Cuba: The Cemeteries

This first set of pictures is from the Cementerio Santa Ifigenia on the edge of Santiago de Cuba. This is where Compay Segundo, of the Buena Vista Social Club, was buried in 2003 with full military honours in recognition of his achievements during the revolution. Santiago de Cuba was where the M-26-7 movement first gathered power and broke free, so there are many revolutionaries entombed here including Frank Pais, a popular former school teacher who was assassinated on the Batista's orders. Jose Marti's mausoleum is also located here. He founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party in 1892, and that was only one small achievement in his impressive life. It was in front of his tomb that I watched the changing of the guard ceremony to the sound of revolutionary marching music. It was such a brilliantly sunny day when I visited that most of my pictures appear a little washed out, and I was so dehydrated by the time I found the place that some of the pictures are obviously taken with a shaky hand and others are not even level. So here's a few that did turn out.





This second set is from the five square kilometre Necropolis de Colon in Havana. Located in Vedado, it's one of the largest cemeteries in the Americas. It was designed in 1868 to have space for well over a hundred years' worth of corpses and has a grid of streets throughout it. The most famous tomb there is that of Amelia Goyri de la Hoz and her child (Located at Calle 1 e/ F y G - which means on 1 Street between F and G Streets). She was a Havanan society woman who died during childbirth on May 3, 1901. Her baby survived her by a few minutes and was buried with her at her feet. The next year, during a routine exhumation, she was supposedly found cradling the baby in her arms. She was soon dubbed La Milagrosa (The Miracle Worker) and came to represent the power of a mother's love, working even beyond the grave. Not long after she was attributed with universal healing powers, and to this day, believers line up to engage in a ritual with strict etiquette in order to have their wishes granted. While I was there, I saw couples, individuals, families, and children all take their turn to ask La Milagrosa for help. The first two pictures are of some of those moments.