«Lidia, a woman of about forty-five years old, was one of the owners of the bakery; from the first moment, whose only son had belonged to our column, she joined enthusiastically and with exemplary devotion to the work of the Revolution».
This is how Comandante Ernesto Che Guevara evokes Lidia Esther Doce Sanchez, a brave woman who was born on this date in 1916 in Mir; since the March 10, 1952 coup d’etat, she manifested her rebellion against Batista’s tyranny, and when she knew that her son had joined the guerrilla struggle, she decided to join the Rebel Army.
Enthusiastic for all tasks, and with a particular devotion, she was distinguished by her limitless audacity so that other messengers avoided her company; Lidia carried and brought important messages from the mountains, fulfilled the most risky missions between the plains and the mountains, carried copies of the guerrilla newspaper El Cubano Libre, medicines and everything she was ordered to transport.
Arrested in Havana, together with her friend and fellow combatant Clodomira Acosta Ferrales, they were brutally tortured and without being able to get a word out of them, already dying, they were put in a boat in La Puntilla, at the bottom of the Castillo de la Chorrera and in sacks full of stones they were threw into the water and pulled out, until not getting any result, they were dropped into the sea where their bodies disappeared on September 17, 1958.