Gonzalo Castañón Escaro was born on December 2, 1834 in Mieres, studied at the University of Oviedo and graduated in Law on January 24, 1859.2 He became known in the press around 1857 as founder of the newspaper La Tradición.
A close friend of Antonio Arango y Valdés, he collaborated with him in many Oviedo newspapers, until he moved to Madrid to join the editorial staff of El Día and later became editor of Crónica de Ambos Mundos.
He returned to Asturias in 1863, and continued to devote himself to journalism and politics. He was provincial deputy for the district of Lena in 1864 and interim professor at the University of Oviedo for a short period of time.
In 1866 he obtained a position in the Government of Cuba, with residence in Havana, so he moved to the Caribbean island. He developed his career as a civil servant as government secretary in Puerto Príncipe (now Camagüey), and then in Havana as section chief of the Spanish Bank of Cuba and advisor of Public Instruction, while collaborating with several Spanish publications.
Gonzalo Castañón promptly assumed as his own the problems of Spain to govern the Cubans, and being passionate as he was, he took sides, getting into political polemics and defending radically Spanish positions, which earned him the enmity of the separatists and insurrectionists.
In 1869 he founded the newspaper La Voz de Cuba, from whose pages he fought against the Cuban independence fighters who in October of the previous year had begun with the Grito de Yara, the struggle for the definitive independence of Cuba from Spanish colonialism.
He died victim of a homicide in Cayo Hueso on January 31 or February 1,1 1870. The year after these events, on November 27, 1871, eight Cuban medical students were executed for an alleged desecration of his mortal remains, which in 1887 were taken to Spain. His remains are in Los Pontones de Telledo, in the Asturian council of Lena.