June, 2024: “First I let myself cut off a hand before writing to my husband to make him a traitor”; this is how Amalia Simoni Argilagos categorically answered when, in the middle of the Ten Years’ War and prisoner of the Spanish forces, she was asked to write to her husband, Ignacio Agramonte, so that he would abandon the fight.
Born on June 10, 1842 in a wealthy family of Puerto Principe, Amalia Camagüey lived in Europe, where she perfected her knowledge of English, French and Italian, and on her return to her hometown she began dating Ignacio Agramonte y Loynaz, with whom she married in August 1868.
At the beginning of the insurrectional fight for the independence of Cuba, the young husband commits himself in the conspiratorial works and participates actively in the preparation of the uprising in Camagüey, and Amalia who turned out to be a woman committed with her time, left behind her city comforts and to go to the insurrection camps, where she was an active collaborator of the Mambo forces, she rendered services in field hospitals, suffered the rigors of the jail and then of the exile.
To subsist and help the family she gave piano and singing lessons, and after the death of her beloved husband she kept her decision to continue her contributions to the libertarian cause; protected by the revolutionary emigration, she worked in the patriotic clubs and offered charitable functions for the armed struggle.
José Martí, who recognized the value of this independence fighter, wrote in the newspaper Patria: “For the dignity and strength of her life; for her rare intelligence and her modesty and great culture; for the tender and touching affection with which she accompanies and guides in the world her two children, the children of the hero, Patria respects and admires Mrs. Amalia Simoni, the widow of Ignacio Agramonte”.
When the Necessary War organized by José Martí ended without independence, Amalia tenaciously opposed Yankee interventionism and the Platt Amendment; the government offered her economic aid for being the widow of Major Ignacio Agramonte, but she rejected it stating: “My husband did not fight to leave me a pension, but for the freedom of Cuba”.
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