How sad and gloomy must the city of Havana have looked on November 27, 1871, when the sentence was signed for the eight young medical students?
Almost all of them were children, between the ages of 16 and 21; all of them were patriots, but none of them were guilty of the serious crimes they were accused of. This episode has been recounted many times, and it is worth repeating because, 154 years later, the mark left by those innocent young men remains indelible.
Days before the event, a group of first-year medical students waited for their anatomy professor in the amphitheater of the old San Dionisio Asylum, adjacent to the Espada Cemetery. Unfortunately for the students, the professor would not arrive on time.
Faced with the delay, they decided to attend the dissection practice. Some entered the cemetery and walked around the grounds, which was not prohibited. Anacleto Bermúdez, Ángel Laborde, José de Marcos y Medina, and Juan Pascual Rodríguez wandered around, climbing onto the cart used to transport the corpses. That trivial act would be their death sentence.
Among them was a 16-year-old boy who picked a rose from the cemetery garden. A flower—just one flower—cost Alonso Álvarez de la Campa his life. From that moment on, the fate of those five students was sealed. The accusation? They had scratched the niche of Gonzalo de Castañón, a preacher who had advocated the extermination of Cubans while in the service of the Spanish Crown. Evidence proved that those scratches dated back much earlier. Was their existence reason enough to shed innocent blood?
The other three were chosen at random: Eladio González y Toledo, Carlos Augusto de la Torre, and Carlos Verdugo, who was not even in Havana when the events took place.
Heaven cried out for their lives, cut short in the prime of youth. Meanwhile, their mothers died of grief and their fathers of helplessness. To the eight were added the Abakuá blood of five brave men who tried to rescue the students, and they too had families.
Finally, a volley of gunfire rang out, repeated three times. It was November 27, at twenty past four in the afternoon. "Tremendous pain, inconceivable pain, oppressed our hearts!" It was the pain of the homeland, which today remembers the human fear of those young people when, moments before their death, they still did not understand why they were being accused.
