Juan Emilio de la Caridad Núñez Rodríguez

Major General of the Cuban Army of Liberation during the War of Independence. He was in charge of directing and organizing the Department of Expeditions.

Juan Emilio Núñez Rodríguez, a dentist by profession, was born in Sagua la Grande, Las Villas (in the central region of Cuba). He was one of the combatants who participated in the three Cuban independence wars during the second half of the 19th century.

He joined the Ten Years' War in July 1876, under the command of American-born General Henry Reeve. On July 4th, he took part in the Battle of Yaguaramas, where General Reeve fell. In early 1878, he joined the troops commanded by Carlos Roloff in Las Villas, and the war ended on March 18, 1878 with the rank of commander.

In August 1879, he was taken prisoner, accused of being a conspirator, when he was attempting to participate in the Little War. He managed to escape from the Castillo de los Tres Reyes de El Morro in Havana after nineteen days of imprisonment. He took up arms again on November 13 of that same year, and in December the Cuban Revolutionary Committee of New York promoted him to the rank of colonel. He participated in actions such as Loma de Amaro, Viana, Los Abreu, Antón Díaz, Siguanea, Pozo Viejo, and Las Hondonadas.

When the Little War failed, he resisted laying down his arms, but was persuaded by José Martí in a personal letter of December 13, 1880, in which he recommended that he do so. Thus, he was the last to lay down his arms in that conflict.

He subsequently settled in the United States. In March 1884, he entered the Island in a modest expedition, but was betrayed and captured on the 14th of that same month. Thanks to efforts by his family members, he was allowed to leave again for the United States. Founder of the Cuban Revolutionary Party, he was a faithful collaborator of Martí and one of the organizers of the Fernandina Plan, an expedition so called because its vessels would depart for Cuba with a view to armed uprising from the port of Fernandina in Florida.

When the War of Independence broke out in 1895, he was requested to remain in the city of New York to gather and organize revolutionaries and supporters of the armed liberation of the Island. In New York, he began to coordinate an activity for which he later received great recognition: the organization and preparation of maritime expeditions bound for the battlefields in Cuba. Subsequently, he was permanently entrusted with that mission.

When the Department of Expeditions was created as an internal body of the Cuban Revolutionary Party, Tomás Estrada Palma appointed Emilio Núñez Rodríguez on February 10, 1896 as its head, although the founding of the Department did not have official character until November 2 of that year. With the military rank of colonel, Núñez Rodríguez was ratified in the position by the first Council of Government.

On December 16 of that same year, already in the exercise of that responsibility, he was promoted to the rank of brigadier general. He personally led, as chief of operations at sea, more than twenty expeditions to Cuba, none of which were captured. The Department officially closed on July 3, 1898, the day Núñez Rodríguez brought to the Island the last two dispatches, with more than 500 men, which he landed at Palo Alto on the south coast of Camagüey. Four days later, he received the rank of major general.

On February 24, 1899, once the war concluded, he was one of five generals who accompanied Máximo Gómez in his entry and official tour through Havana. On March 9, he voted against the removal of Gómez, approved by the Assembly of Cerro—a legislative body of Cuban patriots that emerged at the end of the revolution, though it was short-lived. Núñez Rodríguez also was part of the Advisory Board created to debate the disbanding of the Army of Liberation.

He was discharged on July 15, 1899. On October 27 of that year, during the first military occupation of the United States in Cuba, the interventionist government appointed him governor of the province of Havana. In the same period, he was elected representative to the Constituent Assembly of 1901—the body that drafted the Constitution—for the province of Havana.

In the first elections of the republic, he was elected governor of Havana and continued in that position through several elections until 1908. In 1911, he held the presidency of the National Association of Veterans and Patriots. During Mario García Menocal's first government, he was secretary of Agriculture, Commerce and Labor (1913-1917), and in the second, vice president of the republic.

He died in Havana on May 5, 1922.