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He was a twenty-three year-old humble mulatto when he joined the struggle for independence started by Carlos Manuel de Cespedes at the Demajagua sugarmill.

A Gifted pupil of Máximo Gómez, Maceo became an excellent commander. But his political dimension marked a new era in national history when, before the onerous Zanjon Pact, he raised himself with gallant intransigence at Baragua.

With that manly attitude, prized by José Martí as "the most glorious in our history," he and the men who supported him reaffirmed their love for independence and social justice, saved the honour and shame of the Cubans, and extolled their homeland.

El Titan de Bronce (the Bronze Titan as he was called later) did not ignore that confronting the Spanish power was indispensable to count on the moral and political unity of the revolutionary forces and so the veteran warrior adhered to Marti’s call. His most cherished dream became true at last and happily returned to the battlefield to rewrite glorious pages on which among brilliantt feats were included like the East to West invasion.

Surprised at a provisional camp in San Pedro and engaged in a skirmish under highly disadvantageous conditions due to his unfamiliarity with the terrain; an enemy bullet killed him almost instantly, piercing his lower jaw. The hero of a thousand battles fell in action, a man who was wounded more than twenty times, several of them seriously, and whose physical strength enabled him to saddle his horse again, take the reins and grasp his machete to continue beating the enemy.

While his body was at the mercy of the enemy, the young Francisco Gómez Toro, Panchito, who did not participate in the combat because of his wounds, rushed to "die alongside his General." The indissoluble ties that since his earliest childhood he perceived between his father, Máximo Gómez and Maceo, led him to sacrifice himself beside his corpse.

Likewise, his youth – he was 20 year old when he died- was no hurdle to realize what would happen to him if captured alive by the enemy, being a son of the top leader of the Liberation Army. Therefore he resorted to suicide, but his physical weakness, he had been wounded twice, prevented him from killing himself. An enemy soldier ended his agony while hacking him to death with a machete on the back of his neck.

The young man, at that singular holocaust, reached, on his own merits, a place in national history, without the fact he was the son of the Commander in Chief. About this he wrote to his father, January 17th, 1896: "I am ashamed every day to see how I am treated wherever I go because I am your son, I really do not deserve such deference: I feel myself diminished: not until I face powder and death, will I be a real man. Merits can not be inherited, I must attain them. "

Maceo was the only Mambi leader whose political vision, after the death of Marti, could have prevented the sleight of our victory because he understood fully the threat posed to Cuba by the United States, and in the face of annexation trends becoming stronger in some sectors, he said: I do not think U.S. intervention is beneficial for the future of Cuba as most of our countrymen believe, I rather think that the efforts of the Cubans who work for an independent homeland, hold the secret of our final victory."

That thought exalts those who today remember the 75th anniversary of Frank Pais, another young Cuban hero, and the twentieth anniversary of Operation Tribute: the final burial in our land of the fallen in international missions, and the 16th anniversary of establishment of the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution.