Clemencia's husband (my Abuelo's father) was an Afro-Cuban, documented as a "Pardo Libre" (a "free mulatto").  He had already died, before his wife's passing.

In this painting, I tried to reenact the moment when my Abuelo received notice of his mother's tragic passing.  The first part of the text, which appears in the painting, sets up the circumstances and the historic events, during the time in which my grandfather's mother perished. In those notes, my Abuelo references the Mambi newspaper (El Cubano Libre) for which he wrote, as a war correspondent.  The translation (from Spanish to English) is as follows:

"The newspaper 'EL Cubano Libre,' founded ten months ago upon orders of General Antonio Maceo Grajales, was created with the purpose of informing about the struggles in the jungle of the Mambises, who are fighting for Cuba’s liberation from Spanish dominion. 

In the translation to English, the acrostics and the rhyming are naturally lost.  However, my sister Georgina, translated our Abuelo's poem in poetic verse, below.

The story of my great-grandmother's passing is as follows. Starved, my great-grandmother escaped the concentration camp in Santiago de Cuba in which she and some of her family members were being detained. In the concentration camps, there prevailed hunger, starvation and disease.  My visabuela (great-grandmother) absconded with her two of her young grandchildren who were also being incarcerated, a boy named Zoilo and his little sister. Zoilo was about nine.  He and his sister were my father's first cousins. With her two young grandchildren in hand, my great-grandmother set out to find her son (my father's father, José Rodriguez Figueroa) and nutrition for her starved grandchildren.  Had they been caught by the Spaniards, outside of the concentration camp walls, they would have been automatically executed.  It was written in the law.  The children accompanied their grandmother into the Sierra Maestra Mountains, where they combed the sweltering jungles in search of their uncle. My Abuelo José was a Mambi, a soldier in the insurgent Cuban army, who fought guerilla warfare against the Spanish in the jungles ("la manigua") of the Sierra Maestra Mountains. My Abuelo's task was war correspondence, recording what he saw in the midst of battle, for publishing in the rebel newspaper ("El Cubano Libre"). Zoilo recounted to my father (his first cousin) that, during their search for my Abuelo, they stopped at La Catedral Del Cobre, which is nestled in the Sierra Maestra foothills.  Inside of the cathedral was (and still is) enshrined the statue of La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre (Ochun), Cuba's patron Saint. 

Above is a photograph which was taken around the end of the 19th century, of an indigenous Cuban family. I imagine that my great-grandmother Clemencia may have worn a long white dress, during her demise.  Her dress, however, would have probably been tattered or worn, as a result of life in the concentration camp from which she escaped.   My father remembers having grown up with a photograph of his Siboney grandmother Clemencia.  In the picture, she was wearing a white dress. The picture has since been lost. The Siboney, to which tribe my great-grandmother belonged, were an indigenous people of Cuba's Oriente region.  In my painting I made the soldier in the front of the line a Siboney, representative of Cuba's first people, her native people.

My father shared with me that his father was so disgusted at having learned that the priest had turned away his starving mother and cousins, that he thereupon renounced the Catholic faith in which he grew up.  He thereafter considered himself a protestant. After the war, he matriculated into God’s Bible School in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he was ordained a minister. He returned to the Caribbean and charismatically preached the Gospel as a missionary in Kingston, Jamaica, where he met my Jamaican grandmother Harriet and fathered most of my father's siblings.  My father was the first of his siblings to be born in Cuba, where his parents later started their own church.

The struggles of my native and afro-Cuban ancestors in the fight for their freedom from centuries of cruel Spanish dominion directly influenced my own upbringing.  My grandfather provided to my father, a first hand testimony of the struggle in which he played an integral role.  These survival instincts that my father inherited from his father, fortified my father in the sacrifices and risks that he and my mother necessarily took in getting us out of the island of Cuba, in the mid 1960's, under turbulent circumstance.  We were forced to leave the island with nothing but the clothes on our backs. I am certain that the spirit of my father's Siboney grandmother Clemencia was with us, as we fought though our own poverty and our own hunger.  Pervasive hunger is a reality that has plagued Cuba throughout history and up until today. I witnessed it, first hand, during my Cuba homecoming in 2002.

Several hundreds of thousands of Cubans (including my great-grandmother Clemencia) perished of starvation and disease in Governor Valeriano Weyler's "re-concentration" camps, during Cuba's War of Independence from Spain.  Weyler's re-concentration camps served multiple purposes for the Spaniards.  It separated regular civilians from the insurgents (the Mambises), so that the Mambises could be more easily targeted.  It was also an attempt to deprive the Mambises from necessary resources.  Ultimately, it extinguished mass populations of Cuban natives and other oppressed Cubans who may have risen up to join the resistance with the valiant Mambises.

To the left is a picture of Valeriano Weyler (b1838-d1930).  Weyler was born in Spain to a German military doctor and a Spanish woman.  Some historians claim that Weyler's reconcentration policy in Cuba provided the plan for Adolph Hitler's concentration camps in Europe.

Weyler's reconcentration plan failed to hinder the Mambises in their excellent guerilla tactics.  The Mambises were a colorful group of insurgents, comprised of Afro-Cuban, Indigenous Cubans, Cubans of Spanish Heritage and Asian-Cubans.  They were led by Domincan-born General Máximo Gomez who had left the Spanish army to join the cause of the insurgents'.  Second in command, under Gomez, was Antonio Maceo Grajales (b1848-d1896, pictured to the right) who founded the Cubano Libre (insurgent newspaper) for which my grandfather was a war correspondent.  Maceo was born in Santiago de Cuba and was the son of a mulatto Venezuelan man and an 

many Cuban songs reference "El Mambi con el machete en la mano." ("The Mambi with the machete in hand.")  In my painting, I made two of the mambises holding machetes, one on horseback in the field and the other (the Asian one) on foot in the jungle.

great-grandmother, Clemencia. My grandfather, being of mixed afro-indigenous heritage himself, represented the rainbow of ethnic groups of which the Mambises were comprised. The word "Mambi" means "chief" in Yoruba.  Most slaves in Cuba were of Yoruba ancestry. The Yoruba is a large ethno-linguistic group of people in Western Africa. Almost 30 percent of Nigeria is Yoruba.

Mambises were characteristically clad in white and wore straw hats, often with a Cuban flag, pinned in the middle of the front flap.  Some wore red bandanas tied around their necks. The Mambises, were mostly very poor men, like the Mambi (below left) in tattered uniform. In my painting, I made my grandfather's clothes torn, revealing a cut on his flesh.  I did this to symbolize the very dangerous element of my grandfather's work, as a war correspondent. I also did this as a remembrance of the blood which was shed in the war.  I am certain that our ancestors who were oppressed for hundreds of years under Spain's rule rejoice in the efforts and accomplishments of my Abuelo and his fellow Mambises.