MADRID, Spain.- On March 11, 1876, he was born in Sancti Spíritus, in the Mambí camp of La Reforma, at the height of the Ten Years’ War, the fourth son of Bernarda Toro and Generalissimo Maximo Gomez. They called him Francisco, but he went down in the history of Cuba as Panchito Gómez Toro.
met Jose Marti in the Dominican Republic in 1892, where they would meet again in June 1893. The next meeting would be in the United States almost a year later. Panchito accompanied him on his revolutionary propaganda trip through North American, Central American and Caribbean cities; period that would influence the personality of the young man. The journey included Key West, where they visited Fermín Valdés Domínguez and the three of them took a photo in May 1894. Francisco wrote: “Placing myself between those two men is like hearing someone say to me: walk the path of duty as they have they walked (…)”.
On September 8, 1896, Panchito arrived in Cuba on the steamer Three Friends (Three brothers), south of Pinar del Río, and joined the troops of Lieutenant General Antonio Maceo. After the Invasion of the West, which ended in Mantua, in just three months, Maceo took over the direction of the Western Department (Matanzas, Havana and Pinar del Río), he was here when Panchito arrived, whom he had carried as a child, and He appointed his assistant with the rank of lieutenant. Panchito participated in combats such as those of Ceja del Negro, Manaja, Tumbas de Estorino, El Rubí and Bejerano; in the latter he was wounded in the left shoulder.
On December 4, with a group of his men, including Panchito, Maceo circumvented the trail from Mariel to Majana, between Pinar del Río and Havana, to respond to a call from Gómez from the center of the country. On the 7th they camped in San Pedro and around 3:00 in the afternoon the combat began in which the Lieutenant of the Liberation Army and his assistant, already a captain, at only 20 years of age, lost their lives.
Panchito, because he was wounded, had received an order to remain in the camp, but when he found out that before the enemy fire the mambises withdrew and Maceo’s corpse was left on the ground, he went looking for him and fell wounded; He tries to commit suicide so that they don’t capture him alive, but a Spaniard finishes him off with a machete to the head.
Eighteen brave men, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Juan Delgado, rescued the corpses of the Spanish guerrillas who were stripping them of their belongings. That night the insurgents washed the bodies of Maceo and Panchito and kept a watch over them. They decided to hide them on the Cacahual farm, owned by Pedro Pérez, Delgado’s uncle, where they were secretly buried. After exhumation in 1899, they rest in the Mausoleum of El Cacahual.
