During Cuba’s wars of independence against Spanish colonialism, many men from other lands of the world joined their efforts and stood out as brave combatants or officers of the Liberation Army, one of them was the Polish Carlos Roloff Mialofsky, who reached the rank of officer for his participation in the Civil War in the United States.
He arrived in Cuba in the middle of 1865 and began to work in a house of commerce in Caibarién; he rose up on February 6, 1869 in the Ochoa pasture, near Santa Clara, and the following day the villareños proclaimed him chief of the Liberation Army of Las Villas, with the rank of major general.
Under the orders of Ignacio Agramonte, Modesto Díaz and Máximo Gómez. Roloff Mialofsky fought during the conflict in Camagüey and Oriente, and although he initially rejected the pacification efforts of the Camagüeyans, he later signed the act of capitulation of the forces of Las Villas and after accepting the Zanjón Pact, he settled in Guanabacoa, in the province of Havana.
He participated in the organization of the Chiquita War and after staying several years in Panama and Honduras, called by José Martí he returned to the United States where he was one of the founders of the Cuban Revolutionary Party, collaborator in the Fernandina Plan, and signer, together with other veterans of the previous conflict, of the order of uprising in Cuba for February 24, 1895.
The Mambi Polish arrived in Cuba at the head of the first armed expedition of the Necessary War; Gómez designated him chief of operations in Las Villas, and in the Assembly of Jimaguayú he was named Secretary of War, but then he was sent to other countries with the mission of managing expeditions, a task that he fulfilled on numerous occasions.
In recognition to the multiple merits accumulated in his service to Cuba, José Martí wrote in the newspaper Patria the article Roloff in Tampa, in which he saluted, regarding the visit of the warrior, the brave spirit of the general of Polish origin in whom, according to the Apostle of the Cuban Independence, «the glory of war and the dignity of peace come together in his person».
Carlos Roloff Mialofsky died in Havana on May 17, 1907; five years earlier he had been granted Cuban citizenship.
