Luanda - Angola’s first president and the Nation founding Father, António Agostinho Neto, is among the figures that Cuba says will pay tribute this month (September 2022).
This was announced by the deputy president of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples, (ICAP), Víctor Gaute López.
According to him, the thought, convictions and politic action of Agostinho Neto marked decisively the history of Angola before and after the country’s independence achieved on 11 November, 1975.
In turn, Tamara Velázquez López, director of ICAP’s Communication and Historical Documentary Heritage, announced plans for the organisations of solidarity to join the activities in Cuba aimed to honour the first President of Angola.
The officials at the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples also said that the initiative aims to reiterate the Cuban revolution’s commitment to respect the sovereignty of the countries, as well as promote the solidarity of peoples.
The honorees include Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam, Salvador Allende (Chile) as well as the young Italian tourist Fabio Di Celmo, victim of a terrorist attack in Havana in September 1997, and the American Rev. Lucius Walker.
The list covers the martyrs of the Cuban airline plane, crashed in Barbados, as the result of a terrorist attack in 1976, and the 154th anniversary of the Cry of Lares, in support for the decolonisation of Puerto Rico.
António Agostinho Neto was born on September 17, 1922, in Kaxicane, Icolo and Bengo, and died on September 10, 1979.
As Angola's first President, he proclaimed the country's independence from the then Portuguese colonial yoke, on November 11, 1975.
He is a reference of national culture, having written several works translated into various languages, with stress to "Four Poems of Agostinho Neto", in 1957, " Sagrada Esperança" (1974) and "Renuncia impossível" (1982).
