Friends of the International Brigades Association (AABI) highlight Friday the steps taken to try to recover, identify and repatriate to Cuba the remains of the writer, journalist and internationalist fighter Pablo de la Torriente Brau.
 
The AABI, which is responsible for keeping alive the memory of the foreign volunteers who took part in helping the Republic during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), extended the Agreement between the Department of Justice of the Generalitat of Catalonia, the city hall of Barcelona and the Cuban consulate there.
 
Mabel Arteaga, Cuban consul general in Barcelona, signed the agreement in late December, to define the intervention terms in the burial site, approved by the Catalan authorities a year ago.
 
Thanks to the investigations carried out by members of the AABI' , there is sufficient evidence to exhume, identify and transfer the remains of the Cuban combatant, 'as was his manifest desire in the face of the possibility of death in Spain', the Cuban Foreign Ministry assured in a note last week.
 
The writer and journalist, born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on December 12, 1901, became one of more than a thousand volunteers from Cuba incorporated into the fight against fascism and died fighting in the Madrid Front, in Majadahonda, on December 19, 1936.
 
The body was rescued from enemy lines and buried in the Chamartin cemetery in Madrid with the emblems of Captain of Militias; but in 1937 it was transferred to Montjuic, in Barcelona, to be returned to Cuba, which could not be achieved after republican forces were defeated.
 
According to the Barcelona cemetery register, in 1939 it was taken out of the niche and placed in an unspecified grave, located by the searches thanks to Zoe de la Torriente, Pablo's sister, who in 2009 gave the AABI a hair sample he gave shortly before his departure, according to a work published on the Cuban website Cubadebate.