MONTEVIDEO, Nov. 26 (Xinhua) -- Former Uruguayan President, Jose Mujica, said Saturday that Fidel Castro, who passed away on Friday at the age of 90, was "someone who lived as he thought", and highlighted his courage.
Mujica, the former left-wing president of Uruguay, stated that "like any great person who occupied a long period of history," Castro "will have detractors and those who love him."
"At the moment, it seems the most important thing is to realize this was someone who lived as he thought and lived for what he thought," said the president in an interview with the news site, Montevideo Portal.
For Mujica, a former guerrilla commander and current senator, Castro "spent all his strength and his entire existence...as a great man, who was the product of the events of his time. He had to live with the contradictions of his time."
According to Mujica, for much of the Cuban people, Fidel had a great stature for having spent decades defying the most powerful country in the world.
"It is not a single problem to have courage, decisiveness and the capacity to resist such a dilemma," he concluded.