Julio Mangada

Julio Mangada Rosenörn (June 30, 1877 Sancti Spíritus, Cuba – April 14, 1946, Mexico City) was a prominent Spanish Republican Army officer during the Second Spanish Republic and the Spanish Civil War.

His father had also been a garrison commander stationed in Cuba; his grandfather had been head of a college for young men, while his grandmother headed a girls' and young women's school. One day, he wrote in his autobiography, some of his grandfather's students left college to form a guerrilla detachment dedicated to the independence of Cuba. Home life for him was such that as a four-year-old amongst the soldiers of the garrison his father commanded as infantry captain he would hear the cry "Viva Cuba libre!" and did not think it strange. In Spain, at the age of eight, on the occasion of the republican rebellion of General Villacampo, he ran to the Guadalajara railway station to hear rebels joining with children in cries of "Viva la República!"

As a little boy, he writes, he often heard about Volapük, an earlier constructed language to which his father was somewhat sympathetic. His friend, some teachers at high school and normal school, as well as teachers at the military engineering academy, belonged to a Volapük club, and he sometimes heard them speaking about the need and utility for an auxiliary international language. In his infancy and boyhood, he writes, he experienced "many of the evils of clericalism," when after having lost his mother his father remarried, and his stepmother was "terribly bigoted."

A professional soldier, well known for his progressive and often radical ideas, Mangada began his military career in 1896 by joining the Infantry Academy, where he was commissioned as a lieutenant. On May 1, 1900, as a young infantry lieutenant of the Sicilian 7th Regiment stationed in San Sebastián de los Reyes, a soldier who had heard him express some private views in sympathy to the proletarian celebration of May Day, denounced him to his colonel, and he was arrested. In 1904 he began a close friendship with journalist and writer José Nakens, who constantly battled reactionaries and struggled tirelessly to achieve a Spanish republic. In 1906, he writes, he had been promoted to captain, but to his great chagrin had to visit his new friend in a cell where Nakens had been imprisoned after having been suspected of agitation in favour of the murder of King Alfonso XIII. Other republicans visiting him in prison invited Mangada to join the Masons, which he did. About the same time he met then-Captain (later General) José Perogordo, who taught him the Esperanto language.

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