This book is the product of an investigation that, with greater or lesser intensity, lasted over twenty-five years and extended to a dozen countries. Juan Maso Parra is perhaps the most controversial figure produced during the nineteenth-century Cuban fight for independence and, at the same time, one of the least known. A fighter in the three wars that bloodied the Island between 1868 and 1898, Juan Maso Parra entered the independence ranks at an early age and abandoned them five days before the arrival in Havana of the battleship Maine whose bombing determined the entry o the United States into the war against Spain. Given these circumstances, Juan Maso Parra proposed - and the Spanish authorities agreed - to organize a brigade of Cuban ex-combatants to fight against the invaders of North America. After the defeat of Spain, Maso Parra was ignored by chroniclers and historians, and his name disappeared from the national discourse. This work, in addition to being a biographical essay, also reveals novel information about how Cuba became an independent country.