Review

The flag we have raised. Chronological notes. Carlos Manuel de Céspedes (1819-1874). Review

0000-0002-5104-9037Darnys Fernández Hernández^{1  *} 

¹Universidad de Guantánamo. Cuba.

His work under consideration: The Standard We Raised. Chronological notes. Carlos Manuel de Céspedes (1819-1874). Aldo Daniel ^{Naranjo Tamayo, (2019}) is a useful tool in the preparation of History teachers at the University of Guantánamo and at the same time serves as a complementary bibliography in the training of Primary Education professionals for the assessment of historical personalities according to the profile of this vital career for the formation of new generations.

It contains a historical chronology on the life and work of the Father of the Homeland Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, edited by Ediciones Unhic, its author is a historian, researcher, museologist and Director of the Museo Casa Natal de Céspedes.

Its main value lies in the fact that it is a totality that creates and recreates the life of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, in his closest everyday life. It offers us a profuse and detailed account that at the same time gives us information and invites us to search. This brief chronology is an approach to the exalted figure of the patriot who laid the foundations for the forging of the Cuban nation.

Its objective is to present a synthesis of his work as an intellectual, writer, politician, military strategist, hence it becomes a reference material for education professionals as it contributes to their training in values in accordance with the principles of our socialist social project.

Its content:

It has a Prologue written by Sergio Antonio Garcés Quintana, member of the Unhic, Historian of Manzanillo where he explains the contributions and values of the work, he points out that it is a chronology that can be consulted because it gives us a vast amount of information more similar to a monograph or essay than what the genre is used to with brief words.

In it he expresses that it is amazing to travel year by year, month by month, day by day, such a great life from childhood: his studies, the curriculum, the subjects, the teachers; from the first information of his birth and his closest relatives that invites us to reconstruct Céspedes in his human and revolutionary dimension to share his extreme sensitivity and to move us with his vibrant words to scrutinize his personality.

It continues with an Introduction, where the author bases the treatment given to each moment of the life and work of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes. He calls for researching and disseminating national history and endowing it with a language of traditions and values to transmit to successive generations all the richness of the thoughts, experiences and most intimate feelings of the forgers of the Cuban nation.

The adaptations he made of plays by French, English and Spanish playwrights are revealed, as well as the creation of his own works, the condition of Céspedes as a musical composer, correspondent of the Economic Society of Friends of the Country, Director in Manzanillo of two insurance companies and expert in chess and fencing. His journalistic work shows the systematic use that Céspedes makes of the newspapers of Santiago de Cuba, Bayamo, Manzanillo, Camagüey and Havana.

The author refers that this is the first time that a broader and more comprehensive work is presented because this study was preceded by some chronological notes published in the first version of the digital Encyclopedia of Carlos Manuel de Cespedes (2009) and in 2018 the Journal of the National Library José Martí brought to light a minimal chronology.

He also points out that in this work he appears for the first time as a jurist of a numerous customers with law firms in Bayamo and Manzanillo.

The chronological notes begin on page 17 from April 18, 1819 with the birth of the famous patriot from Bayamo until his fateful end on February 27, 1874.

It also has a final writing that begins on page 277-titled El camino hacia la gloria eterna (The road to eternal glory) that reveals the route of the four burials of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes in Santiago de Cuba.

It emphatically specifies October 10, 2017, when the fourth exhumation of the remains of Céspedes took place, one of the most moving acts of veneration and patriotic love paid by the people of Cuba to the extraordinary man, to the founding father that together with those of Mariana Grajales were placed in the central patrimonial area of the Santa Ifigenia cemetery, in the front part of the necropolis.

The work presents a very valuable graphic testimony of 38 images that reflect his childhood, his family, properties, revolutionary actions, fragments of epistles, of the Campaign Diary, of the Guáimaro Constitution, drawings of his last days of Hernández Giró and the ceremonial acts that were carried out during the Republic until the current monument where the immortal remains of the famous patriot rest.

It ends with an extensive bibliography that facilitates to locate the notes since the active biography of Céspedes is quite dispersed.

Referencias bibliográficas

Naranjo Tamayo, A.D. (2019). El Estandarte que hemos levantado. Apuntes cronológicos. Carlos Manuel de Céspedes (1819-1874). Ediciones Unhic.

Received: September 14, 2022; Accepted: October 15, 2022

^*Autor para la correspondencia: [e-mail]