On August 12, 1851, the city of Puerto Principe (today’s Camaguey province) was shaken. Spanish colonialism executed four men, who the previous month had taken arms to protest against the regimen, in a place known as Sabana de Mendez, in the north perimeter of Puerto Principe. 

Historian Elda Cento Gomez wrote in an article published by the Caliban magazine:

“It is likely that one of the first collective demonstrations by Cuban women had been the decision by a group of women from Camaguey to cut their long hair after the execution of Agüero, Zayas, Betancourt and Benavides”.

“The quatrain that circulated in the city during those days was very clear: ‘the women in Camaguey/ who doesn’t cut her hair/ is not worthy in our territory/ to be treated like a sister./”

Why were these men killed and what brought about the subsequent reaction in the city of Puerto Principe?

It all began a few years earlier.

Joaquin Aguero y Aguero, who was born on November 15, 1816, in Puerto Principe, owned some rural lands, which he inherited from his father. Since he was young, he was not very well accepted by the ruling Spanish authorities because he had been the leader of an improbable action for those times.

A document preserved in Camaguey confirms that on January 23, 1843, he set free his eight black slaves and gave them means for their subsistence such as pieces of land, work tools and money so that they could be able to earn their sustenance as free men.

Prior to that, he and his wife Ana Josefa de Aguero Perdomo founded a free public school in the town of Guaimaro, which later on became the venue of the first Constitution of a Free Cuba, in 1869.

Pressures by colonialists forced him to leave Cuba with his wife to go to the United States, but they returned right away and continued working for the independence and continued criticizing the arbitrariness of the regime.

By the end of 1849, he was an active member of the Sociedad Libertadora de Puerto Principe, which he chaired with the purpose of organizing an armed uprising against colonialism and to expand these purpose to other Cuban regions.

On July 4, 1851, a group of about 40 men led by Aguero rebelled against the Spanish colonialism and for the first time in the Cuban history, in San Francisco de Juracal, near Guaimaro, these men proclaimed a declaration that defended independence.

A fragment read:

“We openly declare to be against all acts or laws that emerge from our former metropolis: we do not acknowledge any kind of authority, regardless of its rank, whose appointment and faculties are not born from the majority of the people of Cuba, the only instance with faculties to dictate laws through their representatives”.

The insurgent movement of Aguero, which historian Cento Gomez considers a step in the history of independence struggles in Cuba, failed a few days after because it was not ready to embark on the conquer of independence. 

However, it was necessary so that a few years after, on October 10, 1868, other Cubans eager for the independence of their country initiated an armed fight for sovereignty.