March, 2025 – It was on March 16, 1826 that the Camagüeyan Francisco Agüero Velasco (Frasquito) was hanged, the first combatant to die for the independence of Cuba; history tells that while this 31-year-old patriot crossed the Plaza Mayor in chains to meet the executioner, he recited the verses of José María Heredia: “He always wins who knows how to die”.
Born in the current city of Camagüey, Frasquito was one of the precursors and main leaders of the conspiracies and independence struggles that arose in Santa María del Puerto del Príncipe and Nuevitas in 1822 and 1823, who participated in the conspiracy of the League of the Chain, and discovered by the Spanish authorities, he fled to Philadelphia, United States of America at the beginning of 1824.
In 1825 he obtained an appointment as second lieutenant of the Colombian Navy in Cartagena de Indias; at the end of that year he marched to Kingston, Jamaica, to organize an expedition together with independence patriots, including Andrés Manual Sánchez Pérez, with the purpose of preparing an armed uprising, which would be supported by an invasion from Colombia ordered by the Liberator, Simón Bolívar, to make Cuba independent from Spain.
He left Montego Bay, Jamaica, on January 11, 1826 and disembarked near St. Croix du Sud on the 20th and began to structure an insurrectionary movement, with the slogan of Independence or Death, but denounced to the mayor of that city they were arrested, taken prisoner, tried and sentenced to the maximum penalty.
On March 16, 1826, he was hanged in the Plaza de Armas of Santa María del Puerto del Príncipe, and although this event was really a clandestine infiltration, many historians have considered it as the first expedition of the independence struggles.
The death of this Cuban, together with his companion Andrés Manuel Sánchez Pérez, went almost unnoticed by the press of the time, in an attempt by the Spanish authorities to silence and play down, on the island and on the continent, the revolutionary movement linked to the figure of Simón Bolívar.
