Isabel Rubio Díaz

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A faithful exponent of the combativeness of Cuban women. She was an active participant in the conspiratorial activities that were organized on the Island against Spanish colonialism.

Her childhood unfolded in her paternal home, which was presided over with honor by the figure of her progenitor, the kind physician Dr. Antonio Matias Rubio Valero. She saw the death of the mother of her adoration, Mrs. Prudencia Díaz Diaz-Pimienta, when she was only six years old. Ten years later, in the fullness of youth, when she was the object of great admiration for her proud bearing and natural charm, she married Mr. Joaquín Gómez Garzón, from which union were born her children Ana María, Isabel, Rosa and Modesto.

She joined the conspiratorial movement in 1882 and participated in important clandestine meetings with Jose Martí in Key West and New York when the conditions were being prepared to restart the war for independence that was being waged in Cuba at that time.

There she committed herself to contribute to the Necessary War in the most western part of Cuba, as happened at its outbreak, acting as personal agent of the Master and of the Cuban Revolutionary Party. Her house became the largest center of conspiracy in the Pinar province.

As the daughter and sister of physicians, she dedicated herself to sanitary work by founding a mobile military hospital. In the countryside she dedicated herself to sanitary work. In Guane she organized a field hospital, never feared death, and tirelessly cured the brave mambises who fought for Cuba in the heart of the wilderness. She exhausted her medicines, and also consumed those sent by sympathizers of the cause of freedom. When she had nothing left to treat with, she searched for herbs in the fields, unraveled her sheets and undergarments to make lint and bandages, and turned her dresses into rags so that the flesh shedding the blood of freedom would not be left bare.

This hospital was visited by Major General Antonio Maceo on January 20, 1896. During that visit, this brave woman was granted the rank of Captain of Sanitary Service. During Maceo's second campaign in Pinar del Río province, from March 15 to December 3, 1896, she traveled with her field hospital more than 150 km, providing sanitary services to the mambises troops. At that date she was already 58 years old. From late 1896 she was forced to frequently relocate the hospital to avoid assault by the guerrillas of San Diego de los Baños, who searched for her incessantly.

The Spanish surprise Isabel Rubio, already a woman in her sixties, at the field hospital created by her in Loma Gallarda, on the afternoon of February 12, 1898. The guerrilla of Antonio Llodrás surrounds the small camp and, faced with Isabel's bravery as she shouts from the door that there are only women and children, the response is a volley that wounds her in the leg. Subsequently taken as a prisoner of war to the Hospital de San Isidro in the capital of Pinar province, she was treated for her wound which, due to late treatment, had become gangrenous and hastened her fatal end.

The efforts of her older brother, Dr. Antonio Rubio, to have her transferred to his private practice were in vain. Surrounded by her nieces and her small grandchildren René and Rosa, she died on February 15, 1898, when the light of the sun that had so many times illuminated her skilled hands to heal other wounded ones was lost on the horizon of that sad winter evening. Her native town, Paso Real de Guane, today proudly bears the name of this exalted patriot.