Central Park

This guide to Central Park in Havana follows sculptor Jose Vilalta Saavedra, carving in a Rome workshop in the early 1900s a marble monument to Jose Marti, the poet and revolutionary shot by Spanish troops in 1895, a man Cuba had not yet built a single statue for. It traces Vilalta from his Havana birth in 1862 through training in the Canary Islands and Carrara, including an earlier monument to eight medical students executed in 1871 on a false charge. In 1900 a citizens' committee raised funds by public subscription and sent the commission to him in Italy.