Juan Bruno Zayas Alfonso: médico y general de brigada en la guerra necesaria.

Juan Bruno Zayas Alfonso was a brilliant military boss and an excellent doctor, who was an example of how to combine both tasks and became one of the most important personalities in the Cuban Independence War. This work compiles, historiographically and documentarily, important aspects of his life, his family origins are pointed out, constituted by merchants and aristocrats on the part of the father, and sacarocrats and shareholders railwaymen on the part of the mother; and the evolution of a member of this family to revolutionary combatant's radical position conformed a social fact of great interest in the Cuban historiography. In a same way, some moments of his childhood are described, his studies--from the high school to his registration in the Medicine and Surgery Faculty--and his work as doctor in different towns of the old county of Las Villas, pointing out that he should be considered as the first Cuban doctor who exercised the rural medicine. Also, the raising from Vega Alta is commented and his meritorious work in the independentist fight, which conferred him in only 14 months the grade of general of brigade, to become in those moments the youngest brigadier in the Liberator Army. Finally, the authors analyzed different versions of his death in combat July 30th, 1895. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]