City of the Dead

The cemetery Necropolis de Colon sprawls across more than 120 acres, - a haven of quiet and greenery to outsiders, hallowed ground to devotees come to honor the dead and beseech their saints. More than two million Cuban souls have been laid to rest under land here, where deserted tree-lined avenidas divide seemingly endless stretches of graves and tombs. A massive ochre chapel modeled after the Il Duomo in Florence rises at the heart of the space. But among the elegance and grandeur, the cemetery reveals the scars of a violent history. Empty tombs and desecrated chapels disfigure even the most prominent of the avenues. Families forced to flee the Communist revolution of 1959 and the ensuing dictatorship of Fidel Castro remain exiled from their ancestors. Extensive areas stand in ruin, inhabited by wild dogs, who raise their young in deserted graves underground.

Just northeast of this chapel lies the cemetery’s most famous tomb, La Milagrosa, Our Lady of Miracles. Masses of tropical flowers decorate her marble figure. Senora Amelia Goyri died in childbirth in 1901, as did her baby. They were buried together, with the child at her feet. Legend has it that when the bodies of mother and child were exhumed years later, the infant was found in her arms - a miracle. Over the past century, a spiritual cult developed around La Milagrosa, and now thousands of Cubans visit her tomb each year, hoping for gifts and miracles, undeterred even by driving rain.

My gift from La Milagrosa was to stumble across her tomb in January 2012 on a special saint’s day for her devotees. And with my first images of them, I began a photographic pilgrimage to this City of the Dead that has lasted more than a decade - a witness to life and death in Havana, above ground and under land.