Florida, February 28.- “The handsome old man, the good-bred one,” is how Generalissimo Máximo Gómez described Salvador Cisneros Betancourt, the Marquis of Santa Lucía, a Camagüey patriot born in February 1828 into a family of ancestry, whose patriotic attitude makes him one of the most fervent anti-colonialists of his time.
Salvador Cisneros Betancourt is a member of the small group of organizers of the independence struggle in Camagüey. His firm decision not to allow the Spanish to concentrate all their power against the eastern patriots determined the uprising of the people of Camagüey on November 4, 1868 in Las Clavellinas.
He participated in the Guaimaro Assembly and was a representative of the chamber, until the dismissal of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, when he assumed the presidency of the Republic of Cuba in Arms, which he was forced to resign due to pressure from the mutineers in Laguna. of Varona, but as a complete revolutionary he expressed his opposition to the Pact of Zanjón.
After 17 years of exile during the Fertile Truce period and in response to the call of José Martí Cisneros Betancourt, he joined the War of ’95 at the head of a group of young people from Camagüey and when the Assembly of Jimaguayú was established, he was elected once again. President of the Mambi government, a position he held until October 1897.
After the constitution of Yaya, the Marquis remains in the insurgent camp as another mambí and demands a location where he can serve the Homeland; He is already 70 years old and does not plan to leave the mountain, so with his escort of seven men and a small group of assistants he held several encounters with the enemy, and also took care of keeping communications with the cities of Camagüey up to date. , Nuevitas and Santa Cruz del Sur, providing the government and the army, where possible, with medicines and accessories.
After the libertarian war, Salvador Cisneros Betancourt from Camagüey opposed annexation to the United States and denounced, with all his energy, the true interests of the northern neighbor in relation to Cuba, by exposing his dissenting vote against the Platt Amendment document that he proposed. his companions to reject completely, because with him “Cuba will not have sovereignty, nor absolute Independence, nor will it be a Republic.”
Salvador Cisneros Betancourt, the wealthy marquis who fought for Cuban independence and participated in the drafting of four Cuban constitutions, died in Havana on February 28, 1914, 110 years ago.
