On Tuesday some Cubans were passing in a train, by the heights of Fordham, returning from the great fair; upon seeing in the horizon a hill, crowned with green, a youth exclaimed: "There is our old General Gonzalez! What a pity!"

Minutes later, at eight in the evening, when the locomotive reached the heart of New York, the youth opened, with hand that forebodes something ill-fated, a telegram that said: "General Gonzalez died this morning."

Far away from his fatherland and from his sons, and lamenting more the forgetfulness of his compatriots than the cruel pains which destroyed his martial body, the second of Narciso Lopez has fallen, the first from whose veins, in combat, shed blood for Cuba; he who was a distinguished Colonel next to Beauregard and Johnston, he who thought of the liberty of his fatherland at the age of eighty, with the same ardor with which he fought for his country half a century ago; has rested forever the old man who never gave up his first ideal: his last thoughts must have been for the land where the Yumuri and the San Juan run noisily, where the palm trees of the magnificent valley which saw his birth, incline their crests as if abated by the deep grief that its veterans are dying, and suffer because they do not rise, to take up the arms that they bestow on us, the youths of today, in whom the disbelief and weakness take away forces to conquer a dignified grave for those who perished in combat, and those who die in the abandonment of expatriation.

Gentleman without flaw, sound Cuban, and virtuous man, Gonzalez in the history of his people has written his name with characters that will never be erased: in his solitary sepulcher, PATRIA, places the flowers of gratitude, the best, the most beautiful, the imperishable ones. That is how we will die, like you, forgotten and without a friendly hand to console us, all the Cubans, cast from our home, if the present generations do not know or do not want to expel once and for all from our soil the one who does not let us live in it with decorum, nor sleep the last dream in the bosom of the free fatherland, under the shadow of our palm trees.