BOGOTA, Colombia
The world is mourning the passing of Argentine soccer legend Diego Armando Maradona, who died of coronary heart failure on Nov. 25.
Coincidentally, 4 years earlier on the identical day, former Cuban President Fidel Castro, whom Maradona thought-about an in depth good friend and a ‘second father,’ handed away.
The connection with Castro was so shut that Maradona had a tattoo of the Cuban chief on his left leg. He developed an in depth relationship with Castro when he went to the island to be handled for drug dependency after he almost died of a coronary heart drawback attributable to his habit to cocaine.
4 years in the past, Maradona grieved over the dying of his good friend.
“The legend remains to be alive in us, within the hearts that beat for Fidel [Castro],” he informed Cuban state tv after touchdown in Havana.
And simply as he had a tattoo of Castro on his left leg, the face of iconic revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara adorned his proper shoulder.
Maradona by no means sought to hide his robust leftist political beliefs.
All through his life, he was outspoken on political and social causes, maybe stemming from his humble beginnings. He grew up in a really humble neighborhood in Buenos Aires referred to as Villa Fiorito. Though he loved a lifetime of luxurious as an grownup, he by no means forgot that he grew up in poverty. That’s the reason he was seen because the soccer participant “of the individuals.”
Maradona developed a robust friendship with former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and in 2018 joined Chavez’s successor, Nicolas Maduro, on the marketing campaign path throughout that 12 months’s election.
When Chavez died in March 2013, Maradona expressed nice sorrow.
“Hugo Chavez has modified the mind-set of Latin America. We had been dedicated to the US, and he put in our heads that we might stroll alone,” he stated.
He additionally championed former Bolivian President Evo Morales, who was ousted final 12 months. In 2008, Maradona performed a charity match in La Paz to indicate his backing for Bolivia’s marketing campaign towards a FIFA ban on matches at excessive altitude.
Maradona additionally expressed anti-American and anti-Bush sentiment all through his life.
He additionally confirmed his help for Palestine on a number of events, assembly with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in 2018 through the World Cup in Russia, when he gave Abbas a signed nationwide staff shirt.
Abbas on Thursday expressed “his deepest sorrow” over the dying of Maradona.
Maradona additionally spoke out towards the Vatican when John Paul II was pope.
“I went in and noticed the golden ceiling. And I assumed to myself: how can [he]…reside with a golden ceiling after which go to poor nations and kiss the boys with a stomach like that. I finished believing as a result of I used to be seeing,” he stated after visiting the Vatican.
A few years later, when Francis, an Argentinian, was appointed pope, Maradona stated he had regained his religion within the Church. He met Pope Francis a number of instances on the Vatican after he was elected in 2013 as Latin America’s first pontiff.
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