Emilia Margarita Teurbe Tolón Otero

Emilia Teurbe Tolón was born in her father's house, on one of the most central streets of the prosperous city of Matanzas. She was the Matanzas patriot who made the first Cuban flag. The banner crafted by Emilia together with her first husband and cousin, the poet Miguel Teurbe Tolón, in 1850, served as a model for the elaboration of the one that Narciso López raised during his landing in the Matanzas Bay of Cárdenas, on May 19 of that year.

At age 16 she would marry her first cousin Miguel Teurbe Tolón, a scholar, patriot, educator, and distinguished poet. From that moment on, celebrated in the Parish Church of Matanzas (Cathedral), she shared with her spouse the home, love, a passion for poetry, and political ideals.

Miguel, recognized in his time as the "poet of freedom," had become involved in the conspiratorial purposes of Narciso López de Uriola, a neighbor of a property adjacent to the San José sugar mill, patrimony of the Teurbe Tolón family.

In 1848, the conspiracy directed by López was discovered, and in anticipation of the Spanish Government's repressive measures against those implicated in the movement, Miguel fled from the Matanzas port to the United States. Emilia remained in the city caring for her mother and the family's properties and interests.

The young poet, immersed in the political activities that continued among Cuban exiles in New York, maintained correspondence with his wife and other Matanzas colleagues. This compromising communication, spied upon by colonial authorities, led to the imposition of several judicial cases processed by the Military Executive and Permanent Commission of the Island.

One of them, brought against Emilia Teurbe Tolón, accused her of being an informant and of being her husband's collaborator in the conspiratorial plans.

Subjected to interrogations, search orders, and house arrest, she was finally deported from Cuba in March 1850. She thus became the first Cuban woman exiled for political reasons.

Upon arriving in New York she joined her husband and the nucleus of conspirators. At that moment, preparations were being finalized for the expedition that would land in Cuba to begin the uprising against colonial rule.

A year earlier, in June 1849, Miguel Teurbe Tolón, at the urging of Narciso López and with the participation of novelist Cirilo Villaverde and other exiles, had designed on paper the banner that would identify the fighters in their struggle against Spanish forces.

Emilia Teurbe Tolón, integrated into the preparatory tasks, participated in the editing and distribution of the newspaper La Verdad, attended to by her husband, and cooperated in raising funds for the cause and aid to other Cuban exiles.

She received the task of bringing to canvas the design executed by her husband a year earlier. Destiny had marked her for this patriotic endeavor.

At the end of April 1850, when Emilia, exiled in New York, set out to embroider the banner of the lone star. The idealized version of the flag's existence on a cushion in her house at Manzano 71 in Matanzas, when it was searched in March of that year, constitutes only a beautiful legend surpassed by historical truth.

In compliance with Narciso López's request, in the boarding house located on Murray Street, between Broadway and Church in New York, Emilia joined white and blue silk ribbons to form the five stripes, and with a scrap of red silk formed the triangle. The star of the banner was also silk, and had a trim of the same material, white and braided. The embroidered model measured eighteen inches long by eleven and a half inches wide. This original served as a model for the making of the flag that led Narciso López's expedition, and that waved in Cárdenas on May 19, 1850.

In 1854, after the annexationist attempts of Narciso López and his followers failed, Emilia asked Miguel for a separation and married civilly to doctor Luis Rey de Perault. The marital break with her cousin, his pain, the prejudices of the society in which she lived, have marked her life to the present day.

Two years later, Emilia returned to Cuba with her second husband, settling in the capital. Immediately the bishopric of La Habana issued an edict that summoned her to settle "...a certain act of justice that concerns her [...] regarding the marriage that they say she celebrated in the United States," a mandate to which she never responded. For this reason, when Miguel died in October 1856, his death was registered in the books of the Parish Church of Matanzas as spouse of Emilia Teurbe Tolón.

Miguel died a victim of tuberculosis. However, the couple's contemporaries and their relatives blamed Emilia for the tragedy. They believed that the dejection caused by the separation had led her husband to an abandonment that triggered the fatal illness.

Historiography perpetuated the accusation, generally citing the poem A E., which the bard signed in New York in September 1853; or A Emilia en nuestra separación, which he wrote in that country a year later. Let us see some paragraphs of the first cited poem, respecting the spelling of the era.

So forever "farewell"?
So that first love,
born of a breath of God,
like a foreign orphan
dies between us two?
(...)

And made the altar a sepulcher,
without light the gloomy temple,
must I prostrate myself to weep
in a deep shadowy valley,
without love, country, or home?

And may my final hour come
and on the bed of pain
I hear not a single voice
that beside my pillow
speaks to me of God with love,

And when the stiff corpse
they carry thereafter to bury
in some desolate place,
let no one go to shed
two tears for the dead!

In the face of this position, both from contemporaries and from twentieth-century historians, the omission or minimization of a fact is significant. Miguel returned to Matanzas days before his death and was accompanied by his second wife, the American Sarah Jeannie Wallace, and his daughter Estrella, only months old. It remains to clarify that there was neither edict nor censure for him; on the contrary, the historical literature produced to date emphasizes his misfortunes from lost love.

Emilia was widowed in 1884, and shortly thereafter joined in third nuptials to Camagüeyan Juan de Dios Estrada Companioni, with whom she left for Madrid in that decade.

Before departing, both bequeathed their assets and the proceeds of several rents to the Tolón Institution –annexed to that of Zapata– intended for the free education of poor children, in a society forgetful of the dispossessed.

Three months after the Republic was inaugurated, on August 22, 1902, Emilia died in Madrid. An eventful existence came to an end: orphaned of her father at age 6, exiled at age 22, considered by her enemies as both the "Marquesa Tolón," and branded as a "filibuster." Relegated by family and friends because of her private life, she survived three marriages, left no descendants, and was held responsible for the death of her first husband; but she had the virtue of integrity in the face of the censure, searches, imprisonment, and proceedings to which she was subjected by the Military Commission.

Despite what she suffered for her political stance, in exile she remained faithful to her ideals and consequently was integrated into the nucleus of conspirators, embroidered the flag that would represent that movement and that became the national banner, and when at age 60 she definitively left Cuba, so as not to end her days under colonial rule, she donated all her possessions to the Economic Society of Friends of the Country.

That was Emilia Margarita Teurbe Tolón y Otero. Therefore, when studying her life and work, vindicating elements emerge that impose themselves over any consideration of a personal nature.

In 1950, the year of the Centennial of the Flag, the Congress of the Republic officially proclaimed her the Embodiment of the Cuban Woman, and the Ministry of Communications issued a philatelic series, dedicating one of the stamps to the embroiderer that, in addition to reproducing her image and patriotic work, stands out for its aesthetic value.

But her just dimension was provided by Matanzas historian Francisco Ponte Domínguez, who dignified her for posterity by declaring her the divinity of the river that identifies her native city, Matanzas, and affirm that Emilia Teurbe Tolón was the "Ondina of the Yumurí."

Her remains were interred in the Colón Cemetery on August 23, 2010. Emilia's grave was found in the cemetery of Nuestra Señora de La Almudena in Madrid, thanks to a thorough search through more than twenty cemeteries in the Spanish capital, carried out by Ernesto Martínez, at the request of Matanzas historian Clara Emma Chávez.

Source: Palabra Nueva.net and Cubadebate