Vilma Espin Guillois

Vilma Espín Guillois, revolutionary leader and politician: born Santiago de Cuba, Cuba 7 April 1930; married 1959 Raúl Castro (one son, three daughters); died Havana 18 June 2007.

For almost half a century, as the wife of Fidel Castro's brother Raúl, Vilma Espín was the de facto first lady of Cuba. Fidel himself was divorced when the revolution triumphed and later opted to keep his own "wife" out of the public eye, happy to see his sister-in-law fulfil the public role.

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Espín was far more than a ceremonial first lady, however, and when the ailing Fidel handed over power "temporarily" to his brother in July last year, she could justifiably have dropped the de facto, but by then she was too ill to appear in public. She was decorated by Castro as a Heroine of the Revolution for fighting alongside the Castro brothers in the Sierra Maestra, sat on both the Central Committee and the Political Bureau of the all-powerful Communist Party, and had been, since 1976, a member of the executive Consejo de Estado, the council of state, theoretically the highest organ of government. Until her death, she remained president of the powerful Federación de Mujeres Cubanas (FMC), the Federation of Cuban Women, which she herself founded in 1960, just over a year after the success of the revolution.

In fact, her reputation as her husband's "political mentor", even something of an éminence grise behind Fidel himself, led many Cubans and foreign diplomats to believe she was at least as powerful as her husband. It was Raúl and Vilma, many believe, who nudged the nationalist Fidel into the Soviet camp two years after the revolution and who pushed for the arrival of Soviet nuclear missiles, bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war in October 1962. While the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev initially mistrusted the young Fidel, it was said to have been love at first sight between Khrushchev and Fidel's fiercely Marxist, vodka-loving younger brother.

To younger Cubans, Espín's high-profile role at the head of the FMC, with three and half million women in its ranks, was her main claim to fame. It was she who drew up the unprecedented Family Code of 1975 which, at least on paper, gave women equal rights and obliged husbands by law to share housework and childcare. In a traditionally macho nation, it was a remarkable breakthrough although women's rights, even if equal, remain at the mercy of the Communist regime's overall repression of dissidence, of freedom of speech and of the media.

To older Cubans, however, Vilma Espín was considered one of the three women heroes of the revolution, along with Celia Sanchez and Haydée Santamaría, first for her key role in the urban guerrilla movement in Santiago de Cuba, and later for fighting alongside Raúl Castro in the Sierra Maestra. Her nom de guerre, "Deborah", was almost as well known during the revolution as Fidel Castro's, "Alejandro."

Vilma Espín Guillois was born in the eastern city of Santiago, in Oriente province, in 1930, though the Party-controlled Cuban media, perhaps at her bidding, often gave her year of birth as 1934. Her father was a patrician Cuban of Spanish imperial stock, a wealthy lawyer for the mighty Bacardi rum family, while her mother was a French bourgeoise immigrant.

The young, fair-skinned Vilma lacked for nothing during her schooldays, while most of the islanders, the black or mestizo population, lived in dire poverty, the lingering legacy of colonialism and slavery. Of a practical bent, she became, in 1954, one of the first Cuban women to graduate with an industrial chemistry engineering degree and, thanks to her family's influence, was accepted the same year for a post-graduate course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston.

There, her fellow students from around the world, including a few Cubans, helped fuel her social conscience. General Fulgencio Batista had taken control of the Caribbean island in a 1952 coup and the plight of the majority of Cubans was worse than ever. She found herself in contact with anti-Batista students, both in the US and on the island, and in 1956, on her way back from Boston, stopped over in Mexico City to meet a young man who had been trying to overthrow the dictator since 1953. He had been jailed for more than two years, pardoned and exiled to the Mexican capital. His name was Fidel Castro.

It was in the rowdy cantinas of Mexico City that she also met the Argentinian Che Guevara and Fidel's brother Raúl. Like many children of wealthy Cubans, she had become attracted to Marxism and found her ideology in tune with that of Raúl and Che, while Fidel himself showed less interest in Marxist thought and insisted his revolution would be a nationalist one, purely to restore democracy.

The name Fidel Castro had come to the attention of Cubans on 26 July 1953 when he and a poorly armed band of 100 friends attacked Batista's Moncada army barracks in Santiago, a fiasco which saw many of the attackers executed and Castro jailed, then exiled. While Castro was in Mexico, however, a young man called Frank País, working underground in Cuba, was possibly the best known name within the anti-Batista movement.

Castro needed to co-ordinate the planned revolution with País, based in Santiago, and used Vilma Espín as a messenger. She carried maps, letters and requests for arms, then helped País organise what was probably the most significant week of the revolution. She later wrote of smuggling weapons and ammunition, concealed in her long skirts or petticoats, between "safe houses." Her own home was effectively the headquarters of the movement.

After the Castro brothers, Guevara and four score other young revolutionaries set sail from the Mexican coast on a rickety, motorised yacht called Granma in late November 1956, País and Espín organised an uprising in Santiago. This was partly to distract Batista's troops, but also to show the strength of the underground movement in the east and thereby galvanise support islandwide and notably in the capital, Havana.

At dawn on 30 November, the time the Granma was due to reach shore, País, Espín and more than 200 men and women, yelling "Viva Cuba libre! Fidel has returned!", attacked the Moncada barracks, the police headquarters, the customs house and other installations.

As it turned out, the exhausted boatload from Mexico had been delayed by bad weather and landed only on 2 December. The Santiago uprising was a military failure but reached its objective of demonstrating to Batista and all Cubans that the underground movement was serious. It was a turning point.

Vilma Espín, Frank País and their comrades went underground or linked up with the Castro brothers and Guevara in the mountains. After País was traced and executed by a Batista policeman on 30 July 1957, there were rumours that Espín, one of only a few people who knew his hiding place, had sold him out. The theory, prevalent among anti-Castro exiles in Miami, was that Fidel Castro resented País's popularity and asked her to betray him. There was never any evidence to back such a theory and she herself scoffed at it.

Whatever the truth, País's death, which brought tens of thousands into the streets of Santiago and sparked a week-long strike, shifted the focal point of the revolution from Santiago to the Sierra Maestra. Espín fled to the mountains and linked up with the guerrilla unit led by Raúl Castro, the "Frank País Second Front" named after the murdered leader, and became Raúl's fiancée.

It was Espín who was widely believed to have urged Raúl Castro to speed the progress of the revolution through a dramatic international gesture. In June 1958, he and his men kidnapped 47 Americans and three Canadians, mostly servicemen on leave from the Guantánamo naval base. Fluent in English, it was Espín who interrogated them. Fidel Castro was said to have been furious at his brother's action, fearing its effect on US public opinion, and ordered the hostages' release three weeks later.

Espín also played a role in another key moment of that year. She helped the New York Times reporter Herbert Matthews reach Fidel Castro in the mountains, then interpreted for the two men in what was to prove an historic interview. There had been reports that Fidel was dead but Matthews' revealed to the United States and the world that he was very much alive and that his guerrillas were a serious force.

On 26 January 1959, 18 days after they had entered Havana in triumph, Vilma Espín and Raúl Castro were married in a Catholic church. Again, she was said to have been the driving force behind her husband's hardline policies, notably the swift executions of hundreds of Batista officers or supporters in the days after the revolution.

In April 1963, after a major reportage in Cuba and a five-hour interview with Fidel Castro, the American television journalist Liza Howard of ABC News said she felt Fidel was seeking rapprochement with Washington but that Che Guevara, Raúl Castro and Vilma Espín were clearly opposed to the idea.

In the late 1960s, Fidel Castro began living with a schoolteacher, Dalia Soto del Valle - an arrangement first under common law, later said to have been quietly legalised - but kept her well under wraps from the public, leaving Espín as the frontwoman for his regime.

During her career as "first lady," Espín was known at first for her well-cut uniforms and later for her designer clothes and expensive perfumes. A 1967 Foreign Office report recently released by the National Archives described her as "a strikingly handsome and even attractive woman, who uses much more make-up and other aids than is the revolutionary custom, and manages to make even her uniforms smart and feminine."

Espín was the author of numerous books, including Women and the Cuban Revolution (1981), Cuban Women Confront the Future (1991) and Inolvidable Frank ("Unforgettable Frank", about Frank País, 2006).

Phil Davison