Caribbean P-93a 100 pesos 1959 UNC Crisp Uncirculated

You will receive a banknote of the design indicated from 1959 UNC Crisp Uncirculated 

Signature: Felipe Ραzοs and Rufo López Fresquet

Note: this is NOT the version with C.G.'s signature, that is the P-93b from 1960. 

Francisco Vicente Agυilerα y Tamayo (1821–1877)

Landowner-aristocrat turned revolutionary — one of the paradoxical founders of the independence movement: a man born into colonial privilege who voluntarily dismantled his own world.

Before the rebellion — the oligarch who defected from his class

Born in Βαyαmο, in the east, into one of the wealthiest creole families on the island.
He owned:

• vast cattle estates

• sugar properties

• enslaved laborers

• political influence in the Spanish colonial system

Unlike later urban nationalists, his outlook came from the provincial planter elite — the same social stratum that normally defended Spain because stability protected property.

That makes his transformation structurally important: independence did not begin as a peasant revolt; it began when parts of the ruling class stopped believing empire served their interests.

1868 — the Ten Years’ War

Aguilera joined Carlos Manuel de Céspεdεs, the man who issued the Grito de Yara and freed his slaves.

Aguilera went further than rhetoric:

• freed his enslaved workers

• burned his own plantations rather than let Spain use them

• financed the rebellion with his fortune

• became Vice President of the insurgent Republic in Arms

In effect he converted capital → legitimacy. The revolution gained credibility because a magnate willingly destroyed the economic logic of the colonial era.

Political philosophy

He represented a strand different from later populist nationalism: Creole republicanism. Not anti-Spanish in ethnicity — anti-colonial in sovereignty.

Goal: The country governed by property-holding citizens under liberal republican law.

So the early independence movement was closer to 19th-century Atlantic revolutions (US, Latin American republics) than to 20th-century anti-imperial socialism.

Exile and death

Spain’s military superiority crushed the uprising’s early phase.
Aguilera was sent abroad to raise diplomatic and financial support.

He died impoverished in New York in 1877 — after sacrificing one of the largest fortunes in the country to a war that would not succeed until 1898.

Why he matters

The nation's memory often centers on José Mαrtί, the poet-ideologue.

Aguilera represents a different archetype: the elite who defects from the system that created him. Without figures like him, independence would have remained a regional insurgency rather than a national project.

He is less remembered precisely because he solved the legitimacy problem early — and later heroes inherited the symbolic stage.