ABSTRACT
Emilio Bernabe de la Caridad Sanchez Fonts (Emilio Sanchez) was born on June 10, 1921, in the rural village of Senado in the eastern Province of Camaguey to an old and prominent family of Spanish descent that was among the leading Cuban households in the sugar and cattle industries. The first Sanchez family member to reach Cuba was Don Mateo Sanchez Pereira, who arrived in Havana from the city of Valladolid in the Yucatan Peninsula, at the very beginning of the seventeenth century. In the early nineteenth century, a family descendant by the name of Bernabe Sanchez-Pereira y Sanchez-Pereira, who was born in Puerto Principe and baptized in the city’s Cathedral on June 16, 1789, enlisted in the Spanish military during the Peninsular War as a Second Lieutenant of the Royal Guards, receiving a medal of distinction for his efforts in the gruesome Battle of Albuera in 1811.
