Four decades after his Cuban Revolution triumph, veteran communist leader Fidel Castro made a nostalgic return on Friday night to the scene of his famous declaration of victory in 1959.
A crowd in the eastern city of Santiago de Cuba - known as the "Cradle of the Revolution" - rose and chanted "Fidel! Fidel!" as he walked out on the same wooden-railed balcony from which he addressed an ecstatic victory rally on January 1st, 1959.
"I live and perceive again the details as if everything were happening at this moment," a bespectacled Dr Castro, standing erect and dressed in his trademark olive-green military fatigues, said at the start of a speech to the nation.
Reading from a script, and speaking - by his standards - for an unusually short 1 1/2 hours, Dr Castro said that beyond the age difference, he was still the same man. Rather than the unkempt rebels who hailed him in 1959, Dr Castro's audience this time was an orderly 1,000-plus invited guests - including Cuba's ruling elite, foreign diplomats and Santiago de Cuba officials - sitting in serried ranks of chairs amid massive security.
In the audience were arts world figures including Colombian novelist and Castro friend Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ecuadorean painter Oswaldo Guayasamin, and Portugal's Nobel Prize-winning author, Jose Saramago.
Speaking from the spot in Santiago de Cuba's 16th-century town hall from which he proclaimed victory after the flight of dictator Fulgencio Batista in the early hours of January 1st, 1959, Dr Castro recounted details of his two-year rebel war. Turning to familiar themes over the decades, he hit out at the United States with a tribute to Cubans' resistance of "40 years of aggressions, blockade, and economic, political and ideological war from the most powerful and richest imperialist power that has ever existed in the history of the world".
The capitalist-dominated world economic order will, Dr Castro predicted, "fall inevitably", while speculative cash-flows and neo-liberal globalisation had taken the world to the edge of disaster.
"Socialism or Death! Fatherland or Death! We will conquer!" proclaimed Dr Castro at the end of his speech at the anniversary celebration, broadcast live on state-run television and radio.
Earlier, Cuba's ruling communists rang in the new year with patriotic celebrations of the 40th anniversary and the island's traditional socialist rallying cries. Television played the Cuban national anthem over black-and-white images of Dr Castro and his rebel "barbudos" (bearded ones).
"More than 3 1/2 centuries of colonialism and almost 60 years of hateful Yankee neo-liberal domination began to be definitively annihilated on that first of January, and Cuba became from that time and forever a free territory," said a special New Year's midnight message on state television.
Havana contends the United States hijacked its war of independence in the 19th century, entering Cuba at the last minute to clinch victory over Spain in 1898 but imposing puppet governments between that year and the 1959 revolution.
Seeking to strike a more statesmanlike pose than in 1959, though no less militant in his beliefs, Dr Castro was symbolically declaring victory again on Friday night - this time for his own 40-year survival against the odds.
Dr Castro and Cuba's ruling Communist Party are proud to have survived the decades of US-led opposition, which have included a nearly 37-year-old economic embargo and plots to assassinate him with poisoned cigars or exploding seashells. Dr Castro also defied predictions his would be the next communist system to fall in the early 1990s after the domino-like collapse of socialism in the former Soviet bloc.
The loss of crucial Soviet aid and trade plunged Cuba into an economic crisis that shrank its economy by 35 per cent and squeezed the island's 11 million inhabitants as never before. But Cuba's fundamental political system remained intact and looks likely to stay that way into the 21st century.
While supporters hail Dr Castro as a 20th-century hero and Third World champion, his critics and foes around the world denounce him as a Machiavellian tyrant who perverted the original revolution to impose a dictatorial political system and repress internal opposition.
Cuban exile leaders in Florida - a bastion of anti-Castro sentiment - scorned Havana's celebrations, calling January 1st an anniversary of "blood and tears". Dissidents in Cuba urged the world to remember what they say are nearly 400 prisoners of conscience languishing in prisons across the island.
Ordinary Cubans, interviewed about the significance of the revolution's anniversary, expressed pride in the country's sense of identity, Dr Castro's bold toppling of Batista, his resistance to US pressure, and his provision of free medical care and education.
However, they frequently criticised their daily economic problems, the lack of freedom for both private enterprise and political opposition, and Dr Castro's lengthy hold on power.
Congratulatory messages arrived in Havana from many Third World nations; current and former socialist allies like Russia, North Korea and China; and European states such as France, Portugal and the Vatican.