Mariana Grajales Coello was a Cuban icon of the women's struggle and the fight for an independent Cuba free from slavery.
Background
Mariana Grajales Cuello was born on July 12, 1815, in Santiago de Cuba, then the capital of the eastern province of Oriente. Her parents, free mulattoes Teresa Cuello Zayas and José Grajales Matos, had fled the Dominican Republic due to the violence that had spread there during the Haitian revolution. Even though her family was free, as a child she witnessed the arrival and parading of naked slaves through the streets of the port city of Santiago. She also witnessed Spanish military troops marching to battle the maroons (escaped slaves) in the mountains north of the city.
Education
Probably because of poverty, Grajales received very little formal schooling. Even though free blacks were allowed an education, they were required to pay tuition, which very few could afford. Her education was the learning she acquired from her parents and the experiences she had such as her visits to jailed maroons an activity she engaged in to make sure she remebered the horrors of slavery.
Although free, she was never too removed from the discrimination of the slave society she was born and raised in, which in itself was an education for her.
Career
During the 1840s, there was great turmoil in Cuban society, particularly concerning blacks: conspiracies of slaves and free blacks were discovered, hundreds of blacks were publicly executed, and strict surveillance of free blacks and fines for those who showed disrespect were enacted. Blacks who were emancipated after May 1844 as well as all blacks not native to the island were to be expelled from Cuba. Somehow, Maceo was able to secure an affidavit declaring him a native of Santiago de Cuba.
Grajales and her family were moderately prosperous. They also had connections among both the white and free black middle-class communities. They were able to purchase a second farm in Majaguabo, also near Santiago de Cuba, and named it La Esperanza (which translated means "hope"). Except for when she was ready to have a child, Grajales spent all of her time at the farm. In 1851, after living together for eight years and having three children, Maceo and Grajales legalized their union through marriage.
During the rest of the 1850s, as she raised her 13 children, epidemics killed off 70,000 slaves. As the call for the abolition of slavery began to take hold, the sugar plantation owners overtly or covertly found ways to thwart the movement.
Grajales was a middle-aged woman by the 1860s and a member of one of the more prosperous black families in the Majaguabo district. The abolitionist movement in Cuba was on the upswing and beginning to take hold, particularly on the part of the island around Santiago de Cuba. Marcos Maceo had joined an underground group, and when the time came and the revolution was imminent he worried about how his wife would react. Fler response was swift and determined. She had no qualms about losing everything they had for the cause: "Swear," Grajales said, "by the blood of the crucified Christ, that you will fight to liberate your country, fight tirelessly, until you see her independent, oi until you die achieving it" (Henderson 1978,140). She became a participant and actively helped them recruit people to fight the revolution. She converted Las Delicias into a military depot and encampment to supply and treat the combatants. In 1868 the Spanish captured Las Delicias and burned the farmhouse. Undaunted, Grajales settled at Las Esperanza. That year, she received the sad news that her oldest son, Justo Regüeyferos, had been killed, and later that her husband had been fatally wounded while fighting under his son Antonio s command. Realizing that staying on the farm was too dangerous, Grajales and her daughters and daughters-in-law joined the insurgency, settling at an encampment where they assisted wounded soldiers. Her skill in healing the wounded and her knowledge of herbs and plants were legendary.
In 1878, after a series of battles that resulted in a cease-fire and an end to the Ten Years' War, Antonio Maceo sent his mother and other family members into exile in Kingston, Jamaica. While her son and others plotted a renewal of the revo-lution, she helped care for the wives and children of the fighters. By now, she and her family had become notorious to the Spanish, labeled the "terrible Maceos." Grajales never again returned to Cuba, nor did she live long enough to see Cuba gain its independence in 1902.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Cuban independence leader and patriot José Marti visited her in 1891, two years before her death, and wrote about their meeting. He describes how Grajales, an old woman by that time, reminisced about the action on the battlefields. His narrative illustrates the sense of power that Grajales the mother and the revolutionary had over people. He captures her essence thus: "And if one trembled when he came face to face with the enemy of his country, he saw the mother of Maceo, white kerchief on her head, and he ceased trembling!"
In 1957 the Mayor of Havana, Justo Luis Pozo del Puerto, officially declared Doña Mariana Grajales de Maceo the "Mother of Cuba."
On September 4, 1958, Fidel Castro, created the all women platoon, titled the "Mariana Grajales Women's Squad." The platoon was armed with the light weight M-1 machine guns.
Connections
In 1831, she married Fructuoso Rcgüeyferos, who died in 1840, leaving her with four children. Described as an attractive and respectable widow, Grajales met Marcos Maceo, himself a widower with children. Maceo had been born in Venezuela and had fought with the Spanish against Simón Bolívar, who was struggling for Venezuela's independence. When he met Grajales, he already owned a farm called Las Delicias, where the couple settled. In 1845, Maceo and Grajales' first child, Antonio de la Caridad Maceo, was born. Over the next nine years they had five more children.