July 2025. On July 14, 1816, the national hero Francisco de Miranda Rodríguez, known as «The First Universal Venezuelan,» died in the Spanish prison of La Carraca, near Cádiz. He is considered the precursor of American emancipation from the Spanish Empire.
Francisco de Miranda participated, from the front lines, in the three great historical and political movements of his time: the American War of Independence, the French Revolution, and the struggle for the liberation of the colonies in Spanish America. He was the creator of the idea of Gran Colombia as a nation; Napoleon Bonaparte said of him, «That man burns in his breast the sacred fire of the love of liberty.»
A true son of his time, a true Enlightenment figure, and ardent defender of the freedom of individuals and peoples in the face of any situation of denial or oppression, Francisco de Miranda is considered the ideologist of Hispanic unity. He conceived a project of continental integration. As early as 1790, he dreamed of an emancipated Spanish America and stretches from the Mississippi to Tierra del Fuego, with an interoceanic canal in Panama and, perhaps, another in Nicaragua.
An enlightened man in every sense, he mastered six languages and amassed nearly seven thousand volumes in his library. A daring soldier, he is the only American whose name appears on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, among the victorious generals of the French Revolution.
Francisco de Miranda was the only man who had personal and direct contact with figures such as George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, Simon Bolivar, Catherine the Great, Frederick II of Prussia, the Duke of Wellington, José de San Martín, Robert Peel, and Antonio José de Sucre. His association with Latin American figures such as Bernardo O’Higgins, Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, Domingo José Martins, Manuel and Pedro Gual, Hipólito Costa, José Bonifacio, and Matías de Irigoyen had a positive impact.
Daniel Florencio O’Leary, Simón Bolívar’s aide-de-camp, stated that «Miranda was an eighteenth-century man whose genius aroused the sense and confidence of his fellow Americans. Although he prided himself on being a soldier, his greatest battles were fought with his pen.»
