Vilma Espín

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Vilma Espín Guillois (born April 7, 1930 in Santiago de Cuba , † June 18, 2007 in Havana ) was a Cuban revolutionary , member of the State Council and the Communist Party of Cuba , and until her death she was president of the Cuban Women's Association (FMC).

Life

She was married to Raúl Castro , brother Fidels and his later successor as head of state and government in Cuba. They had four children together. Espín was often referred to as the unofficial "First Lady of Cuba" because she regularly took on public obligations alongside Fidel Castro.

Vilma Espín came from one of the oldest aristocratic families in Santiago. Her father was the vice director of the local Bacardi rum factory. Her mother was from France .

Espín experienced the Fulgencio Batistas coup in March 1952 as a student at the Universidad de Oriente . Shortly thereafter, she joined the Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario (MNR) resistance group , led by the philosopher Rafael García Bárcena and whose coordinator was in Santiago Frank País . The group disbanded in 1953 after its key members were arrested. After Espín was one of the first women in Cuba to graduate as a chemical engineer in 1954, Espín went to the United States to take up postgraduate studies at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology , but remained in contact with the resistance movement in her home country. In the meantime, País had initially set up the Acción Revolucionaria Oriental group in Santiago , which later renamed itself Acción Revolucionaria Nacional and joined the July 26th Movement founded by Fidel Castro after his release in 1955 , which initially focused on Havana, where it was founded.

On her return to Cuba in 1956, she flew over Mexico, where she first met Fidel Castro and received instructions to be passed on to Frank País, who led the movement in Cuba's eastern province of Oriente . In the civil war that followed she played a leading role. She served as messenger between the guerrilla group around Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra and the underground fighters in Santiago de Cuba. At the same time, she and other leaders of the movement met regularly for talks with the vice consul and other staff at the US consulate in Santiago who supported the rebels. When numerous combatants had already been discovered and killed in the urban struggle and the pressure to search for them steadily increased, Espín joined Raúl Castro and his Second Front in the Sierra Cristal in June 1958 . They married a few months after the victory of the revolution. During the rebellion from 1956 to 1958 she used the code names "Alicia", "Mónica", "Déborah" and "Mariela" within the revolutionary movement - the last two names she later gave to two of her three daughters, Raúl Castro.

Espín and her husband Raúl Castro belonged to the radical left wing of the July 26th Movement , which prevailed against the democratic forces among the revolutionaries after Batista's flight. In February and March 1959 they took part in the secret meetings in the residences of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro in Tarará and Cojímar in eastern Havana, at which small groups decided on land reform, the reconstruction of the armed forces and cooperation with the Communist Party. The official state government, which at that time still included numerous liberal democrats, was not informed of the existence of this parallel secret government.

In 1960 she founded the FMC, which is still one of the most important communist mass organizations today. Over 80 percent of Cuban women belong to it. One of her first campaigns was for the rehabilitation of prostitutes . In the 60s she continued to be a champion for the rights of homosexuals. She was one of the first people to publicly accuse “homosexual men were sent to military camps for re-education.” As part of her engagement, a criminal law against homosexuality was abolished in 1979 . Espín supported the German Monika Krause-Fuchs , who initially worked for her as an interpreter and later became Cuba's leading sex education specialist and founding director of the Center for Sex Education CENESEX , which is now run by Espín's daughter Mariela Castro .

Mausoleum de Segundo Frente Oriental Frank País

Espín died in 2007 and was then buried in the mausoleum of the Segundo Frente Oriental "Frank País" in the municipality of Segundo Frente , part of the memorial to the troops led by Raúl Castro in the Revolutionary War in the far east of Cuba. Her memory as a "heroine" is kept alive there through events organized by state organizations. After Espín's death, the state women's association changed its official logo, which has since been adorned with a picture of the young guerrilla Vilma Espín with a rifle on his shoulder - a combination of the previous logo and a photo from the time of the revolution.

After her death, Espín's parents' house in the old town of Santiago de Cuba was expanded into a memorial, which opened in April 2010 and contains numerous photos, documents and other exhibits about her life.

Awards

literature

  • Julia E. Sweig: Inside the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground. Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.) 2002 (English)

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ^ Sweig: Inside the Cuban Revolution, p. 29
  2. ↑ a b Vilma Espín: siempre en el recuerdo , in: Cubadebate from June 18, 2013, accessed on September 8, 2013 (Spanish)
  3. ↑ Bernd Wulffen : Cuba in transition , Christoph Links Verlag, 2008, p. 56
  4. ↑ Anthony DePalma: Vilma Espín, Rebel and Wife of Raúl Castro, Dies at 77 , in: New York Times of June 20, 2007, accessed on September 8, 2013 (English)
  5. ↑ Fernando Ravsberg: Alfredo Guevara's Mark on Cuba. In: Havana Times, April 25, 2013, accessed December 1, 2013 (English translation of the Spanish original on BBC Mundo )
  6. ^ Jorge G. Castañeda: Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara. Random House, New York 1997, p. 149 (English)
  7. ↑ The Revolutionary , Young World, June 29, 2007
  8. ↑ Machismo is far from dead! Cuba: Sexuality in transition. In: Ö1 Wissen from August 6, 2008, accessed on December 1, 2013
  9. ↑ Eduardo Palomares Calderón: Homenaje a Vilma Espín en el mausoleo del Segundo Frente. ( Memento of the original from October 8, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.granma.cu archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Granma, June 19, 2013, accessed December 1, 2013 (Spanish)
  10. ↑ Inaugurarán en Santiago de Cuba Memorial dedicado a Vilma Espín (+ photos). In: Cubadebate of March 7, 2010, accessed December 1, 2013 (Spanish)
  11. ↑ Silvia Ayuso: Vilma Espín, la 'primera dama' de la revolución cubana, in: El Mundo from June 20, 2007, accessed on May 7, 2013 (Spanish)
personal data
SURNAME Espín, Vilma
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Espín Guillois, Vilma
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Cuban politician
DATE OF BIRTH April 7, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Santiago de Cuba
DATE OF DEATH June 18, 2007
Place of death Havana