Some Mambi mistresses had, as far as posterity is concerned, much better luck than those of the Hispanic defenders of the empire.
Some couples have been remembered for their love for each other, even though women have been kept very specific spaces. They are considered wives, daughters or mothers of the great leaders. Their decision to remain in the insurgent camp is neither analyzed nor taken into account.
At the beginning of the war and the Spanish offensive, which expelled the independence fighters from the towns they had captured, most of the women accompanied their husbands to the fields and forests.
They were soon trapped by the many miseries of war. Those who were part of landowning families were captured by the Spaniards, others were presented to the enemy by their husbands and relatives, for they were not accustomed to the hunger and privations of all kinds imposed by the war and became an impediment to their husbands.
Most of them managed to move abroad, mainly to the United States, where they settled and lived amidst severe economic hardship. For example, the family of Francisco Vicente Aguilera, a millionaire, in the literal sense of the word, who initiated the conspiracy that started the war, presented himself to the Spaniards on June 24, 1871: on the 26th of that month he arrived in Manzanillo; on July 19, he arrived in a boat Santiago de Cuba, and on September 3 of that year he embarked from that port to Kingston.(2)
The husbands of those women, due to their condition of landowners, were almost always leaders in the insurrection, where one was born a General, depending on the number of hectares of land, the number of laborers, slaves or clients that could be mobilized.
These Generals and Colonels in love tried to create clandestine paths to maintain at least an epistolary exchange with some regularity.
0 They have passed to posterity, mainly the love affairs of the main leaders. The landowners, lawyers and people of a certain culture who made up the early the leadership of the Revolution, left on their passions a memory written in letters. their passions in letters to their wives or in personal diaries.
This documentation is of unquestionable historical value, for those men told their wives about life in Cuba Libre, sometimes with very important details that otherwise would have been lost. Carefully reading some of this correspondence, as for example that of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes to his wife Ana de Quesada, highlights the extreme confidence that the first president of the Republic in Arms had in his wife, who unquestionably became a sort of consultant on delicate issues of the conflict.
She herself, abroad, played a role of undeniable relevance in the emigration. Several collections of those letters have been published, such as those of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, Ignacio Agramante, Francisco Estrada, to their respective wives. It is to think that in such descriptions is the interest of those men to keep their wives up to date with what is happening in Cuba Libre. They were also part of the independence. So they had this minimum right to be kept informed of what was happening on what was happening on their longed-for island.
Such letters and personal diaries have served to illustrate daily life in Cuba Libre, but have been less used to assess the intimate drama lived by those men and women.
This unique correspondence circulated mainly thanks to the expeditions organized by the Cuban emigreé the boats and schooners that from time to time went from Jamaica and the Bahamas to Cuba Libre. And also by secret agents who from Cuban cities maintained correspondence with the revolutionary emigration, but unfortunately they were very irregular.
Some of that correspondence was lost along the way. This sense of insecurity is reflected by a daughter of Francisco Vicente Aguilera who had her husband, Eugenio Oduardo, in the insurrection.
From Jamaica, on November 2, 1871, she wrote to her father who in New York was in charge of sending expeditions to Cuba: “If any such expedition leaves for Cuba, write some lines to Eugenio telling him that I am well, because the poor boy must not know about me. I have written you two letters and today I am going to write to you the third one, because if it is true that one can fall into the hands of the Spanish, it is also true that it can reach your hands and find out from me what is of interest.” (3)
The wives of these men were in charge of keeping the correspondence that reached at them. So perhaps it was the women who had a first sense that they were “making history”, apart from maintaining great fidelity to the memory of their husbands or fiancée. Several of them generally acted with great
modesty. They left no record of their sufferings in the cold exile in diaries and letters, and if they did, they did not take care of saving them to posterity. Thanks to them, by preserving the letters and diaries of their husbands, we can know the tragedy of these couples scattered around war.
Although there was also a flow of unpleasant news from the fields of insurrection to the outside. Through some women from the emigration learned of a regrettable truth: their men were not always faithful to them. In the fields insurrectionists maintained a population of peasant women and former slaves who in many cases created a new home for these long-suffering leaders. These relationships created real dramas of jealousy like those of Ana de Quesada with her husband Carlos Manuel de Céspedes. Aware of his infidelity, her letters were: “dry, with a greeting always the same: ‘dear husband’ and a ceremonious farewell: ‘your faithful wife Ana Quesada.” (4) But even these infidelities do not take away the romantic and tragic meaning to these loves.
One of the least known dramas was that of Ignacio Mora and Ana Betancourt. Both were separated by the war. Ana lived in a ranchería mambisa, where she frequently received visits from Ignacio. A day, a Hispanic guerrilla discovered the place and held her along with other women, she was later deported. in his diary personal Ignacio leaves detailed evidence of his passion for his wife absent. If we follow the diary we will find ourselves at the turn of each page his great tragedy. On one occasion he notes from the jurisdiction of Holguín: “I spend my days in this ranch in Canapú, already fighting with my memories, already tormenting me about the fate of my Anita (Ana Betancourt), of that angel to whom my love for the freedom of Cuba has sacrificed the love that her virtues, her capacity and her selflessness for me have always inspired in me.” (5), Loves tormented by the war and separation.
On July 5, 1872, on the first anniversary of Ana’s capture by the Hispanic troops, crushed by memory and remorse, “… the sufferings that they put her through” (6) affect him physically, extreme that Ignacio ends up “falling into bed with fevers that he thought “They would be the last ones I suffered in my eventful life.” (7) For these lonely lovers the greatest pleasure was receiving a letter from their dear ones.
Mora is overflowing with happiness on September 13, 1872, writing: “I open this day with great joy in my heart, with a pleasure like I have never experienced throughout the revolution… The cause of this pleasure, of this joy, that is, two letters that I have received from my Anita.” (8)
The power to write to their wives was an oversized pleasure for these people. Ignacio Mora affirms, regarding his aspiration to leave the valley of Canapú: “My greatest desire to leave this valley of Canapú Arriba… It is because to have paper on which to write to my Anita at least once a month.” (9)
Desperate love will be present as a constant in the correspondence. On March 26, 1873, Mora wrote: “The enemy has retired and I began to write to my Anita.” (10) He admitted on another occasion that: “My only hope, my only consolation is the arrival of the correspondence: with it comes the intimate thought of my Anita; and His letters are the balm of my natural sadness.” (11). It reaches commit an illegality when writing his letters: “under the cover of
Calixto García to send this letter to Devis in Cuba.” (12)
Devis was the Cuban secret agent in Santiago de Cuba and was used mainly for official correspondence. Calixto García as department head had that right that was forbidden to Mora.
Lie and deceive for love. There is even a decision by Ana Betancourt that we are surprised. She asked her husband to burn her letters. it’s possible that I would not want them to fall into the power of strange hands, that eyes malicious people to travel those trails of words that must have reflect her loneliness, her desire to be with her husband. On May 5, 1873, Mora says: “To please my Anita I have burned her letters. Their cards! that consolation of my loneliness and my life. I have made a sacrifice, but I have given pleasure to my worthy Anita. Let the sacrifice be the proof of “my friendship, my self-denial and the great pain of my soul.” (13)
There is a heartbreaking confidence from Ignacio Mora made to the loneliness of the newspaper: “The war and the fate of Cuba have me without careful. “All my thoughts, all my desire is focused on my Anita.”
(14) But shortly after he receives a letter from Ana: “Never, she exclaims, “I will ask nothing of my brothers’ executioners.” (15) The hero that Ignacio was recovers from the moment of weakness. Will forever live up to her. He would fall on insurrectionary land without giving up.
Ana managed to rescue her husband’s personal diary years after his death at the hands of the Spanish. I would write occasionally in the spaces that he left free, brief notes expressing his love as If in that interweaving of the two scriptures the desire of the encounter that never happened: “These daily notes of my unfortunate husband, they resemble cries of anguish: woes of passionate pain escaped of your heart and stamped on paper in the absence of a loved one whom communicate your sadness and misgivings. Written conversation so that one day it would reach my hands; at the hands of the being who was dearest to him, in whose soul he knew that his pains would find an echo.” (16)
Love and death make up a strange counterpoint. in some house humble neighborhood of New York or Kingston is waiting for the terrible news that can arrive at any moment. As the disastrous information received by Caridad Aguilera Kindelán, daughter of
Major General Francisco Vicente Aguilera. On January 3, 1872, from Kingston, where he suffered exile, wrote a letter to his father terrible about the fate of her husband, Eugenio Oduardo, an officer of the Liberating Army: “He was caught in Mal País and shot right there by that scoundrel.” (17) Most of these lovers separated by war will never meet. Céspedes died without seeing Ana, Ignacio Mora without expressing how much he loved his “Anita”, Ignacio Agramonte was killed in action carrying an anthological fidelity towards his Amalia, his cousin Eduardo also found death early without the encounter with his wife Matilda. For General Julio Grave de Peralta from Holguín, fallen in actiom, erased the possibility of meeting his wife, Josefa Cardet (Pepilla), as he tenderly called her in his correspondence.
If the husband’s death, in the land of the mambí, will leave a last unwritten page in the vast mail that these tragic couples kept. That handful of pages remain today as venerated relics. Such documents are like the tip of a huge iceberg, but not of cold ice, but of a long silence, of a tenderness that would never find relief in a body that was already definitively separate.
NOTES.
1.-Archivo de Historia Holguín, Fondo Tenencia de Gobierno, Expediente 6010, Legajo 159
2.-Onoria Céspedes: Cartas familiares de Francisco Vicente Aguilera, Ed. Bayamo, 1991, p. 14
3.-Archivo Nacional de Cuba, Fondo Asuntos Políticos, Legajo 650, No. 24
4.-Fernando Portuondo y Hortensia Pichardo: Carlos Manuel de Céspedes.
Escritos, Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, La Habana, 1982, Tomo III, p. 52
5.-Nydia Sarabia: Ana Betancourt, Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, La Habana, 1970., pp. 144, 145
6.-Ibídem, pp. 144, 149
7.-Ibídem, pp. 144, 149
8.-Ibídem pp. 144, 154
9.-Ibídem, pp. 144, 155
10.-Ibídem, p. 172
11.-Ibídem, p. 208
12.-Ibídem, p. 210
13.-Ibídem, pp. 175-176
14.-Ibídem, p. 154
15.-Ibídem, p. 155
16.-Ibídem, p. 214
17.-Archivo Nacional de Cuba, Fondo Asuntos Políticos, Legajo 650, No. 22
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