(1808-1893)
Revolutionary Cuban mother. Called the Gener-ala Mambisa (Rebel General), Mariana Grajales sacrificed her husband, ten sons, and two daughters, whom she had prepared to the fight for Cuban independence from Spain. Grajales was born in Santiago de Cuba, a rural eastern province where tobacco and sugar plantations predominated. Her parents, Jose Grajales and Teresa Cuello, were mulattos who had free status. Despite the advantages of legal freedom Grajales grew up suffering from the indignities of racism, colonialism, and extreme poverty. Grajales was committed to throwing off the yoke of cultural oppression and racial discrimination that plagued the Spanish colony; she married the like-minded Fructuoso Regueyferos, who helped her from the beginning to raise their four sons with strong revolutionary ideals. Widowed at the age of thirty-two, three years later she married Marcos Maceo, a Venezuelan immigrant of mixed race. At that time, a new representative of the Spanish Empire, Capitan General Leopoldo O’Donnell, arrived on the island and began to employ a new degree of violence and repression. The already tenuous existence of the Grajales-Maceo family was threatened when immigrants of color were ordered to leave Cuba. When groups of rebels began to gather in the jungles and swamps to commence guerrilla warfare in 1868, Mariana Grajales and Marcos Maceo led their entire young family to join the uprising. Grajales lived with the rebels, sharing the horrors and deprivations of war with her husband and children. Throughout she maintained a steadfast and unselfish patriotism, exemplified in her exhortation to her youngest boy at the graveside of his brother: "And you, stand up tall; it is already time that you should fight for your country" (Sierra n.d.). All but one of the Grajales family died during the struggle for independence, including the famed war hero Antonio Maceo. For her heroic words and actions Grajales is revered as the first Cuban woman revolutionary and an icon of the ideal self-sacrificing mother. When the popular uprising against Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista commenced in the 1950s, fifteen-year-old Tete Puebla gathered with other women to form a fighting unit inspired by the historical icon, and thus, the first all-woman platoon of the Cuban Revolution was born—the Mariana Grajales platoon.
