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Castro put to rest in city where revolution began

President Raul Castro of Cuba received his older brother’s ashes from an honor guard in Santiago, Cuba, on Sunday.Marcelino Vazquez Hernandez/ACN via Associated Press

SANTIAGO, Cuba — Bringing to an end nine days of national mourning, the ashes of Fidel Castro were buried Sunday morning in Santa Ifigenia Cemetery in this coastal city where, 63 years ago, he began his socialist revolution.

The Cuban government closely guarded the details of the funeral service, which was private and closed to the media, but the brief ceremony followed a short cortege through the city and a 21-gun salute. Thousands of people lined the 2-mile procession route.

Castro’s remains were entombed near the mausoleum of José Martí, the 19th-century Cuban poet and independence fighter, perhaps the only other native son held in such great esteem by Cubans.

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It made for a subdued ending to a busy week of remembrance marked by large, government-orchestrated tributes in the country’s public squares and nonstop television and radio coverage that provided a continual soundtrack in households and businesses across this nation of 11 million.

The public events during the mourning period drew vast, yet restrained, crowds. Perhaps the most dramatic homage was a three-day cortege that carried Fidel Castro’s ashes hundreds of miles to Santiago from Havana, reversing the route that he and his guerrillas took after overthrowing the forces of Fulgencio Batista in 1959.

Hundreds of thousands of people lined the route, with some traveling long distances and many hours for a glimpse of the modest convoy and the small, flag-draped wooden box containing Castro’s ashes, which sat in a glass case on a trailer hitched to a military jeep.

The government announced Saturday that it would prohibit the naming of streets and monuments for Castro and also ban the construction of statues of him in keeping with the former leader’s desire to avoid a cult of personality.

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The mourning period was a time of reflection for the nation, as it considered Castro’s life and legacy, measuring the achievements of “Castroismo” against its undelivered promises.

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“Nothing’s perfect — it’s taken a lot of work, that’s true,” said Liliam Dominguez, 60, a professor of psychology and pedagogy at the University of Havana, as students and faculty gathered for a memorial march at the university campus last week.

“There are good things and bad things,’’ Dominguez said. “But in the balance, for me, what we have had weighs more than what we haven’t had.”

Like many Cubans are quick to do, she extolled the virtues of the country’s free health care and education systems.

Her father was from a poor family and became a manual laborer in the sugar industry at 15, before the revolution. But a generation later, Dominguez and her two siblings earned university degrees — thanks, she said, to Castro’s initiatives.

Many spoke of Castro last week in terms befitting a father figure. But Castro’s long illness, which compelled him to cede power to his brother Raul Castro a decade ago, seemed to blunt the emotional effect of his death. The nation’s response was generally stoic, with public displays of unchecked emotion rare.

“For me, he’s going to be alive forever,” said Julia Piloto Cuellar, 53, who attended one of several public memorial gatherings last week in Havana, the capital. “He left physically, but he’s going to be with us forever.”

While analysts abroad speculated about the possible effects of Castro’s death on Cuba’s domestic and foreign policy, Cuban citizens appeared to keep expectations in check, perhaps because hopes for speedy improvements at other historic junctures, like the reestablishing of diplomatic relations with the United States in 2014, had gone unrealized for most people.

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The government, meanwhile, harnessed Castro’s death to reaffirm its socialist program, urging people to honor his legacy by redoubling their commitment to the ideals he espoused and the country he built.

The government even placed logbooks in schools and other locations throughout the country and invited Cubans to sign an oath of loyalty to the revolution’s ideals.