Neither of them asked permission to settle in Cuba or in the Tabacalera park, explained Alessandra Rojo.
14ymedio, Havana, 17 July 2025 — Fidel Castro and Che Guevara are, for the time being, prohibited from sitting on the bench in Mexico City’s Jardín Tabacalera park. As if they were patients in intensive care, the heavy statues of both men seated were carried in the arms of several workers on Wednesday and removed from the site, after years of controversy over their “irregular” installation.
“Neither Che nor Fidel asked for permission to settle in Cuba… nor in the Tabacalera,” posted Alessandra Rojo de la Vega, the combative mayor of Cuauhtémoc, one of the 16 territorial demarcations into which Mexico City is divided and where the monument was located.
According to the politician, elected by a coalition opposed to the ruling party in the capital and the country, the placement of the figures in 2018 lacked the necessary documentation from the Committee on Monuments and Works of Art in Public Spaces, and the installation process was never completed. She added that her mayor’s office does not have “a single document” authorizing the statues’ presence in the park and “they are under the irregular custody of a mayor’s employee without any legal basis for doing so.” This led the district’s Urban Services department to remove the monuments.
“That’s not how things are done,” criticized the Mexican mayor and businesswoman, alluding to the “personal whims” of those who governed the district in 2018, despite requests from Cuauhtémoc residents to recover the park bench that housed the Cuban and the Argentine.
This isn’t the first time Castro and Che Guevara have been deprived of their seats. In 2019, the statues were reinstalled in the same location after being removed due to irregularities in the process, but the correct procedure wasn’t followed then either. Now, the mayor’s office announced, they will be put in storage and a consideration will be given to sending them to another location.
On X, the mayor’s announcement sparked all kinds of controversy and comments between those who see the measure as an offense and assured that “Che and Fidel will be back,” and those who celebrate the eviction of those “responsible for the misery a people as beautiful as Cubans are experiencing today.”
Others, jokingly, proposed sending the statues to regions governed by Morena, the party of Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Claudia Sheinbaum, which controlled Cuauhtémoc when the bronze sculptures were placed.
Known as the Encounter Monument, the figures of Guevara and Castro—tobacco in hand, both already in their post-1959 military uniforms—commemorated their exile in Mexico, where they met before sailing to Cuba aboard the yacht Granma. Since its installation, it has been the target of complaints among those who frequent the Tabacalera Garden, not only for representing a totalitarian power, but for being an obstacle to urban harmony.
Known as the ’Meeting Monument’, the figures of Guevara and Castro commemorated their exile in Mexico.
Rojo was nominated last year as the mayoral candidate for Fuerza y Corazón por México [Power and Heart for Mexico], a coalition made up of the three main opposition parties. Before winning the election, her vehicle was shot at five times by an individual who later confessed he had been hired to “scare” the politician. In the election, she won against the candidate of the ruling Morena party, Catalina Monreal— daughter of Ricardo Monreal, the former mayor of Cuauhtémoc — who tried to overturn the election result by accusing Rojo of alleged electoral irregularities. The statues were installed during Monreal’s term as mayor.
In July 2024, 14ymedio published a report on the Encuentro Monument, located in a central area of the capital, which has been vandalized (covered in white paint) and served as a clothesline for those washing in the park’s fountain.
“For me, it’s an aberration to have these statues here. We have countless national heroes, so why would we have these individuals if Castro was a dictator?” a neighborhood resident told this newspaper at the time. Another, drawn into the conversation, replied: “Shouldn’t they be somewhere else? In Cuba, for example?”
For the moment, however, Castro and Che rest in some storeroom at city hall. An empty bench and two stains on the crossbars remain in the park: they are the trace, neither epic nor heroic, of the expulsion.
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