Unlike Fidel, Raul Castro has his tomb ready in Cuba
Agence France-Presse
July 31, 2008
Santiago de Cuba- Cubans may not know the ultimate resting place of
Fidel Castro, but there is no mystery surrounding the future repose of
his brother and successor as president, Raul Castro.
The 77-year-old current head-of-state of this communist island has
already prepared his tomb: a 130-tonne public mausoleum in the eastern
mountain town of Santiago de Cuba.
It is dedicated to the "heroes of the revolution" he and Fidel led five decades ago.
It is here that General Raul Castro's ashes will be deposited after his
death and cremation. They will lie alongside the urn of his wife and
comrade-in-arms, Vilma Espin, whom he married days after the
revolution's triumph in 1959 and who died last year. The couple had
four children.
"The monolith is a symbol of the revolution's strength," Madelaine
Venegas, a guide to the Mausoleum of the Frank Pais Second Front, told
foreign reporters during a visit organized for the July 26 anniversary
of the insurgency's beginning.
Adorned with flowers, the monument -- "Vilma's big passion," said
Venegas -- was built in 2001 in the Sierra Maestra, the cradle of the
revolution and the main theater of battle for Fidel and his fighting
force that eventually overthrew the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.
The Frank Pais Second Front was a guerrilla unit named after a fallen comrade that Raul Castro led in 1958.
More than 69,000 Cuban and foreign tourists visited the quiet site
surrounded by palm trees last year, making the 70-kilometer (40-mile)
journey from Santiago de Cuba.
"Some are surprised to see Raul's name" alongside his wife's in the
olive bronze plate set in the middle of the stone, said Angel Leonidas,
another official guide.
"It's going to be some years yet" before he joins her, added the
director of the site, retired colonel Alberto Vazquez, a former
revolutionary.
He said that even when that day comes, he was not worried, "because the continuity of the revolution is guaranteed."
Raul Castro officially took over as Cuba's president in February,
although he had been de facto leader since July 2006, when his iconic
older brother, 82 next month, took gravely ill and handed over the
reins of power.
In front of the monolith that will eventually house Raul is the tomb of
Antonio Gades, a Spanish communist choreographer and flamenco dancer,
built from the trunk of a palm tree and stone from his native city of
Valencia. A pair of marble dancing shoes complete the monument.
Just before his death in 2004, the dancer willed his ashes to Raul, who had them delivered to the tomb the following year.
In a discreet corner of the mausoleum, in shadow as befits his
reputation, is the tomb of Manuel Pineiro, a revolutionary better known
as "Red Beard" who headed Cuba's intelligence service in the early
1960s before helping organizing leftist insurgencies in several Latin
American countries.
For Cubans, the big mystery is what will happen to the body of Fidel
Castro, the "commander in chief" who led their country for nearly half
a century and who still looms large in their collective memory.
"Really, we don't know what is going to happen with that, but I would
think that they would scatter his ashes over the Sierra Maestra
mountains," speculated Pablo Garcia, a 57-year-old construction worker.
