“Not even a century and a half has been able to reduce the vileness of that crime, nor lessen the pain of the Homeland for the execution of eight innocent people,” the president stressed on his X account.
The president of the National People’s Power Assembly (Cuban Parliament), Esteban Lazo, noted that youths were innocent, and quoted Cuban National Hero José Martí who wrote: “When one dies in the arms of the grateful homeland, Death ends, the prison is broken, Life begins, at last, with dying!”
The events began on November 24, 1871, when a group of students visited the Espada cemetery in colonial Havana, where some of them played with the cart to carried the corpses and one took a rose from the cemetery.
A report from the guard -angry by the “damage” to his garden – falsely accused the boys of having desecrated the grave of journalist Gonzalo Castañón, a preacher of the extermination of Cubans and the repopulation of the Caribbean island with Spaniards.
Historical research confirmed not only the falsehood of the accusations and the well-known innocence implicit in the acts of those teenagers, but also the injustices committed against the 45 imprisoned students.
After the first War Council, which concluded without reasons to blame them, some were released and others received minor sentences, but Spain’s powerlessness and thirst for political revenge due to the military defeats against the pro-independence troops in Cuba’s countryside was evident.
Then, the Spanish Volunteer Corps pressed for a second oral hearing with another court that sentenced five of those imprisoned to deaths, as well as three others who were chosen at random.
Subsequent investigations would show that one of these eight unfortunate people was not even in Havana on the day of the events.
The summary execution of the future Cuban doctors aroused rejection inside and outside Cuba and from the Spanish ranks, and Captains Nicolás Estévanez and Federico Capdevila, the public defender of the young defendants, resigned from their posts.
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