In this episode of Women and Resistance, Adesoji Iginla and Aya Fubara Eneli center the life of Rosa Maria Castellanos Castellanos, also known as La Bayamesa, a formerly enslaved Cuban healer, field surgeon, hospital founder, and captain in the Cuban Liberation Army. 

Her story becomes a larger meditation on freedom, women’s labour in war, and how historical memory erases Black women’s leadership.

The conversation moves through slavery, the Ten Years’ War, improvised battlefield medicine, and the hidden networks of women who sustained the Cuban struggle. Rosa’s final reflections sharpen the episode’s core arguments: peace without freedom is not peace, and kindness without watchfulness can be fatal.

Takeaways 

*Rosa Maria Castellanos explains that she was born into slavery in Cuba and was later known as La Bayamesa, a woman from Bayamo.

*She describes becoming a healer, field surgeon, and founder of hospitals for wounded Cuban fighters in the mountains.

*The episode places her life in the context of Cuba’s sugar economy, slavery, and Spanish colonial rule.

*Rosa recounts her mother’s plant knowledge, showing how healing traditions were passed through enslaved Black women.

*She explains how she used green wood ash, heated metal, leaves, bark, and poultices to treat battlefield wounds when no formal medicine was available.

*Her husband, Jose Florentino Varano Estrada, is named as a crucial partner who helped restrain wounded men during treatment and fought beside her.

*The episode highlights the burning of Bayamo by its own people rather than surrendering it back to Spain, framing it as an act of collective resistance.

*Rosa details her work in the Sierra Maestra, where she carried messages, gathered food, mended clothes, made shoes, and treated soldiers without ever being officially appointed.

*The episode emphasises that women in the Cuban wars were not passive supporters but cooks, spies, nurses, couriers, and combatants whose names were often lost.

*Rosa reflects on being called “property” by enslavers and “Capitana” by General Máximo Gómez, underscoring how language tracks power and liberation.

Chapters

00:00 — Introducing Women and Resistance and the mission of recovering erased women’s histories

02:47 — Rosa questions how her story will be told without Spanish and begins her own account

04:59 — Born into slavery, renamed, and shaped by Cuban colonial violence

08:33 — Green wood ash, heated iron, and battlefield medicine under impossible conditions

11:27 — Why Rosa was called La Bayamesa and later Capitana

12:36 — The barracoon, slavery’s daily violence, and why birth dates were lost

18:46 — Her parents’ forced renaming and the memory carried through her mother’s hands

20:13 — Plant medicine, Indigenous knowledge, and healing learned from women and elders

24:13 — Childhood labour, cane fields, and the realities of Cuba’s sugar economy

28:29 — Cuba, Spain, and the long survival of slavery after abolition elsewhere

31:40 — Flowers in her hair as an act of defiance against enslavement

33:30 — Love with Jose Florentino Varano Estrada as a form of freedom

36:13 — The 1868 uprising, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, and the start of the Ten Years’ War

41:13 — Bayamo burned rather than surrendered, and the meaning of choosing freedom

44:26 — Women’s hidden work in rebel camps and Rosa’s many roles beyond nursing

50:32 — Building hidden field hospitals and feeding starving wounded fighters

53:30 — Catching a Spanish spy and the moral complexity of war

56:24 — Máximo Gómez visits the hospital and names her Capitana

58:15 — The Pact of Zanjón and the limits of freedom after the war

61:07 — Martí’s vision of Cuba, the funding of another war, and Rosa returning at 60

63:38 — The Spanish-American War, U.S. intervention, and Cuba’s compromised independence

67:19 — Her godson Nicolás Guillén, her will, and her final legacy

68:42 — Rosa’s death, military honours, and a street renamed in her memory

71:44 — Final lessons: peace without freedom is not peace, and kindness requires watchfulness

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Welcome  to Women and Resistance, a powerful podcast where we honour the courage, resilience, and revolutionary spirit of women across the globe. Hosted by Aya Fubara Eneli Esq and Adesoji Iginla…

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