EL GRITO DE LARES & THE FIRST POLITICAL PRISONERS (1868)
The Puerto Rican independence tradition dates its calendar from September 23, 1868, when hundreds of rebels organized by Ramón Emeterio Betances proclaimed the Republic of Puerto Rico in the mountain town of Lares before Spanish forces crushed the rising. Some 475 rebels were imprisoned in Arecibo and Aguadilla, where dozens died of yellow fever in the crowded cells before an 1869 amnesty freed the survivors.
Lares gave the movement its flag, its martyrs, and its anniversary — the date on which the Macheteros' founder Filiberto Ojeda Ríos would be killed by the FBI 137 years later. Every subsequent generation of independence prisoners, under Spain and then under the United States, has claimed the lineage of Lares.