present to him is our joint effort to commemorate his birthday, because we know that he does not smoke anymore.”
Cuba has put on a number of events this month to honour the retired "El Comandante" who spearheaded its 1959 revolution and built a Communist-run state on the doorstep of the United States.
Thousands celebrated the birthday in a giant street party along Havana’s Malecon boulevard by dancing to Latin beats through the night from Friday to Saturday, with a live band bursting into “Happy Birthday” at midnight.
Mr Castro thanked Cubans for their tributes on Saturday in a long column carried by state-run media in which the iconic leftist revolutionary also lambasted the US.
"I want to express my most profound gratitude for the shows of respect, the greetings and gifts I have received the days, which give me the strength to reciprocate through ideas," Mr Castro wrote in the opinion piece.
Mr Castro, who handed power to his younger brother Raul in 2008 due to poor health also wrote about his youth in the eastern village of Biran and about his father who died before the revolution.
Castro went on to lambast Barack Obama, over his speech in May when he visited Hiroshima - the site of the world's first atomic bombing at the end of World War Two.
"He lacked the words to ask for forgiveness for the killings of hundreds of thousands of people," Mr Castro wrote.
Many Cubans feel Mr Castro is no longer in step with the times. Considered more pragmatic, the younger Castro is credited with implementing a detente with the US after a half century of frozen confrontation, introducing market-style reforms to invigorate the state-dominated economy and increasing personal freedoms, such as the right to travel abroad.
Mr Castro has lent these policies only lukewarm support in public.
Additional reporting by Reuters
