Agramonte grows as a hard stone

Camagüey. Lips, paws and machetes against a máuseres square. The bullet to the mambí, the bayonet to the beast and the bleeding cuts amid a bugle touch that incites to the degüello.

The war was much crueller of the imaginable thing and of her the Homeland of heroes was populated, sometimes more humanized by the history and other wrapped up ones in legends of paladins.

Ignacio Agramonte`s life, as well as his death, lock in a hearth the admirable hero's qualities, of the lover husband and of the unyielding boss.

Gallant, shaft shyster and talented swordsman of unbeaten bereavements, left behind the books of the French Revolution and the afternoons with Amalia Simoni to become sublime military strategist.

But in Agramonte it is necessary to see the man that evolved in the war, the one that, without stopping to be impetuous and to differ with other generals and until with the President of the Republic of Cuba in Weapons, maintained the Flag of the Red Triangle on high in crisis moments.

To the hesitations he opposed himself in the Whereabouts of the Mines, and with shame he saved to the Revolution when his same leggings hid the frayed pant; it also radicalized his thought even supporting the capture of his small family. To him and the temper that it infused to his chivalry is owed the glorious Rescue of Sanguily.

He was feared and he was loved. With hefty hand he tried to his troops, maintained in the forests shops of war and his centaurs crossed streams like the weapon more feared by the colonial power; however, it is exposed too much, as his idolized wife.

The death could be casual, and although dozens of versions narrate the fact, the later one burns of its cadaver it still took more glorious halo to its existence and he opened parenthesis to the investigations.

In an important intent to tie countless loose ends, a group of historians and military experts took out to the light the title “Ignacio Agramonte and the Combat of Jimaguayú”, of the editorial Social Sciences, in which the real dimension of the combative action is demonstrated.

Today multiple details can be known thanks to the documental evidences, and truly that passage was not so simple. With the mission of avenging the lieutenant's colonel death Leonardo Abril after the defeat of the Coca plantation of the Olympus, José Rodríguez León, of same hierarchy that the previous one, didn't allow that his chivalry fell in the trap of pursuing the Cubans.

According to Ramón Roa, El Mayor only wanted a skirmish and would be seen the troops again in the Guayabo, but everything seemed to indicate that it was his decision to direct the combat and not to participate directly.

Henry Reeve undertook it against the mounted guerillas fighters, but its impulse was braked by the fire, and in the left, the infantry villareña neither was able to pass to the offensive. The combat was prolonged with the action of several companies, and then he decided to go to the herdsman's center where the abundant guinea grass and streams hid to marksmen of 6ta o'clock. Company. There, a bullet reaped the life, and its wallet and pictures accused later hours its identity. Among the Cubans it reigned the confusion, the grief and the bewilderment in the face of the absence after the retreat of the scenario.

“There was not anything mysterious, catastrophe neither twisted in the biggest General Ignacio Agramonte`s death (…) The chance in the war is as present as the necessity”, according to the recent compilation.

May 25 had bosses' meeting in Victoria of The Tunas, and it is necessary to wonder if the Big Guerra had finished in the same way with an Agramonte invader together with Gómez. Those “there was” they don't exist and El mayor was one alone and he died today ago in Jimaguayú 136 years.

Fortunately the Generalissimo was able to use with effectiveness the instrument that he left well tuned: the chivalry.

As the missing minstrel wrote Miguel Escalona in 1972: “This death is not yours, bigger (…) because there is not death that rides. Because there is not alive chest that descends. Because there is not body that transcends of the wound. Because there is not death that he leaves us with the life.”(Oreidis Pimentel Pérez )