Ana Betancourt - Infinite Women

Born: 14 February 1832, Cuba
Died: 7 February 1901
Country most active: Cuba
Also known as: NA

Women’s rights activist Ana Betancourt became a national heroine of Cuba in the war for independence from Spain.
Born into a wealthy Creole family in 1832, at age 22 she married a revolutionary who encouraged her to educate herself and broaden her understanding of the world beyond her sheltered upbringing. When the Ten Years War – the first of three wars for Cuban independence – began in 1868, Betancourt organized supplies for the freedom fighters, secretly stored weapons in her home and helped to spread. With her husband off fighting, her home became a command center for the revolution, but she was forced to flee when Spanish forces discovered her activities. Within months, she had gained a reputation as a Mambisa (a woman guerilla fighter) and was named an agent of the Camagüey Revolution Committee.
In March 1869, Betancourt spoke during the Constitutional Assembly in the jungles of Guáimaro during the Guáimaro Constitution, where she advocated for women to have more freedoms under a new government. She connected the women’s rights struggles to the oppressions of colonialism and slavery, declaring “You destroyed the slavery of color by emancipating the servants. The time has come to set women free.” She had to deliver her fiery speech at a public rally because her petition to the newly created Chamber of Deputies could not be read to the assembly by a woman, meaning a male friend delivered it on her behalf.
In 1871, she and her husband were ambushed by Spanish. Betancourt’s quick thinking enabled her husband to escape, but the arthritis in her legs prevented her from fleeing with him. The Spanish kept her tied up under a tree for three months before she was able to escape. She left the country, travelling to the United States, Mexico, El Salvador and, ironically, Spain. She was in Jamaica when she received news of her husband’s execution in 1875.
At the time of her death in 1901, Cuba was occupied by the United States, and her body could not be returned to her homeland until 1978, when she was buried in the pantheon of the Revolutionary Armed Forces in Havana’s Colón Cemetery. She was later reinterred in a mausoleum built in her honor in Guáimaro. Today, the Order of Ana Betancourt is awarded to Cuban women who “demonstrate revolutionary and internationalist merit and anti-imperialist fidelity and/or great merit in a field of work that contributes to the national interest.”

The following is excerpted from “400 Outstanding Women of the World and the Costumology of Their Time” by Minna Moscherosch Schmidt, published in 1933.

Born in Camagiiey and married Ignacio Mora y Pera in August, 1854. When the preparatory work of the revolution was started in Camagiiey, during 1868, she took an active part together with her husband, who was executed by the Spanish troops on October 14, 1875. Besides this cooperation with her husband, she is a significant, outstanding and important figure in the history of Cuba, as she was the precursor of women’s political rights in Cuba.
She proclaimed these rights at Guaimaro on the occasion of the organization of the powers of the Republic in arms, on April, 1869.
The first president of the Republic in arms, Carlos Manuel de Cespedes, remarked, that history when describing the decisive moments of the national life, would narrate the fact that Ana Betancourt, in advance of her time, pleaded the emancipation of women.