Forgotten for over a century, a major Filipino victory is finally remembered

On June 12, 1898, while Emilio Aguinaldo was declaring Philippine independence in Cavite, Gen. Paciano Rizal, Jose’s older brother, was fighting for it, leading a ragtag Filipino army in a desperate and bloody battle against a large but besieged Spanish colonial force in the center of Lipa, Batangas.

Hundreds of crack Spanish troops were holed up in Lipa’s cathedral and its convento for 11 days in a siege punctuated by street gunfights, sniper fire, and house-to-house combat. Drawing thousands of Filipino defectors from the colonial army and supported by civilian leaders in Lipa, the siege would end in surrender by the Spaniards and a magnanimous victory by the Filipinos, who allowed their enemies and new prisoners of war to march out of the church in dignified military formation (but without their ammunition).

The weapons seized from the defeated Spaniards would be used to arm revolutionaries throughout southern Luzon and as far away as Panay island. Lipa was one of the most significant and dramatic triumphs of the Philippine Army in its comeback year of 1898, helping usher in a short-lived period of peace and freedom in newly independent swaths of territory in the former colony. (The new imperial power US would soon send troops to occupy the Philippines in 1899.)

Yet this pivotal episode in Lipa, led by the national martyr’s kuya and resulting in strategic advances by Filipino revolutionaries, remains untaught in schools, is rarely mentioned in history books, and has been almost totally forgotten.

This Sunday, June 18, a series of events in Lipa will mark the siege’s 125th anniversary, the first time in living memory that any kind of remembrance will take place. Lectures have already been given by scholars and researchers. A military re-enactment of the siege will be mounted in Lipa’s historic plaza and a commemorative plaque will be unveiled.

A new academic article has been published in “Scholarum: Journal of Education,” published by De La Salle Lipa, about the event “that sealed the fate of the Spanish colonial government in Batangas.” The article provides fresh information about the Lipa siege (June 7 to 18, 1898) from the Spanish point of view, based on the memoirs of a Spanish military doctor, Dr. Santos Rubiano, who was an active participant in the siege as the doctor of the wounded. He also later served as one of the negotiators for the surrender that prevented the Spaniards from being annihilated. The memoirs have been translated into English for the first time this year.  

Narrating mostly in a clinical style about the firefights and military maneuvers, Dr. Rubiano also wrote graphically of amputating the arm of the Spanish commander Col. Juan Rodriguez Navas, who was shot by a Filipino sniper as he looked out from the cathedral bell tower to assess the battlefield. Rubiano described his commander’s wound as “the hemorrhaging of small arteries ruptured by the penetration of a Remington (rifle) bullet which, fracturing the left humerus (upper arm bone) in its upper third section, had lodged between the bone splinters and soft tissues opposite the point of entry.” Such attention to detail gives credence to his account of the rest of the event.

But Rubiano could also be lyrical, as he imagined the anguish of indio (what natives were then called) soldiers serving in the Spanish army who had to be disarmed by their Spanish officers who distrusted them. “A sinister spectacle,” Rubiano wrote sympathetically of the indios, “which has forever been engraved in my mind… With what dark colors I imagined the tremendous blow that would be suffered by anyone who realized the gravity of the fact!”

Coming from the enemy side, the memoirs are revealing about the character and behavior of the Filipino army, hastily reorganized in May and June 1898 after the return of Aguinaldo and other revolutionary leaders from exile in Hong Kong. Their arrival, as well as the purported support of the US government, triggered a wave of defections of indios from the Spanish army.

“The memoirs shed light on how the Filipino revolutionaries in 1898 were not only determined in battle, but also benevolent and humane in victory, allowing the Spanish soldiers to depart with their honor intact and even caring for their wounded,” says Diego Magallona, a military history researcher and member of the Republica Filipina Reenactment Group, an organizer of the Lipa siege re-enactment on June 18. “In a way, Dr. Rubiano’s memoirs provide us with evidence that the ideals on which the Filipino nation were built were not mere abstract concepts, but values being put into practice by the Filipino revolutionaries who founded our nation.”

The Rubiano memoirs were first published as a series in a Spanish-language magazine in Spain in 1907 and 1908, and soon relegated to the archives. How they came to be translated into English more than a century later, reviving interest in a forgotten triumph in Philippine history, is itself a notable story.

The memoirs were discovered in 2019 not by a university historian or professional researcher, but by a young, mild-mannered Filipino immigrant in California driven by a passion for the history of his hometown of Lipa. Renz Katigbak, 33, works for a company that manages properties in San Francisco owned by the Philippine government. But much of his downtime is consumed by his devotion to research and writing about Lipa history on the website, Herencia Lipeña. For several years, he has been studying Spanish in order to read archival material available online.

“During my search for historical information on Lipa, I stumbled upon Dr. Santos Rubiano’s memoirs in the National Library of Spain’s online collection of archival books and periodicals,” Katigbak messaged me in response to a series of questions.

“Despite the difficult Spanish writing style, I read the memoirs and learned that they focused on the Philippine Revolution in Lipa. This piqued my interest, and I tried to find a translated version online but I couldn’t find one.”

Katigbak sought out the Lipa-based scholar and former president of La Salle Lipa, Dr. Manuel Pajarillo, FSC, and the both of them teamed up to produce an annotated translation of the Rubiano memoirs that will soon be published as a book. They are also the co-authors of the recently published academic article about the siege in “Scholarum: Journal of Education.”

“Renz’s enthusiasm is a treasure,” Pajarillo told me. “We need more people like him who will point out to us the gems of history that we have not yet seen or cared about as a people.”

One of the objectives of their research is to create material that will be part of the local history curriculum that will be taught in schools.

A seasoned researcher, Pajarillo says he learned a lot from the Rubiano memoirs: “For one, a people must want independence enough and must fight for it. The house-to-house battle for Lipa, like all battles, has not only an admirable face but also an ugly face because the fights for one’s country will have casualties. Second, from the account of an enemy then, I learned about Filipino magnanimity in victory. ‘Trabaho lang po.’ After the battle, the record shows we treated prisoners well. We had honor as a people.”

UPLB professor and historian Gilbert G. Macarandang, who has read the Pajarillo/Katigbak paper on the Lipa siege, believes Rubiano was specifically referring to Tagalog rebels when extolling the behavior of the revolutionaries, citing Dominican friar accounts of maltreatment elsewhere. But in Batangas after the surrender in Lipa, General Miguel Malvar issued an order in Tagalog that “the Spaniards should be treated well. They should not be mocked or subjected to violent acts.”

Macarandang concluded: “Nanatili sa gunita ni Rubiano ang magandang asal ng mga Tagalog (The memory of the Tagalogs’ decency remained with Rubiano)." —JCB, GMA Integrated News