Summary: The family was of a comfortable economic position, loving and sensitive in spirit, with Creole roots marked by Camagüey identity and tradition, from such a home came the Bachelor of Arts Eduardo Calixto de Jesús Agramonte y Piña. Graduated in Medicine and Surgery in Barcelona, he joined the military career with his compatriots. This is how the the patriot and the doctor began his epic of struggles.
The surgeon and the teacher
It was on October 13, 1864 that Eduardo Agramonte from Camagüey took his final degree exams to graduate with a degree in Medicine. The grades were outstanding. Days later, on the 24th, he was invested to practice as a Surgeon. Emilio, his brother, had almost finished his studies in Civil and Canon Law at the same county university. At the same time, his second brother, José de Jesús, attended his second education in France.
He returned to Cuba, to his hometown of Puerto Príncipe, to begin professional practice at the San Juan de Dios Hospital. Shortly after, on September 28th, 1865, he requested from the Ministry of Public Instruction a chair to teach at the Institute of Application or Second Education of Puerto Príncipe, intending to teach Rhetoric and Poetics, Spanish Grammar and the French Language.
On October 16th, the superior civil governor of the Island appointed him to the chair to exercise it. On the 21st, the prinipeño city council received its approval. Already at the Institute he shared classrooms with other professors and students of similar political projections, who were part of the cultured society El Liceo, which they soon left to go to war.
The patriot.
The Philharmonic Society contributed a little more than 57 of its members to the insurrectional movement, to get out of its halls to combat Spanish colonialism in the Greater Antilles, in 1868. Eduardo Agramonte joined the executive of the Revolutionary Board of Puerto Príncipe and the patriotic Tínima Lodge No. 16. He was also present in the preliminary meetings of the insurrection, and in the main political events in the city and in the liberation combats in the battlefield , in the meeting of the Paradero de Las Minas against the traitor plot of Napoleon Arango, and to propel the revolution towards the triumph of independence, on November 26th 1868. Four days after the date of the Camagüey uprising, he would have said to his father: “I am not in great danger,” as if misfortunes and the threat of death in war were not constant.
Later, he enriched his record of services to the country with the appointment in the Guáimaro Assembly of the Secretariat of the Interior, in April 1869. In that position he insisted on enforcing the most radical and revolutionary measure that could be adopted in those political circumstances, the decree that declared the citizens of the Republic in Arms free. Then, after his resignation, he went to the House of Representatives as Representative for the State of Camagüey.
Death in combat
It was on March 8th, 1872 when the cavalry and infantry of the San Quintín Battalion assaulted the area of the Sierra de San José del Chorrillo, where, among others, the families of the deposed general Manuel de Quesada and his own were in their huts.. Several Cubans were wounded by the first shots of the Spanish infantry: Captain Ignacio Miranda, Commander Aurelio Sánchez, Captain Calixto Perdomo… One shot was enough to knock Colonel Eduardo Agramonte, the composer of the Army’s bugle calls, from his horse, cousin of Major Ignacio Agramonte Loynaz.
Two years after the tragedy, when his brother evoked his memories, the musical pedagogue Emilio Agramonte, an acquaintance of José Martí, wrote to the grieving wife Matilde Simoni Argilagos in Camagüey: «More than a year and a half has passed, my dear Matilde, since the unfortunate and glorious death of our Eduardo, and even (sic.) the feeling caused by the loss of the best of husbands, the best of brothers, has not diminished one iota. When I read the details of his death in a Spanish newspaper, I did not doubt its veracity for a moment, because I knew his ardent and honorable character, and I was sure that he would die in combat against the enemies of his homeland ».
The paradigm of doctor and patriot that turned Eduardo Agramonte Piña into a Cuban hero deserves consideration among our current youth. For the man from Camagüey who knew how to lead the profession of Medicine and the fight against an Empire with dignity and manliness, in the current Cuban situation, let us keep this example in mind in case the Northern Empire’s intention to try to take over Cuba by force occurs.
Translated by: Aileen Álvarez García
