More than a century after his fall in combat, Cuba today remembers Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, initiator of the independence struggles in 1868 and first president of the Republic in Arms.

Exactly 150 years ago, the man known here as the Father of the Homeland lost his life during an unequal combat against Spanish colonialist troops in the town of San Lorenzo, in the Sierra Maestra, in eastern Cuba.

A lawyer by profession and landowner, Céspedes freed his slaves in La Demajagua farm, in today’s eastern province of Granma, on October 10, 1868, and called them to independence or death to start the war of liberation against Spain.

With the rank of major general of the Liberation Army, he assumed the presidency of the Republic in Arms in April 1869.

He outlined strategies to take the war to the whole country, starting with a crusade from east to west, with the objective of destroying the wealth of Spain to undermine its sources of sustenance and finally conquer national sovereignty.

Although the war failed, it had a profound anti-colonial character, since it defended a political project opposed to reformist and annexationist ideas to achieve, simultaneously with independence, the total abolition of slavery.

Tensions and disagreements with the House of Representatives led the latter to depose Céspedes on October 27, 1873.

According to historians of the island, the deposition was the prelude to his death because he was deprived of aides and escort, and at the same time, he was forced to leave the government.

Unjustly deprived of the escort that corresponded to his high position, he fell on February 27, 1874 in an ambush perpetrated by the San Quintín Hunters Battalion, from which he defended himself with only a revolver.

The Cuban people named him the Father of the Homeland for his leading role in the struggles for independence and because when he received the news of his youngest son’s death sentence and was blackmailed to lay down his arms if he wanted to save him, he said: Oscar is not my only son: I am the father of all Cubans who have died for the Revolution.