Colon Cemetery, Havana
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The Colon Cemetery or more fully in the Spanish language Cementerio de Cristóbal Colón was founded in 1876 in the Vedado neighbourhood of Havana, Cuba. Named for Christopher Columbus, the 140 acre cemetery is noted for its many elaborately sculpted memorials. It is estimated that today the cemetery has more than 500 major mausoleums, chapels, and family vaults.
Colon Cemetery has a 75-foot-high monument to the firefighters who lost their lives in the great fire of May 17, 1890. As Baseball is a leading sport in Cuba, the cemetery has two monuments to baseball players from the Cuban League. The first was erected in 1942 and the second in 1951 for members of the Cuban Baseball Hall of Fame.
In February of 1898, the recovered bodies of sailors who died on the American Battleship Maine were interred in the Colon Cemetery. In December of 1899 the bodies were disinterred and brought back to the United States for burial at Arlington National Cemetery. [1]
With more than 800,000 graves, space in the Colon Cemetery is currently at a premium and as such after three years remains are removed from their tombs, boxed and placed in a storage building. A few of the personalities interred here include:
- Santiago Álvarez (1919-1998), filmmaker
- Beatriz Azurduy Palacios (1952-2003), filmmaker
- Hubert de Blanck (1856-1932), composer
- Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980), novelist
- Juan Chabás (1910-1954), author
- Eduardo Chibás (1907-1951), politician
- Ibrahim Ferrer (1927-2005), musician
- José Miguel Gómez (1858-1921), president of Cuba
- Máximo Gómez (1836-1905), military hero
- Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (1928-1996), filmmaker
- Harrison E. Havens (1837-1916), United States Congressman
- Alberto Korda (1928-2001), photographer
- José Lezama Lima (1910-1976), writer, poet
- Dulce María Loynaz (1902-1997), poet, novelist
- William Alexander Morgan (1928-1961), American adventurer
- Nicolás Guillén (1902-1989), poet
- Fernando Ortiz (1881-1969), ethnomusicologist
- German Pinelli (1907-1996), journalist, actor
- Chano Pozo (1915-1948), musician, pioneer of Afrocuban jazz
