Havana, Cuba, Aug 26.- Few Americans know that some 150 years ago a Cuban woman named Loreta Janeta Velazquez, wore men clothes to be able to fight in the US 1861-1865 American Civil War for the Confederate States. Some say fiction, some say true, but the story goes that Janeta, traveled from Cuba to New Orleans when she was still a young lady.
Later, when the war broke out between the Federal Union or northern states and the Confederate of southern states, she asked a tailor to make her a soldier uniform to join the war and take sides with the Confederate States.
Under the name of Officer Harry T. Buford, the Cuba-born woman led a regiment in Arkansas and she participated in the battles known as Bull Run, Balls Bluff, Fort Donelson and Shiloh, where she was wounded. She then took sides with the Federal Union and acted as a spy during the war, which was finally won by the North.
However, her story was unknown till very recently in the United States despite she wrote about her experience her memoirs under the title “Woman in the Battle.”
However, Ecuadorian moviemaker Maria Agui Carter, who also emigrated to the U.S. at an early age, found her biography and dedicated many years of her life to a deep research into the life of Loreta Janeta and she disclosed the truth about the Cuban woman in the astonished eyes of those who have learned about it.(ACN)
