Emilia de Córdoba Rubio

First female mambisa. Distinguished figure from the town of San Nicolás. Her activities, full of undeniable humanism, courage, selflessness, and bravery, occupy a place in the Cuban revolutionary process from 1868 until the first decades of the Neocolonial Republic.

She was born in San Nicolás de Bari in May 1853 on the San José estate owned by her father. Daughter of Rafael de Córdoba e Hidalgo Gato, a wealthy landowner with liberal, separatist, and anti-slavery ideas, a charitable, religious, and selfless man. Secretary of works for the reconstruction of the town church in 1856, benefactor of enslaved people, expelled from his lands for his ideals irreconcilable with Spanish colonialism's projects in Cuba.

All these ideals, united by a fervent love for the land where she was born and a manifest rejection of the barbaric era in which she lived, sowed in Emilia the yearning for redemption and her solidarity spirit materialized through the thousands of activities she carried out even putting her life and that of her large family at risk. Surrounded by sugar mills, cane, and black slaves, synonymous with exploitation, she fought against it by separating what was just from what was unjust.

She had a comfortable childhood and through the teachings received from her parents, deep feelings of social justice were fruitful in her youthful years, and thus, still an adolescent, she would ride horses and go to neighboring estates to convince their owners or administrators to free the enslaved blacks from the stocks or whippings they suffered from such punishments.

She received a refined education, in accordance with her economic standing. Emilia went beyond what her time and her condition as a woman demanded. Cultured and independent, she did not silence her dissatisfaction and followed the path that reason and her extreme human sensitivity dictated to her.

Despite the prejudices of the nineteenth century, she knew how to rise above them and design a strong, determined, uncontrollable, and unacceptable personality in the canons of her time and launched herself relentlessly to practice goodness and use the substantial portion that belonged to her in the paternal inheritance to aid the defenseless and to fight to free Cuba from the yoke of colonialism.

She had the great privilege of being born in 1853, the year in which the apostle José Martí was born, and she knew how to follow his ideals of independence and social justice and, like him, dedicated herself body and soul to fighting for a better future for her tainted homeland.

Her fruitful life as an illustrious patriot is evident in the multiple events she starred in throughout her existence (1853-1920). She openly opposed the cruel exploitation of man by man; for this reason, she courageously confronted the bloodthirsty Spanish General Valeriano Weyler during the reconcentration, not only with words but also with actions.

She aided prisoners to whom she brought medicines, food, and clothing, confronting Spanish authorities. The silent walls of Castillo del Morro, El Príncipe, and La Cabaña know of her presence, passing through their heavy gates and distributing smiles and encouraging the faith of men, among whom are Alfredo Zayas Alfonso and Dr. José A. González Lanusa. All these activities did not go unnoticed by the crown, which forced her to embark hastily for Key West, United States, in the company of Charito Sigarroa and Clemencia Arango.

In the preparation of the necessary war in Cuba, alongside the patriots of the island, preparing the historic uprising of Ibarra in Matanzas, to begin the war on February 24, 1895, according to testimonies from participants, among them the prominent and legendary Juan Gualberto Gómez, who was one of the Cubans who requested that a memorial bust (later becoming a statue) be made in the place where Emilia lived and died in Havana, and Antonio López Coloma.

She collaborated with Generalissimo Máximo Gómez and his army at Central Narcisa. A fact that appears reflected in the Campaign Diary of the heroic Dominican General.

Upon the death of her father, Emilia de Córdoba continued supporting the struggle and joined the campaign promoted by Martí, serving as a liaison and carrying out tasks for the cause despite being marked by the Spanish government.

During the Ten Years' War, they carried out activities to eradicate the abolition of slavery and maintained correspondence with separatist Cubans, with the objective of extending the war to the western provinces, for which reason her father with the entire family is deported to the Isle of Pines for disloyalty to the Spanish government.

Renowned agent of the 1895 revolution in Cuba and for her conspiratorial activities, she was tried and sentenced to leave the country with an Order of Expulsion from the island in 1897. Her life in Key West, where she was deported, was not lacking in conspiratorial activities; on the contrary, she arrived and settled in the place where Cuban emigration was most numerous and active, and there she founded a boarding house to provide shelter to Cubans in need of help and protection. She sponsored, encouraged, and directed baseball matches between the emigrants, which made her a precursor of that sport in Cuba and in America. The funds raised in those encounters, she delivered entirely to defray the expenses of the Cuban Revolutionary Party.

In 1898 during the North American intervention in the Spanish-Cuban War, Emilia de Córdoba returned to Cuba as an auxiliary to the renowned Clara Barton, president of that medical corps, and provided innumerable services as a wartime nurse. For her extraordinary and exemplary conduct, she received congratulations from Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States.

Upon her return to the island, she promoted another of her facets, confronting discrimination against women, for which she demanded the right to work under the same conditions as men and achieved it, no less than from the American interventionist General Brooke, who at the head of the military government on the island during that period, was appointed to reorganize the country and everything related to all public services. Emilia de Córdoba occupied a position in the Department of Public Works and thus became the first woman in the country in that type of activity.

When the war ended, she devoted herself to the protection of unemployed emigrated veterans.

Upon her death, which occurred on January 13, 1920 in the Barriada de la Víbora where they resided, her admirers, neighbors, and companions in struggle, among them the most distinguished patriots of our independence struggles, requested that in the park that was in front of her house a bust be erected to perpetuate her memory and the gratitude of Cubans.

At the instance of María Collado Romero, the park in front of her house in la Víbora was named with her name, today Parque de Córdoba, and a monument was erected in her honor, a grandiose statue, so as not to forget the benefactress of blacks, of the poor, of women without rights, the friend and sister of prisoners, the collaborator of the Cuban Revolutionary Party that Martí created to build a Republic with everyone and for the good of all, which is inaugurated by President Gerardo Machado y Morales on May 20, 1928. This statue is considered the first monument created for a Cuban woman in the Capital of the Republic.

Source: Ecured