Ignacio Agramonte: The Lover Hero

December 23, 2021

They say he was over six feet tall, with brown and languid eyes, clean and pale skin. Enough to imagine him in the gatherings of Puerto Príncipe or Havana, in the dance halls, in the law offices, in the wilderness. Any setting is good for him. In all of them he knows how to make himself the center of attention, an example and a virtue. However, few moments compare to that of the early morning of May 26, 1869.

As so many other times he wages a battle, but now it is a skirmish to evade his own impetuousness, to contain an impulse that challenges him like the best-trained infantry. He stands before a wooden door, a singular frontier between the happiness and uncertainty that reach him like a gunshot, but this time his enemy is himself. As if before a city taken by his troops, he wants to push through the barrier and triumph.

He has arrived at full gallop from the mambí camp and cannot wait, but he restrains himself. His fist on his machete, his boots on. In his pockets, papers and military orders. A white, red, and blue cockade adorns his uniform. A flash of light crosses his gaze.

On the other side of the threshold a group of women rests beside Amalia, vital rest after an early childbirth. The soldier's honor does not permit him to enter the room and he decides to wait through the entire early morning.

Only when Ana Betancourt —the patriot who raised her voice in Guáimaro a month ago— opens the door, Ignacio Agramonte overflows with all the force that fills him: "Rise quickly and leave, for here is a man desperate to embrace his wife and meet his son".

Still two years remain until that sleepless night and he is not yet El Mayor. Only a month ago Carlos Manuel de Céspedes called Cubans to arms and began a Revolution planned in successive meetings between landowners of the East and Camagüey.

Ignacio could not be at Las Clavellinas, the site chosen by his countrymen to join the struggle, but now he arrived at the meeting at Las Minas to save the honor of his people.

The terrible Count of Valmaseda operates in the region and approaches a group of men uncertain about the fate of the Revolution. He promises them peace agreements and small reforms to Spanish rule over the Island, and finds the most receptive ears in Napoleón Arango, a wealthy sugar plantation owner. Both have already spoken in the East and now he will serve as his voice in Camagüey.

The meeting began late at night. On one side, those who intended to assassinate independence. On the other, several patriots led by Salvador Cisneros Betancourt. Around them, nearly 300 people attentive to the debate. Some speak and others, while Ignacio listens in silence. Finally his turn comes and he stands up, imposing, precise, almost with the commanding voice that his soldiers would later know.

"End once and for all the cabals, the clumsy delays, the demands that humiliate" —he says as if wanting to settle the matter once and for all—. Then, a conviction that will accompany him always: "Cuba has no other path than to conquer its redemption, tearing it from Spain by force of arms".

It is the same idea that drives him in April of 1869 as he participates in the first Constitutional Assembly and takes part in drafting the founding Magna Carta of the Republic in Arms.

Formed in a liberal thought that always looks toward democracy, he aspires there to a separation between civil and military powers that puts him at odds with Céspedes' frenzy to advance freedom through centralized command. Both are right, though an inevitable friction is bound to mark them for the rest of their lives.

"Of Céspedes the impetuousness, and of Agramonte the virtue" —José Martí would later say in a vibrant and beautiful text—. The two know their own worth and above all that of independence.

In the following months Ignacio's resignation comes due to his disagreements with the Government's actions and later another letter from Carlos Manuel requesting that he resume military command. They are two men who overcome all disagreements for the good of the Homeland.

That is Ignacio's goal: freedom. For it he endures hardships and sacrifices, absences and distances. He recalls them all in late 1871, when the situation in the fields becomes even harsher and only he has the strength to sustain the morale of his troops.

Then in some the idea grows again of laying down their arms, of abandoning the rain and mud of the fields, the persecution, hunger and death for a project that many believe has failed.

"What do you have" —they ask him— "to continue the war". Expeditions do not arrive, his father has died and his mother is alone far from him, nor does he have his Amalia, sometimes he eats only a guava shared with his escort, other times he divides a sweet potato to feed his horse as well.

And in the midst of all this, "what do you have?" Agramonte trembles at the question, and as if he were leading cavalry he unleashes all his will to win: "Shame!"

The love story between Ignacio and Amalia is one of the most beautiful of the war.

Bohío "El Idilio", May 26, 1870. Exactly one year ago Ignacio spent the early morning awake before the door of the room where Amalia brought their firstborn son into the world. As now, that day there was joy in the place. As then, today he holds his little one in his arms. "It seems that when one has children" —he has written— "one loves freedom more".

Suddenly a warning: a Spanish column advances toward the place. There is no time left to move them all to a safe place. Ignacio's face changes, but he does not lose a second. "This seems like a betrayal" —he says while embracing his family—. He takes his machete and almost goes out to face the enemy. "Do not be distressed" —he repeats to her—; "the wife of a soldier must be brave".

When he returns, what he sees horrifies him. The bohío is ransacked, burned and empty. "I ran to the hut along lost paths" —he writes weeks later to Amalia— "and found only debris and your belongings scattered among others: I searched in the woods and only found the certainty that the enemy had taken my only treasures, my adored treasures: my adored companion and my son. What desolation, my love. All, all your torments I have tasted and how they torment me".

With pain gripped in his fist Ignacio follows the trail of the Spanish soldiers and arrives, alone and wounded in spirit, almost at the edge of the camp. From afar he makes out several mambí families, but not his own. He feels rage, fury, and more than once puts his hand on his revolver, but he knows a gunshot would be the condemnation of all. He lives a most sorrowful dilemma of which he knows the outcome.

Perhaps in the very tents that Agramonte watches with devotion and dread, an officer tells Amalia to send a letter to her husband and invite him to lay down his arms. As if fulfilling Ignacio's request before their farewell, she barely raises her gaze: "General" —she reproaches him— "you will cut off my hand first, before I would write to my husband that he be a traitor". It is her final condemnation. They will never see each other again.

Amalia is deported and travels to New York. In her womb she carries a girl, the daughter that El Mayor will never know. Ignacio will endure dozens of sacrifices, misunderstandings, sorrows, but from all of them he will emerge victorious and little by little will become an idol to his soldiers. One afternoon he launches an almost suicidal attack and like lightning rescues Brigadier Julio Sanguily; another he fills with tenderness and teaches one of his most humble aides to write.

He is "a diamond with the soul of a kiss", as Martí would call him. He arms the best and most organized cavalry of the mambí army, creates workshops in the wilderness, wins battles, and in the midst of all that he writes frantically. His handwriting is small, slanted to the right, fluid. Reality leaves Amalia hundreds of kilometers away, but he insists on keeping her close, corporeal. He is the enamored warrior.

"My most constant thought amid so many cares is that of your love and that of my children" —he repeats to her constantly—. Thinking of you, my dear, I pass my best hours, and all my future happiness I place in returning to your side after a free Cuba. How many dreams of love and happiness, my Amalia! The only happy days of my life passed swiftly at your side intoxicated by your gazes and your smiles. Today I do not see you, do not hear you, and I suffer with this absence that duty imposes on me".

In exile Amalia joins the fundraising effort for the mambises, but the climate of New York affects her. Then she moves to Mérida with her two children. There the letters of El Mayor reach her. "Speak frequently to Ernesto and Herminia of their papa" —he asks her—, educate and form their tender hearts in the image of yours; for when I find in them your portrait and your soul my affection and my satisfaction will have no limits". But his wife is restless.

From Cuba reach him news of his husband's reckless actions and she trembles with fear. At the end of April 1873 she writes him an extensive letter that Ignacio will never read. In one part the letter seems a premonition, but it is also a plea.

"Ah! you do not think much of your Amalia, nor of our two dear angels, when you care so little for a life that is necessary to me, and that you should also try to preserve for the two innocent creatures who do not yet know their father".

His wife asks him for caution for the sake of the family, for his children and for herself, and appeals to his most intimate fiber. "For the sake of Cuba you must be more prudent" —she reminds him—, expose less an arm and an intellect that Cuba needs so much. For Cuba, my Ignacio, for her also I beg you to take better care of yourself".

Dawn has not yet broken in the mambí camp and there is already movement among the troops of Major General Ignacio Agramonte. A scout announces the presence of Spanish forces very near there and he decides to engage in combat.

He does not want to destroy the strong enemy column, but hopes to deal it a blow and avoid the persecution that he has sustained against his own for days. It is May 11, 1873 and the pastures of Jimaguayú await the final battle.

It is not the first time that Ignacio fights in that plain and he trusts in his plan. He intends to provoke the Iberian vanguard, draw it to the bottom of the terrain and then attack it. The strategy that has already served him well.

One of his soldiers described him that day as having a "perfect military appearance". His skin was darker from the sun and the rigors of field life, his hair remained very black and fine, his face clean, his mustache short. Fine sideburns flanked his face.

A change in the Spanish combat order upends everything. The vanguard composed of cavalry is not the first to enter the pastures of Jimaguayú, as Agramonte had planned. Instead, the infantry collides fully with the Cuban troops and combat is joined. Faced with an enemy that nearly doubles him in number, Ignacio decides to retreat. Nothing is gained from engaging in a battle entangled from the start.

El Mayor moves from one side to the other, issuing orders, rallying his men. And suddenly, he goes out with a few men to charge against the Spanish to facilitate the retreat. Terrible is the moment of his fall, struck down by a bullet to his right temple. The shooters are hidden in a small hill of grass and he cannot see them. When his body touches the plain of Jimaguayú, Agramonte is already immortal. He is only 31 years old.

As will happen more than two decades later in San Pedro, there is disorder and fear in his troops. After the battle Henry Reeve orders the body recovered, but it is already impossible. The Spanish have already captured a man with documents looted from the corpse and discover who lies in the field. Without delay they order him brought in. When they do, some traitor has also dealt him two wounds in the neck and head.

Agramonte is a trophy. They tie him on the back of a horse and throw him in the plaza of San Juan de Dios, in Puerto Príncipe. They want to display their prize, to degrade him, but from a corner appears Father Fray Olallo and lifts up the hero. On a stretcher they carry him to the hospital, where he washes his face, protects the body as he did with so many other sick of his city. But this lifeless man still caused fear.

Almost silently comes the order to burn his body and make it disappear. The ashes they scatter to the wind; the bones that the flames could not destroy rest in some common grave lost until now in time.

Less than a year later Céspedes —the other great pillar of the first years of the Revolution— will fall in San Lorenzo, the embers will also consume an Amalia who will live until 1918 loving her Ignacio. The war will fail five years later.

However, there is something that fire and fear could not destroy: the virtue of El Bayardo, the soul of Camagüey, the lineage of a being who "was as if where men have a heart he had a star".