The Three Carbonell Cuevas brothers

On 3 October 3 1938, Víctor Carbonell Cuevas arrived at the port of San Juan, Puerto Rico from New York on the ship Borinquen after fighting in Spain for more than a year. He was received by his mother, some veterans of the Spanish Civil War, the consul of the Republic in Puerto Rico, and supporters of the Association for the Spanish Popular Front. The memory of the heroic death of his older brother Pablo in the Battle of Teruel was fresh in his mind, but he did not yet know that his other brother, Jorge, had died leading an infantry assault during the Battle of the Ebro. Three brothers went to fight against imperialist Nazi fascism in Spain… and only one came back!

Pablo was working as a mechanic in Cabo Rojo, his hometown, when the military uprising occurred in Spain. He was married and had children. The youngest of the three, he was studying Agronomy at the College of Engineering and Agriculture of Puerto Rico. Jorge, who was in Madrid studying his second year of Medicine, joined the militias and fought with the Fifth Regiment alongside Colonel Mangada in the mountains around Madrid. At his family’s plea, Jorge returned to Puerto Rico in December 1936.

Six months later, in July 1937, the three Carbonell Cuevas brothers traveled to Spain. After military training in Albacete, they joined the Canadian Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion of the XV International Brigade, which saw its baptism of fire at the Battle of Fuentes de Ebro in October 1937. Later, in December 1937, they fought in the Battle of Teruel, where Pablo was killed while commanding a machine gun unit, and Víctor was wounded in combat.

Jorge survived the retreats from the Aragón front in March 1938 and was promoted to captain. In the early morning of 25 July 1938, he crossed the Ebro River commanding Company 4 of the Canadian battalion. But on 9 September while taking a hilltop in the Sierra de Cavalls, he was struck by a bullet that fatally wounded him. He was buried there.
In 1949, Puerto Rico’s national poet, Juan Antonio Corretjer, wrote these lines in his honor:

To Jorge Carbonell

From your radiant Cabo Rojo,
corsair, fisherman, and sailor,
peasant, soldier, nitrate worker,
follower of Betances, mason, and carbonaro,
rebel, anti-slavery, tumultuous soul,
socialist, guildsman, union man,
sugarcane worker, laborer, and hatmaker,
agitator and revolutionary.

Red, in the end: you rose up, militiaman,
above the Ebro and above fate,
higher than the sword and the hand.

Oh, what glory to know you and to learn from you—
you, first Boricua communist,
a captain more fearsome than death!

JAOC