CUBA MONUMENTS
Some impressive monuments and memorials grace Cuba's streets, parks, and cemeteries. For example, the female Indian on Havana's Fuente de la India was carved from Carrara marble by Giuseppe Gaginni in 1837. The bronze statue of Christopher Columbus in Cardenas was created by a Spaniard named Piquier in 1862 and is the oldest of its kind in the Americas.
Many of the heroes of the wars of independence are buried below ornate marble monuments in Santiago de Cuba's Santa Ifigenia Cemetery. The monuments to these same heroes erected since the 1959 revolution are often massive Soviet-style affairs, such as the monument to General Antonio Maceo depicted here. More recent monuments, like the bronze statue of Che Guevara below, are Chinese influenced.
The most politically charged monument of them all stands on Havana's Malecon, not far from the United States Interests Office. The monument to the victims of the sunken battleship USS Maine was built in 1926, but after the revolution an inscription was added alleging that the Americans sank their own ship in 1898 to provide a pretext for intervening in Cuba.
All the photos on Cuba-Pictures.com are by David Stanley, original author of Lonely Planet Cuba. The images on this page are details. To view the complete photos, click on the thumbnails. | 
