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« on: June 19, 2007, 08:36:27 PM » |
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Cuba's 'first lady' dies aged 77
June 20, 2007
HAVANA: Vilma Espin Guillois, one of the most powerful women in the Cuban revolution that brought her brother-in-law Fidel Castro to power, died yesterday aged 77 after a lengthy illness.
As wife of the now Acting Cuban President Raul Castro, she was considered the country's first lady as the veteran leader Fidel Castro's own partner has stayed away from public life.
A chemical engineer by training, she became a top figure in the communist regime, where she championed women's rights as president of the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) since that group's foundation in 1960, and won victories for gay rights.
Born in the city of Santiago to a Cuban father and French mother, she studied in the US at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before taking up arms in Fidel Castro's guerilla movement to topple Cuba's dictator Fulgencio Batista.
It was during her time in the underground movement, singing in the camps at night as the guerillas hid out in the Sierra Maestra mountains, that Espin - known by the nom de guerre "Deborah" - met Raul Castro.
"I was 28 and had never had a lover ... He said I had bewitched him with my singing," she once said of her husband.
They married in January 1959, shortly after the guerillas' victory in the revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power.
With her brother-in-law in power, Espin helped to establish and then lead the FMC to fight illiteracy and bolster women's political participation, also campaigning on issues such as abortion, contraception and children's rights. Her daughter Mariela, 45, is a sexologist and a lawyer working for gay people and transvestites. Mariela recently credited her mother as one of the first to fight against the persecution of homosexuals in Cuba in the 1960s.
Espin successfully pushed for the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1979.
She had two other daughters - Deborah and Nilsa - and a son, Alejandro, with Raul Castro, who recently turned 76.
Fidel Castro handed power to Raul, the defence chief, on a temporary basis in July 2006 while the 80-year-old president recovers from gastrointestinal surgery.
The Government declared an official period of mourning lasting from Monday to Tuesday evening.
AFP
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