09/22/2023
🇨🇺 Brígida Zaldivar Cisneros, wife of General Vicente Garcia, known as the "León de Santa Rita", a Cuban Freedom Fighter in the war of independence. In 1856 she participated with her husband in a mission that began in Las Tunas. In 1868, the Spanish Colonel Eugenio Laño, who dominated Las Tunas, took the measure to subdue General Vicente Garcia by locking the family in their own house and not allowing any food to enter the home, although a neighbor bribed the post managed and would smuggle milk for the children. Three of her children died in captivity and Brigida remained firm by not asking her husband to lay down his weapons. Brígida participated as a nurse in the assault on Las Tunas on August 18, 1869 and later went to the bush with her children and her husband to fight the Spaniards. Due to the tenacious persecution that his family was subjected to, Vicente Garcia chose to send them into exile to New York, then to Jamaica and later Venezuela. After the Baragua Protest, Vicente Garcia went to Venezuela to meet Brígida, at which point 6 years had passed without seeing each other. On March 4, 1886, Vicente Garcia died in Venezuela. In 1895, when war officially began, Brígida picked up arms once again and returned to Cuba to fight with her daughter María and remained as a soldier until 1898, fighting in the mountains of Cuba along side other Freedom Fighters. On January 25, 1907, she traveled to Las Tunas leading the delegation that brought the remains of Vicente Garcia to Cuba. She then settled in Santiago de Cuba with her daughter Rosa García and in 1916 she returned to Las Tunas and shortly after settled in Havana at CALZADA DEL CERRO # 715 between LA ROSA Y TULIPAN where she died on May 25, 1918.
