Unlike Fidel, Raul Castro has his tomb ready in Cuba

Sunday, August 3, 2008 at 10:08 am under World News Alerts Unlike Fidel, Raul Castro has his tomb ready in 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 communist island’s 77-year-old head of state 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” that he and Fidel led five decades ago.

It is here that General Raul Castro’s ashes will lie after his death and cremation 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 organised 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 theatre 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-kilometre (40-mile) journey from Santiago de Cuba.

(Agencies)

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