Vicente García González

Cuban military officer. He participated in the Ten Years' War against Spanish colonialism commanding the forces of Las Tunas, a conflict in which he achieved the rank of major general.

He was born in Las Tunas, son of a wealthy Spanish merchant and a Tunas landowner. In 1856, in his native land he organized a conspiratorial movement against Spanish colonialism, which did not succeed due to lack of preparation.

A decade later he resumed revolutionary preparations together with a small group of men. In 1867 he was appointed president of a revolutionary junta, in which the Santiago native Francisco Muñoz Rubalcava served as vice president. That same year he traveled to Bayamo and met with Francisco Maceo Osorio, Donato Mármol, Esteban Estrada, among other conspirators from the eastern region, and they agreed to increase the activity of the movement.

In early 1868 he joined the Estrella Tropical lodge in Bayamo, belonging to the Gran Oriente de Cuba y las Antillas (GOCA). His initial work consisted of recruiting supporters for the independence cause.

On August 4, 1868 he attended the meeting at the Tunas estate of San Miguel del Rompe, presided over by the eldest conspirator, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes y del Castillo, in which no agreement was reached between easterners and Camagüeyans about the date of the uprising. The following month he went to the Muñoz estate in Las Tunas, where the idea of postponing the armed uprising until after the harvest was accepted. On October 4 he convened and presided over the meeting at El Mijial, establishing October 14 of that month as the start date of the revolution.

As soon as he received news of Céspedes' uprising on October 10, he sent notice to the conspirators to meet at his pasture El Hormiguero, the place where he had his first armed encounter with Spanish forces. On October 13 he assaulted his native city, an action that marked the beginning of the war in Tunas territory. In the following days he was able to repel attacks by enemy forces sent to aid the besieged Spanish.

Between the end of 1868 and the first months of 1869 he directed important actions in Las Tunas, such as those at Arroyo La Palma, Becerra, La Horqueta, Parada, El Salvial, among many others. For this reason in July 1869 he was promoted to major general of the Liberation Army.

The following month he participated in the assault on Las Tunas, under the orders of General Manuel de Quesada, appointed commander-in-chief at the Assembly of Guáimaro. After a strong mambí offensive, Quesada gave the order to withdraw; from then on, the Spanish named the territory Victoria de las Tunas.

On October 6, 1870 he rejected an enemy emissary who appeared at his camp with propositions for peace without independence.

Between 1871 and 1873 he continued his traditional attacks on convoys, seizures of forts, ambushes with machete charges. On August 19, Spanish General Federico Esponda baptized him as the "Lion of Santa Rita," after the combined attack of three Spanish columns against his camp in that area failed.

On March 15 he supported General Antonio Maceo in the Protest of Baraguá. That day he remained guarding the surroundings of the meeting place of Cuban forces with Spanish General Martínez Campos. The next day the Provisional Government was established, which elected him commander-in-chief of the armies of the republic.

On May 28 he fought at Pozo del Ñame, the first battle after the protest against the Peace of Zanjón. But on June 6, 1878, while camped near Manatí, he received news of the laying down of arms by the forces of Las Tunas.

The next day he left on the steamship Guadalkivir to San Thomas, and on the 19th he embarked for Venezuela, from where he maintained frequent communications with Generals Calixto García, Carlos Roloff and Leoncio Prado, among others.

In 1879 he failed in his attempt to reach Cuba as part of the actions in the Guerra Chiquita.

In 1884, Maceo and other Cuban émigrés requested his presence in the preparations for the Gómez-Maceo Plan. That year, the Club Hijas de la Libertad of New York declared him an honorary member.

He remained dedicated to work on a cacao agricultural colony that he had founded in Río Chico, Venezuela. On March 4, 1886 he died as a result of peritonitis, caused by the ingestion of ground glass, placed days earlier by a Spaniard in his lunch.