Candelaria Figueredo

Candelaria Figueredo (born December 11, 1852, Bayamo, Cuba – died January 19, 1914, Havana, Cuba) was a Cuban patriot who fought in the Cuban struggle for independence from Spain.

Life Candelaria Figueredo was the daughter of lawyer Pedro Figueredo y Cisneros, a Cuban nationalist revolutionary who fought against the Spanish in the war of Cuban independence from 1868 known as the Ten Years' War. Her mother was Isabel Vázquez y Moreno.

She herself joined the struggle in October 1868 aged only 16 when her father asked her to carry the independent Cuban flag into battle at Bayamo. She accepted the risky task enthusiastically and entered the town seated on a white horse carrying the newly designed flag.

A large Spanish force recaptured Bayamo in 1869 and she and her family fled into the Sierra Maestra where they lived the lives of fugitives constantly on the run. On July 15, 1871, she was captured by the Spanish, together with her 14-year-old sister and 12-year-old brother. They were imprisoned in the Fortress of Zaragoza in Manzanillo, where they were interrogated. Candelaria, and her siblings were finally ordered to leave Cuba by October 17, 1871, or face deportation to the island of Fernando Poo (now called Bioko) off the west coast of Africa. They sailed from Manzanillo on the schooner Annie bound for New York on October 13, despite there being a hurricane in the vicinity. Candelaria is supposed to have persuaded the captain to sail with the words: "It is a question of necessity. I prefer a thousand times to be food for the sharks than that of the Spaniards".

She was reunited there with her mother and other sisters in Key West, Florida.