Before the firing squad, with sore and bloody feet, but immensely patriotic, Perucho stood before history and, along with his own words of war, permeated the most intimate fibers of the Cuban nation when he exclaimed, minutes before his last breath, that "to die for the country is to live".

The heartbreaking passage describes the fateful day of August 17, 1870, when a Spanish battalion struck down, in Santiago de Cuba, the sick and helpless body of Pedro Felipe Figueredo Cisneros –our eternal Perucho–, whose outcome was as epic as his entire life.

Besides, it is that Figueredo was more than the mambí chief who bequeathed us for all time the notes of his Bayamesa, which became the National Anthem; and the courageous patrician who lit the independence fires under the leadership of his dear friend Carlos Manuel de Céspedes.

Perucho was more.

He was the man who gave up all his material luxuries to go to the jungle to defend the deferred dream of a free Cuba, and then burned his properties in the insurgent Bayamo that burned down the city on January 12, 1869.He was also the Major General of the Liberation Army and Secretary of War, who left us the example of a sublime father, since his inexperienced daughter Canducha was the standard-bearer of the armed corps.

With a penetrating gaze, tall stature and sweet character, Perucho knew how to combine with amazing skill his tasks as an illustrious lawyer, excellent musician and acute writer, with those of a reckless conspirator and a sagacious patriot, in whom the beautiful feelings of rebellion and freedom nested.

When evoking him, Martí would affirm with deep certainty that redeemer "raised the dormant decorum in the breasts of men."