Rosa Castellanos Castellanos

Rosa Castellanos Castellanos, "La Bayamesa". Fighter in Cuba's wars of national liberation in the 19th Century. She was a skilled nurse, organized field hospitals, and wielded the machete and rifle with great skill in her military incursions.

She was born in a barracks in the town of Dátil, in Bayamo, in the eastern part of the country. Her parents were named Don Matías Castellanos and Francisca Antonia Castellanos, enslaved people brought from Africa who assumed the surnames of their masters. She shared her intimate life with José Florentino Varona Estrada, a former enslaved Black man, with whom she joined the independence struggle from 1868 to 1878.

Perhaps Rosa María expressed her greatest gifts as a nurse through the combination of her humanism, her good humor, and her sense of discipline, as there is evidence that she was always joking around with the sick, while commanding, ordering, and inspiring respect among everyone.

After the grotesque Yankee intervention in the Cuban people's struggle against Spanish colonialism and following the arrival of the compromised Republic established on May 20, 1902, La Bayamesa had her wages liquidated according to her military rank. And in the midst of disillusionment and poverty, she continued offering her services in midwifery work and other services such as the treatment of erysipelas and indigestion.

With the outbreak of war on October 10, 1868, she ventured into the Sierra de Guisa, in the settlement of La Manteca. She played a decisive role in supplying food to the mambí forces and to the wounded in the campaign. Subsequently she became skilled as a nurse, organized field hospitals, and in 1870 she also wielded the machete. She was greatly persecuted by Spanish troops and was forced to move to Camagüey in 1871, venturing into the Sierra de Najasa to treat wounded insurgents, where she established an admirable hospital in a cave on Loma del Polvorín.

She saved many lives of mambís gravely wounded in combat and also worked as a midwife. She made medicines from traditional Cuban flora. She knew the methods to cure the common diseases of the jungle, for which she found the appropriate remedy.

Rosa participated in the combats of Palo Seco and El Naranjo, actions in which she moved the wounded to safe places. General Máximo Gómez, upon visiting her in the rustic hospital in 1873, said to her:
I have come to meet you, for by name there is no one who does not know you for your noble actions and the great services you have rendered to the homeland.

In response to these words from the brave warrior, Rosa answered him:
I fulfill my duty and no one will get me away from it because what is defended is defended and I don't want any troubles here and whoever is healed goes back to battle again (...).

Participation in the War of 1895

When the War of 1895 broke out, Major General Máximo Gómez himself asked Rosa to organize and direct a hospital in Santa Rosa, in Najasa, which was never able to be assaulted by enemy forces, as a result of the iron measures of protection and surveillance. Like any other soldier, when her patients left her free time, she covered shifts in the combat lines, carried weapons, fired rifles, and wielded the machete with skill.

In this context, when the Generalísimo stood before the woman, he ordered her to take 12 men of her trust and begin the construction of the hospital; to which she responded: "General, two are enough for me."

In May 1896, at the site known as Providencia de Najasa, Rosa is received by Máximo Gómez Báez, who after embracing her in a fraternal hug grants her the rank of captain of the Liberating Army of Cuba, the only woman to ever hold this rank throughout the entire epic.

The promotion also carried the following observation:
This selfless woman rendered excellent services in the Ten Years' War, and in the current revolution, since its beginning has remained at the head of a hospital, in which she fulfills her duties as a Cuban with exemplary patriotism.

Her Final Days of Life

In full misfortune, the City Council barely approved her a credit of 25 pesos monthly as relief on September 4, 1907. But only twenty-one days remained before her death, victim of a heart condition.

For her outstanding merits, her body was laid out in the Session Hall of the same City Council, where it remained for about thirty hours. The Territorial Center of Veterans of Independence offered her the military honors that corresponded to her, and the people of Camagüey marched by depositing offerings and giving the deserved tribute of affection and admiration to La Bayamesa. On the front page of the newspaper El Camagüeyano that day, the news was published.

Before dying, she made a will in which she designated Nicolás Guillén Urra as executor and universal heir of her meager assets, father of who would become Cuba's National Poet. It seems that with this, she was announcing the continuity of her revolutionary life.

The Monument to Rosa la bayamesa is a commemorative construction made in homage to her outstanding work in the Wars of National Liberation. Its social purpose is to provide a place that would allow the creation of employment for women from Bayamo and to develop commemorative acts and children's activities. In short, to create a space where the work of women in any sphere of work would be recognized.