Díaz-Canel paid homage to executed medical students

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez led in this city the commemoration of the 153rd anniversary of the execution of the eight medical students, a traditional ceremony that gathers hundreds of students every year in a pilgrimage from the University of Havana to the monument build in Old Havana in remembrance of the vile murder.

On November 24, 1871, first-year medical students were at school waiting for their professor, Pablo Valencia, but when they heard that he would be late several of them decided to attend Dr. Domingo Fernandez Cubas’s dissection practice.

According to historical notes, some of them went in the cemetery and, as they walked through its courtyards, one of them, Alonso Alvarez de la Campa, picked a flower in front of the main office, which kindled the wrath of the caretaker, named Vicente Cobas, who accused the boys of scratching the glass that covered the niche keeping the remains of the Spanish journalist Gonzalo Castañón, director of La Voz de Cuba and spokesman of the volunteer corps, who had been killed by a Cuban patriot in Key West.

The students were arrested and prosecuted in a summary trial, but the verdict was not accepted, so there was a second one in which five of them got the maximum penalty, along with another three students chosen at random to satisfy the volunteers’ cry for blood.hree days later, on November 27, 1871, the eight students sentenced to death were taken to an esplanade of La Punta fortress and executed in one of the most atrocious crimes committed in Cuba by Spanish colonialism.