It was approximately 30 hours before the end of 1959. In the warehouses of the Bank of Agricultural and Industrial Development of Cuba (BANFAIC) located in the town of Maffo, some 890 kilometers from Havana, an armed group of Fulgencio Batista’s army was resisting the siege of the Rebel Army and refusing to surrender.
It was the last fortified redoubt of the tyranny on the road to the city of Santiago de Cuba and at the same time, the last position towards the victory of the Rebel Army and the people of Cuba, against the tyrannical government of Batista.
That December 30, 1958, the Commander in Chief Fidel Castro Ruz, dialogued for the third time in 20 days of combat, with Lieutenant Regueira Luaces and offered him arguments about the uselessness of the resistance and the decrease of the resources to sustain the siege inside the BANFAIC ships.
In a heated moment of the discussion, the following dialogue between Fidel Castro and Regueira Luaces took place:
- Fidel: “…and after you run out of food, let’s assume that you have enough for five months (…) what are you going to do?
- Regueira: “…Well, then I give up”.
- Fidel: “… No, then you commit suicide you and all the officers of the battalion, because if you, knowing that you are lost, that all the reinforcements have been destroyed, that you have no chance of maintaining a combat here, sacrificing lives of revolutionary combatants and sacrificing lives of soldiers, then you have to commit suicide…”
Regueira Luaces withdrew to the interior of the BANFAIC knowing that immediately the rebel command would send to its vicinity a tanker loaded with gasoline, guarded by an armored tank, perfected for these purposes in the workshops of Central America.
The BANFAIC ships could become a blazing inferno in a moment. However, sanity prevailed. At 5:30 in the afternoon of December 30, 1958, the surrender of the remains of Battalion 10 of the dictatorship’s army, commanded by Commander Leopoldo Hernandez Rios, at the BANFAIC in Maffo, took place.
The road to the freedom of Santiago de Cuba was free.