Born on August 4, 1839 in the city of Holguín, Calixto García Iñiguez stood out for his remarkable service record in Cuba’s three wars of independence, crowned with the historic vindication of patriotism conveyed in his letter to U.S. General William Shafter, when the mambises were prevented from entering the city of Santiago de Cuba at the end of the 1895-98 war.
Some authors hold that his mother Lucía sensed that he would be a great warrior, because she gave birth to Calixto during the regular Sunday march of the Spanish troops on their way to mass in the local church. Indeed, he eventually became a self-taught military tactician, as he proved in the fight for the independence of Cuba.
At 29 he joined the incipient Ten Years War, and his bravery and intrepidity in more than 30 battles earned him the rank of General on May 1, 1872 and a spot in the general staff headed by Máximo Gómez, whom he later replaced based on his extraordinary skills as a soldier—he was the first mambi chief to deploy artillery in the battlefield and to combine it with cavalry and infantry, as well as to besiege Spanish-held cities and forts, for instance.
Calixto was taken prisoner by the Spaniards when he was 35 years old. Bent on dying before falling into enemy hand, he tried to kill himself with his revolver, but he didn’t die, as the bullet entered his chin and exited through his forehead. On September 6, 1874, as he lied bloodstained on top of a cart, the leader of the Spanish column that kept him ordered to keep him alive. When they told Calixto’s mother that her son had been captured, she flatly refused to accept it, and when she learned that he was seriously wounded after shooting himself, she said that it was indeed her son, who would always choose death over captivity.
Once recovered, the brave fighter was sent to prison in Spain, where he remained for four years until his release on May 29, 1878 following the Zanjon Pact and settled in New York, from where he joined the Cuban Revolutionary Committee and planned for the so-called Small War and, after several unsuccessful attempts, he disembarked in eastern Cuba. However, the war ended in deafeat. Calixto fell ill and surrendered on August 3, 1880.
Again he was deported to Spain, where he lived until the outbreak of the Necessary War (1895-1898)—organized by José Martí—in which he excelled and, when Antonio Maceo fell in combat, he was named Lieutenant General of the Liberation Army in charge of the Eastern Division.
In 1898, the United States intervened to thwart Cuba’s fight for independence. The participation of the troops led by García Iñiguez in Santiago de Cuba was essential to the outcome of the Spanish-Cuban-American war, but the U.S. Army denied the mambi troops entrance to the city, leading an outraged Calixto García to resign as chief of the Eastern Army and send a letter on July 17 to General Shafter in protest against such an affront and exposing the real intentions of the U.S.A. As a result, the Governing Council dismissed him from his post, and yet he entered the city of Santiago de Cuba and was warmly welcomed by the population.
Calixto García’s last mission was to reconcile the discharge of the fighters the Liberation Army and to have Washington recognize the Assembly of Representatives, to which end he traveled to the United States.
He was in the middle of these negotiations when he died of a sudden pneumonia on December 11, 1898.
Calixto Garcia: an icon of national rebellion