Michael D Higgins with Raul Castro in Havana during a state visit to Cuba in 2017. Photo: Maxwell’s Michael D Higgins was sent a box of Havana cigars every year by Cuba’s Castro brothers, comedian Tommy Tiernan has claimed. As he had stopped smoking, the President shared the cigars among his friends, including Tiernan, who said he once got a batch sent by Raul Castro, the brother of Fidel and former chairman of the Communist Party in Cuba.
Mr Higgins was criticised in 2016 over the statement he issued on the death of Fidel Castro, which made no mention of human-rights concerns. In it, he praised the revolutionary dictator as “a giant among global leaders whose view was not only one of freedom for his people, but for all of the oppressed and excluded peoples on the planet’’. At the time, a spokesperson for Mr Higgins rejected the criticism as “both unsustainable and unwarranted”.
The claim about his receiving the cigars from the Castro brothers was made by Tiernan during a podcast interview with US comedian Bill Burr, which has been shared online. Tiernan described himself as a “good friend” of the President and said that in the 1970s and 1980s when he was a Labour TD, he “made great friends with the Castros”. “He used to smoke cigars.
When he got elected President, he had given them up,” he said. “But the Castros used to send him a box of cigars every year and he had stopped smoking but he was very grateful and he used to share them out.” Tiern.