Vilma Espín Is Dead: One Down and Two Bastards to Go

It was not Fidel.

It was not Raúl.

But it was the next best thing.

Yes, it is confirmed: Vilma Espín is dead.

Raúl Castro has declared 26 hours of mourning (¡qué cursi!) in honor of the "distinguished heroine of the resistance" and his ex-wife.

As the great-granddaughter of Karl Marx, Vilma Espín Guillois was a member of Communist royalty and heir to a fortune in Bacardí stock. That and the blackness of her own character (the beast killed her own sister for an inheritance and betrayed dozens of anti-Communists in the "July 26th" Movement to Batista's police) made her our real-life Madame Defarge and the ideal bride for the heir presumptive of Castroism.

The most powerful woman in Cuba for most of her life, Vilma Espín did not possess the womanly virtues that might have tempered the brutish traits of her husband and brother-in-law, but shared in a triad with them the blame for destroying our country.

The token female in the Communist Party hierarchy, as Almeida was the token black, Vilma Espín was charged by the Revolution with representing the interests of the Revolution in respect to women. As such she was never a champion of women's rights, but the sponsor of every wrong that has been committed on Cuban women over the last 48 years: Cuban women, of course, outside her charmed circle.

At least this Communist "princess of the blood" had the pleasure of arranging a "royal" marriage for one of her daughters (the non-lesbian one) with the head of the Sicilian mafia. Vilma in fact resided in a palace on that other island for most of the last 30 years, serving as the courier in the transfer of the family's wealth to Geneva. She may in fact not have died in Cuba at all, as the absence of a corpse would seem to indicate.

Nevertheless, she is the first to die of that nefarious triad and paves the way for the other two national villains.

We would have preferred Fidel dead.

We would have preferred Raúl dead.

But after them no one is better dead than Vilma Espín.

Disgrace to your sex, antithesis of Maceo's mother, burn in hell forever!

¡Viva Cuba libre!


POSTSCRIPT:

In an unprecedented development, "Heroine of the Revolution" (if only for marrying Raúl) Vilma Espín was cremated without a state funeral or even an unofficial viewing. Obviously, they did not want the people to see her physical deterioration, which must mirror Fidel's, since she's been kept on life support longer than he's been. Also, if there is no state funeral, then there will be no speculation on why Fidel did not attend it. And, of course, if there was one funeral that Fidel could not have skipped without giving everything away it was Vilma's.