By Ray Sánchez
Havana Correspondent
Posted June 19 2007
Havana -- Havana Vilma Espin Guillois, the wife of acting President Raul
Castro and considered for decades the first lady of Cuba, died Monday
after a long undisclosed illness, the Cuban government announced Monday
night. She was 77.
Espin, one of the Communist nation's most powerful women and head of the
Cuban Women's Federation for nearly half a century, died at 4:14 p.m.
Monday in Havana, Cuban state television said.
"Her name will be eternally linked to the most significant conquests of
Cuban women in the revolution and to the most relevant combatants for
the freedom of women in our country and the world," the government
statement said.
Espin was born into a wealthy family in the eastern city of Santiago on
April 7, 1930, and her father worked as a lawyer for the Bacardi
company. But she became one of the original guerrillas in Fidel Castro's
revolution, working clandestinely as a young urban rebel against
Fulgencio Batista's dictatorship throughout the 1950s.
An industrial chemistry engineer, she attended graduate school at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1955 before joining the young
revolutionary Frank Pais and heading the urban underground in the former
Oriente Province. After Pais was assassinated, Espin hid in the Sierra
Cristal mountains north of Santiago, where Raúl Castro held the Second
Front. They married in 1958.
"Vilma was the nearest thing that Cuba has had to a first lady," said
Cuba analyst Brian Latell. "To whatever extent women achieved very much
in Cuba, she was a leading symbol of that."
Espin, a leader in her own right, seemed to enjoy her prominent role in
the secretive inner circle of Cuban power, maintaining her stature as
unofficial first lady even after Fidel Castro reportedly married Dalia
Soto del Valle in the early or mid 1960s.
Espin thrived politically for more than four decades as president of the
Federation of Cuban Women, which she founded in 1960 and turned into a
key base of support for the communist government.
Although Raul Castro and Espin were said to have separated more than 20
years ago, she is still referred to here as the wife of the acting
president. They have three children.
Cuba watchers said Espin played an important role in the early days of
Castro's rule as she helped define a growing role for women in Cuban
society. "People tended to identify with her," said Wayne Smith, former
head of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana. "They sought her out a lot."
Despite Espin's focus on women's issues, she was not a radical feminist,
said Julia Sweig, director of the Latin American program at the Council
on Foreign Relations and author of Inside the Cuban Revolution. "Cuba
was pretty conservative culturally in the 1960s," Sweig said. "She was
helping to get women trained and educated so that they could work
outside the home and be more self-respecting members of the workforce,
and that's a pretty positive thing."
In Miami, the news of Espin's death spread quickly. Miguel Saavedra, the
president of Vigilia Mambisa, a hardline exile group, said many Cubans
in his neighborhood knew of Espin's death Monday evening and were out on
front porches, in cafes and on the street talking passionately about the
milestone. He offered no condolences.
"All that has happened in Castro's government, his family has
participated in," said Saavedra. "It would be best if they would all
die, to get rid of that generation. And then the 12 million people on
the island can save themselves."
A government statement said Espin, who is believed to have suffered from
cancer although her illness was never officially disclosed, had been
cremated. Her ashes were to be deposited in a ceremony attended by her
family, with full military honors, at a mausoleum in the revolution's
Second Front in the Sierra Cristal in her native Santiago.
Staff writers Ian Katz and Sofia Santana contributed to this report,
which was supplemented with information from The Associated Press. Ray
Sánchez can be reached at rlsanchez@sun-sentinel.com.
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