After Fidel Castro's death, Dickie Bannenberg, son of the famous designer Jon Bannenberg, published drawings of a yacht designed for the Cuban leader by his father.
John Bannenberg visited Cuba at the invitation of Castro in June 1972. At a meeting with the Comandante, the Australian designer discussed the concept of a state yacht. The result of their conversation was these drawings, preserved in the late John Bannenberg's archives.
The drawings show a 61m superyacht with a garage for two fast tenders in two hull paint schemes: bright red and white.
«I thought his plan was perfect: not only to hold formal state meetings aboard the yacht in the Caribbean Sea, but also to allow access aboard to, say, front-rank sugarcane cutters as a reward for their families»," John Bannenberg wrote in his memoirs.
Castro planned to have the yacht commissioned by the Ministry of Fisheries. He mentioned communist-friendly Poland as the most feasible country to build it. However, as it turned out during the work on the project, the Polish shipyards did not have large enough production facilities to build a superyacht of this size. As a result, the project remained on paper.
The leader of the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro, died on November 25, 2016 at the age of 90. The yacht played an important role in the history of the revolution: Castro and other revolutionaries landed on the Cuban coast from a 1943-built 18-meter diesel yacht Granma.
