Juana Pérez de Corcho Espinosa, known among family, friends and neighbours as Edita, celebrated her 100th birthday, a gathering dedicated to this descendant of Mambí.

Her father Matías Pérez de Corcho, who fought for the Independence of Cuba under the orders of the general of the invading army Quintín Banderas, nicknamed her «La Totiza», because she had brown skin and blue eyes like the totí, a bird with bright plumage that we often find in our fields.

The occasion was also an opportunity to remember the presence of the family in the peasant area of «Las Grullas» in the current demarcation of the People’s Council of Marroquín, a place where, at the end of the war, the independence fighter, together with his wife, Emérita Espinosa Pardo, a young survivor of the inhuman Reconcentration of Valeriano Weyler, set about the task of making the land produce.

It was there that «La Totiza», one of the last fruits of Matías and Emérita’s marriage, was born and lived several of the stages of her life: her childhood, her youth, her marriage to Reinando Moreira Espinosa, the birth of their four children and her joining the Federation of Cuban Women.

It was in the 1980s that Juana Pérez de Corcho Espinosa, Edita or La Totiza, decided to move to the community of Campo Hatuey, in the municipality of Majagua, where her daughter Edelia was already living and where she had the opportunity, surrounded by a large part of her family, to make an emotional toast to her 10 decades of life.