What if I tell you Maria Teresa Montalvo and O’Farrill, Countess of San Juan de Jaruco, a famous habanera, a widow with four children, but still young, appealing and perfectly encamable, was mistress of King Joseph I, that “Pepe Botella” elevated to the throne of Spain by the grace of His tender brother Napoleon? And that his daughter Maria de las Mercedes Santa Cruz y Montalvo, the very famous Countess of Merlin, was mistress in turn of Jerome Bonaparte, nephew of the Emperor?

Gossip of history?. The truth is that both substantiated by the comments. Lady Holland, in his book My trip to Spain, portrays the Countess of Jaruco as a “beautiful habanera, extremely voluptuous, who lives completely dedicated to the passion of love,” while in a political pamphlet of the time branded as “dissolute and scandalous.” As for the daughter, her biographers, always eager to delve into the dirty sheets, especially for being a woman’s, attribute a few romances, including Prince Jerome, without which we can turn around time know and what were Platonic and Aristotelian what.

The uncle of the Countess of Jaruco, Gonzalo O’Farrill occupied important positions in the court of the Bourbon King will be Finance Minister and the French king. In his palace in Madrid of Carnation Street, home to Maria Teresa, are frequent visits Moratín Quintana and poets and a painter by the name of Francisco de Goya, characters that are pleasing to the Countess as well as exasperate her husband, who prefer to receive on their properties to Don Manuel Godoy, attained the status of super-and exalted as a Prince of Peace through intimate favors taxed at the ugly, toothless Queen Maria Luisa and patient tolerance of simple Carlos IV.

In early 1795, Don Joaquin Santa Cruz and Cardenas, third Earl of San Juan de Jaruco and first Earl of Mopox, husband of Maria Teresa, has been appointed in Madrid chamberlain of Charles IV and do Knight of the Order of Calatrava until through his friendship with the thrust of Godoy and Francisco Arango Havana, the “stateless statesman,” eminence grise of the sugar Creole, he was appointed Deputy Inspector General of the Spanish troops in Cuba and president of a commission would develop plans, almost all designed by Conde himself, for the economic transformation of the island

These positions require you to travel to Cuba again and again and as the Count was away from Madrid malignant rumors abound about the conduct of his wife Maria Teresa. True, and have many years of marriage, they married when he was fifteen and she was twelve. On one such trip, as he was suffering from dropsy, death surprised him in Havana, but it had led Spain to the eldest daughter, Maria de las Mercedes, which was here the care of a grandmother and later as a pupil in the Convent of Santa Clara, where, with ten or eleven years with the help of a nun, managed to escape, never to return.

Beautiful Habaneras
 
It is very beautiful Maria de las Mercedes, although we do not seem so far in the portraits. The Countess of Merlin is his pseudonym is considered one of the first writers of Cuba. She herself, in her book My first twelve years (1832) says that the eleven had reached their full size and very thin but I was so formed as any girl of eighteen. States: “My Creole color, my eyes black and lively, my hair so long it was hard to hold, I got a wild look, which was related to my moral dispositions … and passionate live-out, envisioned the need for repress my emotions, much less to hide. ”

Just thirteen years old when he arrived in Madrid and the Spanish aristocracy pays homage. The besieged soldiers, politicians, writers … Goya, one day, and see his paintings, rather than tables, repairing the fate of the teenager. He says: “As a painter not achieve the glory, but go far as a woman.”

The political events of precipitate. Napoleon, who wants to swallow the whole of Europe, invades Spain. Carlos IV abdicates and force him to move to France, and Godoy is imprisoned, while the Spanish people up in arms against the foreigner and will not cease in their struggle to expel him. The nobles were cowed, and many flee, others stay and, after the initial confusion, seek accommodation next to the French. They include Gonzalo O’Farrill, uncle of the Countess of Jaruco, and the very Countess who, they say, then find comfort to her widowhood in the arms of the usurper king Joseph I.

It was a bad move. When the Bourbons recover the throne in the person of ill-fated Ferdinand VII, son of Charles and Maria Luisa, Countess of Jaruco and had died (Died April 17, 1812 in Madrid, Spain), but the guy suffer exile and the family fortune will be confiscated. By then Maria de las Mercedes, daughter of Maria Theresa, is married to Antonio Christopher Merlin, a French general in Spain received the title of Count. When married, she is twenty years old and he was forty. Do not think, however, in a relationship of convenience, very good game that the General could be in the occupied country. The letters referred to it when he begins in the conquest of Andalusia show a woman in love. They are, says professor Salvador Bueno, letters “written with a certain naivete at times, and others with passionate words and frankly erotic references.” Very different from what you might write to Philarete Chasles, a lover of trashy, failed writer and historian, who takes advantage of the love of the Countess and widow and a stage where the beauty of Merlin urgently needed body work and its economy was cracking .

It is common to find comments on the love life of the Countess of Merlin, Jerome Bonaparte and her lovers Philarete Chasles and admiration that caused her beauty.

These two women and hanging out, according to some commentators, they would like to pay admiration, lovers reveindicandolas as admirable, intelligent fighters, in their capacity as Spanish prostitutes. Cervantes’s sisters were also prostitutes. At that time I had not invented anything that was not written in history, were true or hearsay only. It seems that what is best for learning the arts of love female is going through Cuba, and unless they are told Pepe Botella or Napoleon himself, because Josephine was also Caribbean.

Then, came the Collapse
 
You should also leave Spain the Countess of Merlin before the fall of Joseph I. And I will play to attend, years later in Paris, the collapse of Napoleon. Although excluded from the new court headed by another Bourbon, Louis XVIII, marriage, who has three children, holds a position and residence is visited by many celebrities. Maria de las Mercedes alternate Victor Hugo and Lamartine, Musset, Rossini, Maria Malibran, the celebrated singer, and Domingo del Monte and Jose Antonio Saco, his countrymen, in meetings in which the Countess left hear his beautiful soprano voice.

After my first twelve years, book of 1831, the pen of the Countess of Merlin continued to submit pages to complete a very interesting book. They can be found beyond the literary qualities (actually, unequal), the mosaic of a time told from the unique experience of its author. The said Agnes Sister Story (1832), Memoires et Souvenirs (1836), women’s hobbies in the world (1838), Madame Malinbran, the aforementioned trip to Havana (1844), Lola and Mary and The lionesses in Paris (both 1845) and Le Duc d’Athènes (1852), among other books and articles, form a romantic poetic not to ignore the Cuban literature of a period of full foundation.

CASA DE LOS CONDES DE JARUCO EN LA HABANA

That world begins to crumble with the death of Antonio Merlin, in 1839. Countess travels to Cuba and collects data for its most famous work, The Havane, writing on behalf of slaveholding planters, who give back very good service. Also appear in Spanish, abbreviated and with a foreword by Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda, entitled Travel to Havana. In 1845 he returned to Spain. He wants back what the Bourbons confiscated his. “Never was so well attended pedigüeña” he writes, but nothing does, is to empty-handed.

And comes the end. Surrounded by her children and forgotten by those who both flattered and shone in their classrooms, go get extraordinary death with resignation, the March 31, 1852, at sixty-three years old under the protection of his daughter in the Castle Dissay, on the outskirts of Poitiers, France. A small procession followed his remains to the cemetery of Pere Lachaise Paris. Many years later, Domingo Figarola-Caneda, his most careful biographer, was able to locate his grave. It was covered with grass and there was not an epitaph to remind her to this beautiful Cuban excessively passionate and never was careful to suppress their feelings and emotions.

Agencies/Various/InternetPhotos/TheCubanHistory.com
The Cuban History, Hollywood.
Arnoldo Varona, Editor.

Huber Matos Benítez (26 November 1918 – 27 February 2014) was a Cuban dissident activist and writer.

Previously, he had been a revolutionary who assisted Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and other members of the 26th of July Movement (M-26-7) in successfully overthrowing the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista as part of the Cuban Revolution.

Matos had opposed Batista since the general’s effective coup in 1952, which he regarded as unconstitutional, but became increasingly critical of the movement’s shift towards Marxist principles, and closening ties with leaders of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC). Convicted of “treason and sedition” by the new Castro regime, he would spend 20 years in prison (1959–1979) before being released in 1979.

Matos was born in Yara, in Oriente Province.

He became a school teacher in Manzanillo, while also owning a small rice plantation. Matos joined the Cuban nationalist party Partido Ortodoxo, which the young lawyer Fidel Castro was already a prominent member of.
Revolutionary activity.

A Partido Ortodoxo member at the time of Batista’s coup of 10 March 1952, Matos became involved with the resistance movement to Batista that began gathering steam throughout the country. He soon moved to Costa Rica where he spent the next several years while at the same time back home in Cuba, the struggle against Batista moved to its armed stage, eventually evolving into Cuban Revolution. From Costa Rica, Matos kept in contact with the M-26-7 revolutionaries stationed in Sierra Maestra hills while helping their aims logistically and organizationally. He was also able to get in touch with the president of Costa Rica José Figueres who supported Cuban rebel aims and helped Matos obtain weapons and supplies.

On 31 March 1958, 39-year-old Matos flew a 5-ton air cargo with ammunition and weapons to Castro’s rebels, thus actively joining the resistance in the mountains. On 8 August 1958 Castro awarded Matos the rank of combat commander, giving him the lead of the rebel army’s ninth column that carried the honorary name of Antonio Guiteras, a Cuban leftist politician who had been assassinated more than a decade earlier.

Within six months, the revolutionary movement successfully overthrew Batista and seized control of the country. During the final assault on Santiago de Cuba, Matos led his column. In January 1959 he victoriously rode into Havana atop a tank, alongside Castro and other revolutionaries.

Days later, on 11 January 1959, Matos was appointed as Commander of the Army in the province of Camagüey.
Split with Castro.

In July 1959, Matos made public denunciations of the direction the revolution was taking, with openly anti-communist speeches in Camagüey. This led to a series of disputes between Castro, at that time Prime Minister of Cuba, and President Manuel Urrutia Lleó. Shortly thereafter, Castro replaced Urrutia with the Minister of Revolutionary Laws, Osvaldo Dorticós Torrado. Given his past concerns, Matos found the move troubling and decided to tender his resignation in a letter to Castro. On 26 July, Castro and Matos met at the Hilton Hotel in Havana. The revolutionary leader was in a rather upbeat mood, as over a million people, including several thousand peasants, had flocked to the capital to celebrate the passage of the Agrarian Reform Law.

According to Matos, Castro told him, “‘Your resignation is not acceptable at this point. We still have too much work to do,’ he said. ‘I admit that Raúl and Che are flirting with Marxism… but you have the situation under control… Forget about resigning… But if in a while you believe the situation is not changing, you have the right to resign.'”

In September 1959, Matos wrote, “Communist influence in the government has continued to grow. I have to leave power as soon as possible. I have to alert the Cuban people as to what is happening.” On 19 October, he sent a second letter of resignation to Castro. Two days later, Castro sent fellow revolutionary Camilo Cienfuegos to arrest Matos. During the subsequent meeting between Cienfuegos and Matos, who had grown close during the revolution, Matos says he warned his young colleague that he believed he had been sent to make the arrest so that forces allied with Matos might kill Camilo Cienfuegos. The young revolutionary had become quite popular in the months following the march on Havana, as such, Matos says it was Castro’s intent to eliminate any perceived competition. Cienfuegos, however, is recorded as having supported the arrest of Matos, which is why he had been sent. Cienfuegos mysteriously disappeared en route back to Havana after the securing of Matos and his military adjutants in late October 1959.

Sentencing and imprisonment.

The same day Matos was arrested, Miami Cuban exile Pedro Luis Díaz Lanz, former air force chief of staff under Castro, dropped leaflets into Havana that called for the removal of all Communists from the government. In response, Castro called for a show of hands at a political rally in favor of executing the two dissidents. The crowd responded with “Paredón” (“To the wall.”).

Following the rally, Castro called a government meeting to determine Matos’s fate. Che and Raúl favored execution, and three ministers who questioned Castro’s version of events were immediately replaced by government loyalists. In the end, however, Castro decided against execution, explaining that “I don’t want to turn him into a martyr.”

A trial that began on 11 December 1959, found Matos guilty of “treason and sedition” and sentenced him to twenty years imprisonment, most of which were spent at the Isla de la Juventud, where Castro had been imprisoned in 1953. According to Matos, “prison was a long agony from which I emerged alive because of God’s will. I had to go on hunger strikes, mount other types of protests. Terrible. On and off, I spent a total of sixteen years in solitary confinement, constantly being told that I was never going to get out alive, that I had been sentenced to die in prison. They were very cruel, to the fullest extent of the word… I was tortured on several occasions, I was subjected to all kinds of horrors, all kinds, including the puncturing of my genitals. Once during a hunger strike a prison guard tried to crush my stomach with his boot… Terrible things.”

Matos was released from prison on 21 October 1979, having served out his full term.

Life after prison.

Matos was reunited with his wife and children, who had left Cuba during the 1960s, in Costa Rica. They then moved to Miami where he resided until his death in February of 2014. Matos, and his son Huber Rogelio Matos Araluce (Huber Matos Jr.), became active participants in the U.S.-based opposition to the Castro regime.He wrote a book about his experiences, Cómo llegó la noche (How the Night Came), which is available in Spanish and in French (Et la nuit est tombée).

Matos performed the secretary general duties at Cuba Independiente y Democrática (CID), a Miami-based organization founded in October 1980 in Venezuela.

Matos died at the age of 95 in Miami, Florida. Matos is survived by his wife. They had four children, of whom a son, Huber Matos Jr, also became a prominent revolutionary figure.

Agencies/Various/InternetPhotos/YouTube/TheCubanHistory.com
The Cuban History, Hollywood.
Arnoldo Varona, Editor.