Bill of health

Our sources in the medical community in Cuba have been sending us reports about raul castro's own faulting health.
The bill of health apparently is far from clean, and the reports mention a few ailments such as cyrrhosis of the liver, with a slew of hepatic complications, a mild skin cancer -reported as benign- and some marks in his lungs, due to cigarrette smoking. In the past he has suffered from kidney stones and stomach ulcers. We have been also told that raul castro kicked the cigarret habit, but we have no confirmation of lung cancer.

We also have receive other reports, which we have not been able to confirm through any independent party, all of them pointing to a faulty health, and to a variety of diagnostics.

They have a common factor with the reports we could confirm, that even if raul castro's health is far from being great, his current condition is not life threatening, it is about what you can expect in a seventy six year old man of a very dissolute lifestyle.

Of course, we are going to be releasing updates as soon as we can verify the information. Among those rumored cancers are cancer of the duodene, panchreatic cancer, stomach tumors, and full blast liver and lung cancer (usually they come as a combo). Again, we have not received any third party confirmation on any of these, even though we hear a lot of chatter about leukemia -also unconfirmed.

No word on his mental condition, but y'all know that he is a bipolar individual -bouts of violence followed by a mellow state, outbursts and repentance- and he is also a very paranoid, very manipulative, pathological liar.

The place of burial for raul castro will be besides his wife Vilma Espin, under the plaque already put in place for that finality.

Now, the footnote:
We have written before about the possible burial place for castro.
In Oriente:

1- His ancestral home of Biran, with his parents. The burial place in the garden has been tended and remodeled a couple of times during the last year.
2- Posta No. 1, Moncada Barracks, Santiago de Cuba, the place he never was "able to find" on that fateful day of July 26th, 1953, sending his men into what he knew from the beginning that was a failed enterprise.
3- Pico Turquino, under the Jose Marti bust on the crown of the mountain. The bust was placed there by Celia Sanchez Manduley and her family, before castro's violent arrival to power.
4- It is also rumored in Santiago de Cuba that an even bigger insult to Marti might be in the works:to bury his cremains side by side with Marti in the cemetery of Santa Ifigenia in Santiago, so the population do not dare to destroy the grave and disturb the remains of Marti in order to get to the remains of Castro. Talk about using Marti as a human shield even in death.
(we got independent confirmation that this rumor is actually making the rounds in Santiago through a Cuban engineer who recently traveled to that city)

In Havana:
1- Under the monument to Marti in what he calls Plaza de la Revolucion (it will become again the Plaza Civica, but we would prefer Plaza de la Libertad one day)
2- Under the SAU-100 in front of the Museum of the Revolution (which will become again one day Palacio Presidencial de la Republica de Cuba)
3- The ashes will be exposed in an elaborate urn at the Granma Memorial, behind the Palacio Presidencial (where the statue of President Zayas used to be)

There was some talk in Havana for a while saying that he would be interred in the Pantheon of the Revolutionary Armed Forces at the Colon Cemetery, or besides Che Guevara in Las Villas. The first is still mentioned from time to time, the second was promptly discarded after doubts of the autenthicity of the remains of Che Guevara rose.

Both castro's will be cremated, as desired by them. The idea doesn't have a lot of support by the castro family, so at least in the case of the dying dictator it's possible that this final desire will not be fulfilled.