2023-07-04 13:17:37
August 12 marks the 125th anniversary of the end of the Cuban War. Despite the time that has elapsed, memories associated with the young people who were uprooted from their family environment and sent to fight in those distant lands still survive in the memory of Spanish society. They were sent dressed in their ‘rayadillo’ uniforms to fight against a motivated and elusive enemy, and they had to face very adverse weather conditions, to which they were not used, and suffer the permanent harassment of diseases to which they would succumb a great number of them.
When I visited the Loma de San Juan Memorial for the first time, the director of the Office of the Curator of the City of Santiago de Cuba, the architect Omar López, told me that when the last remodeling works were inaugurated in 1998, on the occasion of the centenary of the end of the war and in an act presided over by Raúl Castro, he asked him why the names of the “Galicians” (sic) did not appear. The then Vice President of the Government wanted to know, ultimately, why the fallen Americans and Cubans were listed and the Spanish were not. Omar confessed to me that he did not know how to answer him.
That same year, in 2004, I was already immersed in the archaeological project to search for the remains of the Spanish sailors killed in the naval combat in Santiago de Cuba on July 3, 1898. Thanks to that meeting, however, I took aware of the tremendous comparative injury that existed with the Spanish, of all the weapons and bodies, that had fallen in that place of honor. So I decided to recover their memory, so that their names would occupy their rightful place.
The work has not been easy and the investigation has been long, tiring and exhaustive, for the simple reason that there are no complete lists of casualties. In the known documentation, as well as in the usual bibliography that deals with these facts, only the chiefs and officers were mentioned. With respect to the quantification of the dead, wounded and missing, the figures are incomplete, and many times discordant between the authors who dealt with the subject. Finally, the most recent articles are limited to repeating data without contributing anything new.
Journal of the Ministry of War
I thought that the answer was going to be in the lists of deceased that had been published in the Journal of the Ministry of War (DOMG), so the first task that I set out to do was to photograph the copies that I could locate in the library of the Captaincy General. of the 5th Military Region in Zaragoza, already inactive due to the transfer of the dependencies to Barcelona. I got them to let me take a few volumes home to buy time. At that time they were not digitized as they are now, although today they are available to researchers in the Virtual Defense Library. Fortunately, I have always had the unconditional collaboration of Miguel Ángel Zapater, a colleague and friend.
Once the listings are obtained, we upload them to a database. In this way, we realized that the deceased from the combats in Santiago de Cuba were not collected and, furthermore, they contained many errors and duplication of individuals. That is why we thought that the other option we had was the lists deposited in the General Military Archive of Madrid. To carry out this work, I obtained funding from the Ministry of Defense in the annual call for subsidies.
Again the same process, but this time in Madrid. There we had to review all the boxes and select the lists of deceased issued by Military Health and the General Captaincy of Cuba. They had to make 9,000 photocopies for us, which put the patience and good work of the officials of the General Military Archive of Madrid to the test. With great disappointment I verified that in all those lists the fallen ones that I was looking for were not included either.
63,000 names
All this effort, however, I have been able to make profitable in a doctoral thesis that collects the identity of 63,000 soldiers who died as a result of the war in Cuba and draw some conclusions of scientific interest. It has also helped many people to know the final and unknown destination of their ancestors who went to Cuba and never heard from them again. This help is given through the Association return with honor. Tenacity, because my Aragonese origin gives me some advantage, and the fortune of meeting the right people on this path, helped me to guide myself in the right direction, until in the end I have managed to reap the fruits.
I made the first discovery at the suggestion of Colonel Laureano Dolz del Castelar, who told me about the Ecclesiastical Archive of the Army, where the death records of numerous Army units and military hospitals are kept. At last I had in my hands a document that gave data on soldiers fallen in combat against the American enemy on July 1, 1898. It was book no. 702, of the Talavera Peninsular Battalion No. 4. It was a memorable moment.
Then I discovered book 688 of the Provisional Battalion of Puerto Rico No. 1, which fought in the Lomas de San Juan and also noted their dead in that combat. But that was where the streak over those who died in Santiago de Cuba on July 1 ended. The death records of the other battalions deployed in these scenarios are not found in the Ecclesiastical Archive funds: Constitución 29, Asia 55, etc. For more than a year, I took photographs of 168 books that correspond to expeditionary units to Cuba, an effort that has allowed me to correct many of the DOMG errors.
collaborations
To find out the missing data, therefore, I had to turn to the primary documentary sources that are scattered in different archives. On other occasions I had to resort to indirect deduction, whose explanation would be a bit cumbersome.
Fortunately I have had the help and collaboration of many people, beginning with Dr. and Colonel Raúl Izquierdo Canosa, president of the Cuban History Institute, and ending with Colonel Juan Antonio Álvarez Jiménez, who was then a military attaché at the Embassy of Spain. . The support of the Institute of Military History and Culture of Madrid has also been fundamental, especially from Colonels Laureano Dolz del Castelar, Manuel Molero and Gonzalo Jayme. I have also had the patient and enthusiastic collaboration of the staff of the Ecclesiastical Archive of the Army and the military archives of Madrid, Segovia and Guadalajara. But, above all, I have to underline the help of my colleagues from the Regreso con Honor Cultural Association, without whose collaboration it would never have been possible to achieve the final result.
Finally, all together we have managed to identify the 193 Spanish soldiers killed in the land combat of the Santiago de Cuba campaign and the 517 wounded. All that remains is for their names to appear in the place of honor that corresponds to them.
List of fallen in combat
The list of the Spanish soldiers described below corresponds to those who died in the town of Caney, Fort El Viso and in positions located on Loma de San Juan, both in the attack by American troops and in the subsequent counterattack carried out by out, on July 1, 1898, by Spanish troops to try to recover them. Also included are those who died in the days immediately following, as a result of the injuries received in those combats. In the absence of an official list of the deceased combatants, all the existing information in documents deposited in the military archives has been compiled, cross-checking data and debugging errors, which were frequent in handwritten documents.
As a volunteer from Cuba commented in his ‘Memories’: «Today we remember those anonymous heroes who had no rival in the world to suffer, without protest, hunger, thirst, nakedness and all the calamities that Spanish mismanagement brought upon them. . No one can match his self-sacrifice in sacrificing his life for the cause he champions. All these virtues are the cause of the Spanish soldier being universally recognized as the first in the world.
List of soldiers who fell on Loma de San Juan
infantry: Colonel José Baquero Martínez Elizalde
From the Talavera battalion, Peninsular No. 4: Captain Benito Manso Pérez; 2nd Lieutenant Francisco Valls Allue; Sergeants Antonio Jimeno Rodríguez and José Yera Gil; Corporals Rafael Benedicto Lauron, Francisco Giró Palas, Pedro Requena Esteban and Nicolas Sanz Gregorio, and soldiers Antonio Antolín Manero, Alejo Baldajoz Estrada, Agustín Baño Álvarez, Francisco Bohígues Peiró, Marcos Casas Vizcarra, Eusebio Dávila Pestaña, Ramon Giménez Hernández, Francisco Gómez Lázaro, Juan González Hernández, Eulogio Martínez Sánchez, José Martínez Rodenas, Demetrio Morales Ferrales, Lino Moreno Clemente, Manuel Oliva Mateo, Leandro Ovejero Mayuquera, Manuel Palencia Ceballos, Mariano Pascual Elvira, Mateo Pascual Luengo, Pedro Pérez Campos, Rafael Quintana Mosquera , Pedro Rodríguez Alcántara, Ángel Santos Exposito and Joaquín Vázquez Hernández.
From the Provisional Battalion of Puerto Rico No. 1: Captain José Bonet Parrilla; 1st Lieutenant Mariano Valbuena Fernández; 2nd Lieutenants Mariano Balbuena, Joaquín Martin Valderas, Juan Martínez Ibars and José Núñez Dapena; Sergeant Salvador San Miguel Roldán; Corporal Antonio Muñoz Torralba; soldiers Francisco Álvarez Bordalla, Antonio Burgos Rodríguez, Agustín Busto Mora, Francisco Caldito Canales, Enrique Far Cárdenas, Nicolas Feíto Parrondo, Gerardo García Roldán, Nicanor García Díaz, Pedro Jato Celeiro, Pedro Martín Lucía, Antonio Medina Rodríguez, Salvador Muñoz Alba, Manuel Noguera Sánchez, Antonio Prieto Fernández, Alfonso Ramírez Linares, José Rochera Ortell, Lorenzo Turrel Tuset and Pedro Yagüe Arribas
Mountain Artillery, 5th Regiment, 1st Battery: gunners Pedro López, Julian Monserrat and Francisco Ruiz Rivas.
Of the Marine: the captain of the ship Joaquín Bustamante Quevedo; the boatswain 3rd Timoteo Abelenda Pita; Sea Corporal 2nd Vicente Brage Gato, and Sailor 1st José Fernández Arambul.
From Marine Corps: Corporal Ginés Vélez Mercader and cornet José Verdú Aguilar.
List of fallen soldiers in Caney
He brigadier general Joaquin Vara de Rey Rubio.
From the 55th Asia Battalion: Captain Antonio Vara de Rey Rubio
Constitution Battalion No. 29: the commanders: Rodrigo Agüero Mármol and Rafael Aragón García; 2nd lieutenants Félix Escudero González, Pedro Fuentes Martínez, Manuel Morales Vega, Antonio Rubio Pallejero and Alfredo Vara de Rey Herranz, and soldiers Ángel Andrino Moreno, Antonio Aznárez Climent, José Crespo Rivas, Juan Diaz González, Tomas Gómez Brusel, Ignacio Linares Mur, Antonio López Gutierrez, Ramon Martínez Lago, José Martínez López, Bernabé Sanz Fatas, Joaquín Senar Soldevilla, Pablo Vega Terán, Miguel Verdú Peidro and Agustín Zubillaga Colina.
From the Cuba No. 65 battalion: the 1st Lieutenant Cesareo Dominguez Camacho.
From the 1st Third of Guerrillas: 2nd lieutenants Enrique Casadevall Mulleras and José Pastor Gómez.
Soldiers of which the body does not consist
Juan Bautista Bort Rambla, José Cruña Río del, Pascual Falcon Miguel, Fructuoso Fernández Chaves, Jesús Fernández Pavón, Juan Ferrer Sanz, Lesmes Fuente de la García, Protos Hermosilla Ruiz, Facundo Rubio Parra and Julian Sanz Martín.
Francisco Javier Navarro Chueca He is a doctor in History, Corresponding Academician of the Royal Academy of Valencian Culture (RACV), Honorary Archaeologist of the Official College of Doctors and Graduates of Aragon, President of the Return with Honor Cultural Association and member of the Valencian Association of Military Historians.
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