© 2000 Pedro Perez Sarduy
Bakonfula de la prenda Mambi

Antonio Maceo: The Bronze Titan  12/10/2007 Granma: by Fidel Castro

La Tribu Heroica: la Historia del Mayor General Antonio Maceo por Dra. Gayle McGarrity y Lic. Osvaldo Cárdenas 

Maceo and Puerto Rico

Maceo and the Abakwá

Maceo's mother: Mariana Grajales Coello

Dialogue with Magdalena Cantillo Frometa: on Mariana Grajales Coello, “Mother of the Cuban Nation,” 4/15/05 by Eugène Godfried

Dialogo Con Magdalena Cantillo Frometa Sobre Mariana Grajales Coello “Madre De La Patría Cubana,” 15/4/05 by Eugène Godfried

Leonardo Griñán Peralta's  Psicografía de José Martí deals realistically with the disagreements between Maceo and Martí.

Links

Antonio Maceo, "the Bronze Titan"
Entrepreneur, General
1845-1896

Born June 14, 1845, Antonio Maceo y Grajales became an entrepreneur and one of the greatest military commanders of the both the 1868 and the 1895 wars for independence. His unmatched courage in combat and stalwart character were said to be Maceo's main assets in his meteoric military career. From a buck private he went up through the ranks to become second in command of the Liberation Army, also known by its Congo name, the Mambi Army.   Indeed, the Liberation Army was also known as Maceo's Army.  For a long time, he far eclipsed Jose Marti in importance, as Marti was abroad in exile and less well known in Cuba. 

The two most memorable episodes of Maceo's military life were the Baragua Protest, when he refused to surrender his weapons at the end of the Ten Years'War in 1878, and the East-to-West invasion he carried out 17 years later when a new war broke out in 1895.

The invasion is considered one of the most brilliant military feats of the 19th century. With a small army, Maceo unleashed the war throughout the island, using the machete as his main weapon. The invasion lasted three months and the insurgents fought all the way along 1,696 km.

When the final battle with the Spanish enemy was imminent, Maceo was killed in combat on December 7,1895. He was then 51 and had devoted 32 years of his life to the independence of Cuba. He had waged 900 combats, received 26 bullet wounds and had lost his father and several brothers in the war.

Maceo was also an entrepreneur and successful in his businesses. And he usually but not always had a respectful ear in José Martí, his fellow martyr in the cause of independence.   Marti's letters to Maceo are always very reverent in tone, in contrast, say, to letters from various politicians to Frederick Douglass.  It is only later generations who have made Marti the more important figure.  At the beginning, the two were always depicted together.

When Maceo's mother, Mariana Grajales Coello, learned of her son Antonio's death, she told his younger brother, "hurry up and grow up quickly, Cuba needs you!" She was in a line of great maroon women leaders in the Guantanamo area.

The Bakonfula

It is said that besides the overt command structure in the Mambi Army, there was a second one, Congo in origin, where Maceo was the Bakonfula (translated into Spanish as Mayordomo) and Quintin Bandera was the Tata Nkisi of the prenda that the Army took with them in the field. This prenda is now said to be with Quintin Bandera's family in Regla, Provincia Habana. Shortly after the war, in 1906, Quintin was assassinated and his aide de camp, Evaristo Estenoz, founded the Independents of Color in 1908 -- their centenary is celebrated in August, 2008.

It is also said that Marti pronounced his famous dictum, "More than white, more than black, we are Cubans" when he was vying with Maceo for control of the Mambi Army. He was aided in this by the Iberian contingent, who refused to think of Maceo as other than a heavyweight fighter, negating as best they could his active mind.

Maceo and Puerto Rico

In the memoirs of Antonio Maceo's doctor during the last  Cuban War of Independence in the 1890s, there is a passage about the Puerto Ricans who fought for Cuban independence, and the vision of Maceo to extend the struggle
to Puerto Rico:

“. . . muchos puertorriqueños han venido al campo insurrecto al conocer que en la base primera del  Partido Revolucionario Cubano se dice: 'El Partido Revolucionario Cubano se organiza para obtener por  medio de las armas la independencia de Cuba y auxiliar y fomentar la de Puerto Rico.'  Entonces el General [Antonio  Maceo] me dijo, en tono que demostraba profunda convicción y firmeza: 'Cuba, triunfadora en su empeño emancipador, no puede, por muchas razones, olvidar a la Isla hermana, Invadiremos a Puerto Rico y obtendremos su independencia'.” (p. 22).

Fernández-Mascaró, Guillermo. 1950. Ecos de la manigua (el Maceo que yo conocí). La Habana: P. Fernández. 24  pages.

Maceo and the Abakwá

According to Angel Guererro, in 1895, the year the Second War of Liberation began,  Antonio Maceo was betrayed in Havana, but the members of Bacoco Efo, an Abakwá potencia in Belen, of which Lino D'ou was a member, hid and protected him. Many Abakwá members fought in the Mambi Army and, for example, composed an elite corps in the Mambi Army from Matanzas.

La Protesta de Baraguá