In the Cemetery of Santo Cristo del Buen Viaje in Camagüey rests, according to legend, Dolores Rondón, a woman from the 19th century whose life of ambition and fall into misery inspired one of the most famous epitaphs in Cuba, a décima that continues to attract visitors more than a century after it was engraved in marble.
The legend says that Dolores was born around 1812 on Hospital Street, between Cristo and 20 de Mayo, in what was then called Puerto Príncipe, now Camagüey.
She was the illegitimate daughter of a Creole mulatto woman and a wealthy Catalan named Vicente Ramas, who lived with his legitimate family in the most prosperous area of the city, but financially supported his natural daughter.
Dolores grew up without her father's surname or fortune, although she was endowed with great beauty. She rejected humble suitors while waiting for a man who would guarantee her opulence and power.
Among the lovers who suffered her snubs was Agustín de Moya, a barber poet passionate about literary gatherings. The greatest affront Dolores dealt him was showing up married to a Spanish soldier, with whom she settled in a house in the Plaza de San Francisco, very close to her Catalan father's home.
Years went by and Dolores's husband was assigned to a mission outside the city. The couple vanished from the Camagüey social circle, and nothing more was heard from them.
During the epidemics that struck Camagüey in the second half of the 19th century, Agustín de Moya worked as a volunteer nurse at the women's hospital of the Church of Carmen, which served people with limited resources.
One night, he recognized the face of his beloved Dolores among the critically ill patients. She still held an intoxicating magic, but it was overshadowed by illness, old age, and poverty. He could not save her.
Dolores Rondón died of smallpox in 1863, in extreme poverty. After her death, Agustín de Moya composed the epitaph that would make her immortal.
The text, a décima with profound moral content, states: "Here Dolores Rondón completed her journey. Come, mortal, and reflect on the greatness of what they are. Pride and presumption, opulence and power, all come to an end, for only the evil that is economized and the good that can be done become immortal."
The epitaph is believed to have originally appeared in 1883, twenty years after Dolores's death, inscribed on a white cedar panel with black letters over a mass grave.
Decades later, at the initiative of Mayor Pedro García Agrenot, it was moved and carved in marble in the 1930s and paradoxically relocated to the northern section of the cemetery, the aristocratic area, where it continues to receive visitors today.
The researcher Abel Marrero Companioni is cited by various sources as the one who confirmed Agustín de Moya as the definitive author of the verses.
The Cementerio del Santo Cristo del Buen Viaje, inaugurated on May 3, 1814, is the oldest cemetery still in use in Cuba. It was established following the Royal Decree of Charles III in 1787 that prohibited burials in churches, and it was blessed by the priest Juan Nepomuceno Arango y Cisneros. Today, it faces abandonment issues despite its historical and tourist value.
The figure of Dolores Rondón holds a prominent place in the Parque de las Leyendas de Camagüey, on República Street, where the artist Joel Jover immortalized her story in ceramic murals.
More than a supernatural tale, its legend serves as a moral fable about vanity, ambition, and the transience of power—values that, etched in marble, continue to resonate with those who visit his tomb in the most labyrinthine city in Cuba.
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