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2 UN MILITAR ESPAÑOL DE ORIGEN VENEZOLANO Among the most visited and quietly beautiful historical sites near el Castillo de San Salvador de la Punta de Havana—itself sitting serenely across the mouth of the harbor from the Castillo de Los Tres Reyes del Morro, the famous “Morro Castle”—is a small shrine marking the site of the 1871 executions of eight martyred Cuban university students accused and summarily convicted by the Spanish authorities of revolutionary insurrection. Their alleged crime seems to have been the defacing of a statue of a colonial worth. The proof of involvement even in an escapade so trumped up was itself largely nonexistent. Three years into the 1868–78 First War of Cuban Independence, the murders became an abstract or epitome of Spanish tyranny. Today marked by a small, graceful Greek temple and surrounding garden, and known as the Monumento de Estudiantes de Medicina, the place of execution itself stands as one of the most important sites in the city commemorating the nation’s long struggle for revolutionary liberty. Nearby, and much less visited, is the site of another execution twenty years before. Here too, the executioners were the Spanish. Here too, the charge was revolutionary insurgency. In this case, the victim was not a Cuban, however, but a Venezuelan, one of the strangest figures in nineteenth-century Latin American, Spanish, American, and, finally, Cuban revolutionary history. To be specific, the prisoner to be officially dispatched—before a crowd, it is traditionally suggested, of nearly twenty thousand onlookers—was a three-time anti-Spanish filibustero and would be insurrectionist named Narciso López. A former field marshal of Spain, then a colonial official of the Royal government in Cuba, and finally a celebrated revolutionary exile and military adventurer engaged by US annexationist interests comprising a who’s who of US mid-nineteenth-century politics, after three failed expeditions, he was summarily garroted on the spot in January 1851. That is, he was strapped to a chair, with metal bands around his wrists and ankles, and with his head confined in a metal cage Chapter Two 30 and his neck tightly bound in a pressure apparatus. When a screw was turned—in López’s intentionally humiliating case, by a slave executioner —the windpipe was broken and suffocation ensued. As may be inferred even from the brief outline given above, the life of López seems itself sufficiently complex and involuted in its relations of power, nationality, and identity to be the stuff of a postmodern fable of Latin American political history. A slight but allegedly handsome figure with notably passionate dark eyes, even down to the reflexive symbolism of his baptismal name, Narciso López seemed driven from the outset to enact an intransigently self-willed concept of heroic destiny. Born to a Venezuelan landowner in 1797, the young López grew up in the midst of insurrectionary disorder and destruction, forced to move with his family from their war-ravaged plantation first to Caracas and later to Valencia, a revolutionary stronghold. There López found himself among the antiroyalist defenders, after Bolivar, suffering a heavy 1814 defeat in a battle called La Puerta, nonetheless called upon the townspeople of Valencia to maintain their resistance, promising to move to the rescue of the besieged garrison and renew the war from there. Shortly, the Liberator instead chose to retreat with his army into the neighboring sanctuary of New Grenada. In Valencia, the resistance lasted three weeks. When the Spanish arrived, they massacred nearly a hundred prominent citizens, including López’s father. At that point, for reasons that remain unclear—having “no love,” as one biographer puts it, “for the Spanish or for Bolivar”—the young colonial resistance fighter, celebrated for his bravery and leadership during the siege, chose to enlist in the royalist army, rising by 1823 to the rank of colonel. Of course, 1823 also turned out to be the year of Bolivarian rebel victory and occasioned López’s evacuation to Spain, albeit with a brief first stop in Cuba, where he married the daughter of a wealthy noble and is said to have gained a lifelong interest in matters Cuban. In a new Spanish career in the army and in government, López managed to navigate the early tumults of a series of military and political upheavals and battles over royal succession, known to history as the “Carlist Wars,” serving as an aide-de-camp to the prominent general Jerónimo...

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