Havana - The Beatles shared honours on Friday with Cuban leader Fidel Castro - whose government once banned their music - in a list of the most "relevant" figures of the 20th century published by the ruling Communist Party.
"They revolutionised rock and pop music, with their songs figuring among the most notable of those genres," the international version of Communist Party daily Granma wrote next to a photo of the Fab Four.
The British band, whose music was considered a "harmful" Western influence and effectively prohibited in the years after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, got the 16th mention on Granma's non-numerical list of "relevant figures of the century."
Granma did not explain how the names were selected.
Cuba's music-loving population now listens openly to The Beatles, and there is even an annual festival in their honour.
Less surprisingly, the first three mentions on Granma's 19- person list went to some of the century's best-known communists: Russia's Vladimir Lenin, Castro, and Argentine-born Ernesto "Che" Guevara in that order.
The 1917 October Revolution leader, Lenin, "founded the first socialist state in history and had sufficient clarity to steer that new world experience amid a war-devastated Russia."
Castro was hailed as "one of the most important Latin American leaders in the second half of the 20th century" who "even with the disappearance of the East European and Soviet socialist bloc, stayed firm in his socialist ideals."
Of Guevara, a commander in Castro's triumphant rebel army, Granma wrote: "For some, he's a myth, for others a saint, but for Cubans he is a man who knew how to assume his ideology generously, without expecting anything in return."
US novelist Ernest Hemingway received the final mention from Granma, probably influenced by the fact he had a home in Cuba for two decades, and wrote some of his most famous works, including "The Old Man and the Sea", in Havana.
Also on the list was British war leader Winston Churchill, "one of the most brilliant politicians promoted by the English bourgeoisie". Granma praised Churchill for "leaving behind his sick anti-Sovietism to see in time that the USSR was the only ally capable of avoiding total debacle for England in the Second World War."
The rest of the Cuban list was made up of Pope John Paul II, Joseph Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt, Ho Chi Minh, Nelson Mandela, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Charles de Gaulle, Adolf Hitler, Mao Tse Tung, and Pablo Picasso. - Reuters