It served as a sample for the young women of New Orleans to make the flag that led Narciso López’s expedition and that waved for twenty-four hours in the city of Cárdenas on May 19, 1850.
Emilia Teurbe Tolón returned to Cuba in 1856.
By: Norma Normand Cabrera
It’s April, and in the city that never sleeps, spring is slowly waking up, releasing flowers and other beautiful things. A ship arrives in the city, and on board is a young woman from Matanzas, a wealthy family whose separatist ideas had just made her the first woman exiled from Cuba for political reasons. 19th century, of course. The author doesn’t know the time. Only that she was 24.
Only that it was New York in 1950.
Emilia Teurbe Tolón has come to seek the flag.
Six years earlier, just turned 16, she had married her cousin Miguel Teurbe Tolón, known as the “poet of freedom ,” who was linked to the conspiratorial plans of Narciso López. Narciso’s conspiracy was discovered in 1848, and Miguel, who knew how to live in a colonial setting. Miguel fled to the United States, while Emilia remained in the city of Matanzas, taking care of the family estate.
They were spied on, of course. The Spanish. The compromising communication between the couple was spied on by the colonial authorities and gave rise to several legal proceedings, one of which accused Emilia of being an informer and collaborating with her husband in the conspiracy plans. Subjected to interrogations, searches, and house arrest, she was finally deported from Cuba.
And now she has come to find Miguel and his people, the conspirators, at a time when final preparations were being made for the expedition that would land in Cuba to begin the uprising against Spanish colonial rule.
Almost a year earlier, in June 1949, Miguel Teurbe Tolón, at the urging of Narciso López and with the collaboration of the writer Cirilo Villaverde and other émigrés, had designed on paper the flag that would identify the combatants in their struggle against the Spanish forces.
Emilia arrived in New York and, as soon as she disembarked, was commissioned to translate the design onto canvas. She joined white and blue silk ribbons—the five stripes. With a scrap of red silk, she formed the triangle. The star was also silk and had a white braided trim. The embroidered pattern measured eighteen inches long by eleven and a half inches wide. It served as a sample for the young women of New Orleans to make the flag that led Narciso López’s expedition and that flew for twenty-four hours over the city of Cárdenas on May 19, 1850.
Emilia Teurbe Tolón returned to Cuba in 1856.
To live in Havana, of course.
She had married Dr. Luis Rey de Perault two years earlier, after her marriage to her cousin Miguel had ended. In 1884, she was widowed from the doctor and later married Juan de Dios Estrada Companioni, from Camagüey, with whom she traveled to Spain. She was sixty years old. She left Cuba so she wouldn’t die without seeing her flag on El Morro. Before that, she donated all her assets to the Economic Society of Friends of the country, to benefit free education.
She died in Madrid on August 22, 1902.
In 1950, the Centennial Year of the Flag, the Congress of the Republic officially proclaimed her the Incarnation of Cuban Women, and the Ministry of Communications issued a stamp collection in her honor.
The flag she embroidered, kept and guarded by patriotic hands throughout time, is exhibited in the Museum of the Revolution.
Since August 23, 2010, the remains of Emilia Teurbe Tolón, brought from Spain, have rested in the Colón Cemetery in Havana. The Lone Star flag flies over her tomb.