Cuba is throwing a weeklong party to celebrate Fidel Castro's 100th birthday on Thursday with ballet performances, poetry and more than 300 academic papers and panel discussions on the impact of "Castro Thought" on everything from education and science to sports.
One missing detail: a functioning electrical grid.
Hundreds of representatives from left-wing and Communist parties around the world have come to celebrate the man who ruled Cuba for nearly five decades before his death in 2016. Outside the conference halls, there is little cause for celebration.
Mountains of garbage line Havana's streets, some set ablaze by residents protesting their living conditions. Electricity and water disappear for days at a time. The economy is in ruins.
"They are honoring the man who killed the country," said Luis Fonseca, a day laborer and would-be barber who unloads trucks at a market in colonial Havana. He and his friends knew nothing about the commemoration. "No one is talking about it."
Boris Gonzalez, a writer and historian, woke up one recent day without electricity or water. His teenage daughter was sick with dengue.
"People don't give a damn about the event," he said. "Nobody is talking about Fidel. We are beyond that."
The irony is unmistakable: Cuba is celebrating the centenary of the man who promised a revolutionary paradise as it struggles to keep the lights on under mounting U.S. sanctions.
That contrast is just what the regime wants to obscure. For a week, Havana has tried to resurrect the glory days of Castro's revolution, staging an international celebration amid the worst economic crisis in decades. The government wants to give the impression that everything is fine, Yoani Sánchez, an independent Cuban journalist, said on her blog.
"This event is an extraordinary example of political necrophilia -- a celebration of dead ideas, zombie ideas that don't work," said Moisés Naím, a Latin America analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace.
Opening the festivities, President Miguel Díaz-Canel praised Castro's life as an example to revolutionaries and vowed to resist U.S. aggression. His remarks drew an ovation from 1,500 guests at Havana's Palace of Conventions, including delegates from Communist parties stretching from Chile to China.
"As Fidel said more than once, we are ready to resist the imperialist blockade for as many years as necessary," Díaz-Canel said.
A handful of former leftist Latin American leaders paid tribute to Castro. "Fidel was for my generation of Latin Americans a living symbol of the struggle for social justice, liberty and sovereignty," former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff said in a statement.
Meanwhile, power failures have cut television, radio and internet, leaving few Cubans aware of the festival.
Castro, who was nicknamed "El Caballo," or "The Horse," still has admirers, mostly among older Cubans. Some people waiting in food lines say they miss the leadership of a man who bestrode the island in his trademark green military fatigues and whose memory still looms.
"You will hear people say this would not be happening if Fidel were alive," said Carlos Alzugaray, a retired Cuban ambassador.
But Alzugaray said most Cubans have other priorities. "They only want the lights to be turned on again," he said.
There are no statues of Castro in Cuba. Nor are streets, schools or government buildings named after him, a prohibition he imposed shortly after his guerrillas overthrew Fulgencio Batista in 1959.
"There is no cult of personality around any living revolutionary," Castro said in 2003. "The leaders of this country are human beings, not gods."
He didn't exactly follow his own advice.
Castro built an enormous personality cult. Billboards across the island still show him in camouflage, rifle in hand, leading the revolution. Granma, the Communist Party newspaper, keeps his image on its website's home page. "Fidel will never leave us," it says.
Castro's impact extended well beyond Cuba.
He turned the small island into a geopolitical power. Castro promoted guerrilla movements throughout Latin America and leveraged his alliance with the Soviet Union to send tens of thousands of Cuban soldiers into Africa. After the fall of the Soviet Union, he became a power broker in oil-rich Venezuela. For decades he was Washington's most tenacious adversary.
Even now, running on empty, Cuba remains a bugaboo for Washington. The U.S. State Department last month issued a remarkable 99-page report that branded the island as a unique national-security threat that is still bent, under Castro's influence, on "conquering the neighboring United States."
"Call it megalomania, genius, madness, audacity, irresponsibility, whatever you want," said Jorge Castañeda, a former foreign minister of Mexico who once tangled with Castro. "But there is no doubt that he turned Cuba into a global player -- at great cost to Cubans who are still paying the price."
For all of his geopolitical skills, Castro pushed crank economic theories at home. He sought to create a selfless "New Man" and tried to abolish money. He nationalized businesses, destroyed Cuba's economy and left the island dependent first on the Soviet Union, then on Venezuela.
His strategies often veered into the absurd. Castro was obsessed with cloning Ubre Blanca, a champion milk cow, to end the chronic milk shortage his agricultural policies created. When the cow died, Granma published her obituary on its front page, and a marble statue of her was erected. Her embalmed remains are still displayed. Castro even mused about breeding miniature cows for Havana families to keep at home. The tiny cows never materialized.
"History will absolve me," Castro said in a famous speech defending himself after his failed 1953 attack on a military barracks.
That is increasingly debatable.
"History won't absolve him," Gonzalez, the historian, said. "I hope we don't repeat the error that has lasted for almost 70 years."