On August 13, 2026, during the third session of the inaugural International Colloquium titled *Fidel: Legacy and Future*, Cuban officials formally presented the landmark publishing project *Fidel Castro Ruz, Selected Works* — a work conceived as a centennial gift from the Cuban people to the world, honoring the birth of the Cuban Revolution’s iconic leader Fidel Castro Ruz. The launch event was attended by Cuba’s highest-ranking leadership, including Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba and President of the Republic, who received a symbolic copy of the complete collection during the ceremony.
René González Barrios, director of the Fidel Castro Ruz Center, detailed the massive scope and rigorous work that went into compiling the collection. The final product is a 23-volume monumental work spanning 15,944 pages, bringing together 690 documents spanning 33 distinct formats, supported by 12,210 contextual footnotes designed to help readers situate Fidel’s words within their specific historical moments. A full standalone volume, the 23rd, is dedicated exclusively to the correspondence exchanged between Fidel Castro and Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías, the late Commander and former President of Venezuela, which González Barrios described as “a true treasure and a manual of revolutionary ethics.”
González Barrios emphasized that the collection is the product of years of collective work by a team of academic and historical specialists united by a shared commitment: to deliver Fidel Castro’s ideas, shaped across decades of changing global and national contexts, to the Cuban people and the wider world as a living resource for political and social struggle. The project would not have been possible without the solidarity support from one of Cuba’s longstanding international partners: the Communist Party of Vietnam and the people of Vietnam, who took on the responsibility of printing 3,000 copies of the complete collection.
Vu Trong Lam, director and editor-in-chief of Vietnam’s National Political Publishing House “The Truth”, which completed the printing work, noted that the collaboration represented more than a publishing project. It stands, he said, as a new demonstration of the shared commitment between the two nations to protect, expand, and carry forward the longstanding traditions of solidarity, special friendship, and comprehensive cooperation that have defined Vietnam-Cuba relations for decades.
Alongside President Díaz-Canel, the presentation ceremony was attended by multiple senior leaders of Cuba’s Communist Party and national government, including Esteban Lazo Hernández, President of the National Assembly of People’s Power; Manuel Marrero Cruz, Prime Minister of Cuba; Roberto Morales Ojeda, Secretary of Organization of the Party Central Committee; and Salvador Valdés Mesa, Vice President of the Republic, among other senior political officials.