Gómez

The Visigoths left Iberia a stock of personal names that outlived their kingdom, and most of those that reached Castilian are compounds, two heroic elements bolted together and latinised by notaries. Gome sits oddly there. It is no compound and it claims nothing, coming from Gothic guma, the ordinary word for a man, with cognates in Old English and Old High German and kin to Latin homo; Spanish philology reads the surname as an apocope of Gomesco, son of Gome. Most of the great -ez names carry a war name or a saint's; this one carries the word for an adult male and no more.

The suffix is disputed too, and here that matters. The usual account traces it to the Latin genitive -ici, son of, fixed to the father's forename after the Visigothic settlement. A rival account traces it instead to Gothic -iks, and Spanish scholarship has settled on neither. For Gomez the argument decides whether the name is Germanic in both halves or only in its root.

Gomes is the Portuguese and Old Galician form, Gomis the Catalan, Gomez the ninth commonest surname in Spain: the National Statistics Institute counted 491,345 people carrying it as a first surname on 1 January 2021, thickest in Segovia at 2.399 per cent, then Cantabria and Huelva. There was never one Gomez family to descend from: the word for a man was available to every parish in Castile at once, so the patronymic was minted over and over by unrelated households. Portuguese Gomes stands twelfth in Brazil, carried by more than four million people; the Spanish spelling is rare there, with 15,220 bearers, and owes its presence to Hispanic immigration.

Maximo Gomez y Baez was born on 18 November 1836 at Bani, in what is now the Dominican province of Peravia, while the territory lay under Haitian rule. He first took up arms as a teenager against the incursions of Faustin Soulouque. On his twenty-seventh birthday, he watched the Dominican general Pedro Florentino burn Bani to the ground, and it turned him: he joined the Spanish forces for the Dominican Restoration War, a choice he later admitted regretting, and rose from sergeant to commander after beating Florentino in the field.

His side lost. When Isabella II ordered the defeated Spanish troops out of the new republic in 1865, Gomez sailed with them, his mother having warned that the patriots would kill him for wearing a Spanish uniform. In Cuba he married Bernarda Toro, who followed him through both of the island's wars, and in 1868 left the Spanish Army for the rebels with the tactic that made his name: the Cuban army never had ammunition enough, so it fired once and closed on foot with cane knives. At Pino de Baire on 25 October 1868 he led that charge himself against a Spanish column and destroyed it, inflicting 233 casualties.

In 1871 he cleared the Guantanamo district of loyalist coffee planters in a campaign that doubled as a school: Antonio and Jose Maceo came out of it as senior officers. After Ignacio Agramonte was killed in May 1873 he took over Camaguey and its cavalry. On 19 February 1874 he marched west with 700 men and broke 2,000 Spanish at El Naranjo. Early in 1875 he crossed the Trocha, the line of forts cutting the island in half, burned 83 plantations around Sancti Spiritus and freed the people enslaved on them. He was shot through the neck on that crossing, and wore a kerchief ever after over a wound that never closed. In 1876 he gave up his command when General Carlos Roloff told him the officers of Las Villas would take no more orders from a Dominican.

He rose to major general. In the second war he burned the sugar estates, hating it, saying it destroyed in hours two hundred years of his labourers' work and answering himself with the phrase that stuck: bendita sea la tea, blessed be the torch. It cost him his son. Francisco Gomez y Toro, Panchito, aide-de-camp to Antonio Maceo, was killed on 7 December 1896 recovering Maceo's body. On 5 March 1898 the Captain-General of Cuba asked him to bring his men over and fight the Americans alongside Spain. He refused. In 1901 he declined a presidential nomination he was expected to win unopposed, saying a Dominican-born man should not be Cuba's civil leader. He died outside Havana in 1905, and his face is on the Cuban ten-peso note.

Trifon Gomez was born on 3 July 1889 at Zaratan, near Valladolid, and schooled at the Escuela de Huerfanos Ferroviarios for railwaymen's orphans. At fifteen he was an apprentice turner in the railway workshops at Pisuerga, at the School of Arts and Crafts by night until he qualified as a mechanical expert. By 1915 he was secretary of the Northern Railway Union, the body that called the general strike of August 1917. The strike cost him a year of his country: exile in Paris until September 1918.

Back in Madrid, he was elected to the city council in April 1931, made deputy mayor of La Inclusa, and sat as a deputy for Madrid after the elections of 1931 and 1933. When the civil war came he took charge of feeding the capital, becoming director general of its supply department in 1937. Then he lost, and left. In France he rebuilt the union from the thousands who had crossed the border with him; the exiled UGT elected him president at its first congress in November 1944, and the congress of 31 March to 1 April 1951 gave him the presidency of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party in succession to Indalecio Prieto. He died in Mexico City on 8 May 1955, still heading a union whose country would not have it.

Vernon Louis Gomez was born at Rodeo, California on 26 November 1908, youngest of the eight children of Francisco Gomez, a Californian whose father Juan Gomez was Spanish and whose mother Rita was Portuguese. Francisco, a former cowboy known all his life as Coyote, managed a thousand-acre ranch in Franklin Canyon, and the boys were up at four to milk and muck out before school. Lefty plucked chickens at the butcher's to pay for saxophone lessons and pitched for the Rodeo town team at thirteen; his father wanted an engineer, and signed him to the San Francisco Seals anyway in 1928.

The New York Yankees bought his contract for an estimated $39,000 and he debuted on 29 April 1930, six foot two and 147 pounds, thin enough that the club pulled most of his teeth and put him on three quarts of milk a day. He won twenty games in a season four times, went 26 and 5 in 1934, and took pitching's triple crown in 1934 and again in 1937, leading the American League in wins, earned run average and strikeouts. He won six World Series games and lost none, still a record; he was an All-Star every year from 1933 to 1939, and closed the decade with more strikeouts than any other pitcher. The Veterans Committee elected El Goofo to the Hall of Fame in 1972.

Haydee Gomez Cascante was born in San Jose on 6 July 1926 and qualified on 17 December 1947, at nineteen, from the School of Nursing of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Costa Rica, specialising in obstetrics so that she came out both nurse and midwife. She assisted Dr Carlos Saenz Herrera in private practice, worked at the banana company's hospital in Quepos and in the theatre of the Hospital Calderon Guardia, and studied public health at Syracuse in 1952.

From 1950 until she retired in July 1987 she served the Ministry of Public Health, thirty-seven years as supervisor, administrator, researcher and consultant in maternal and child health. She organised the national postgraduate course in obstetrics, directed the Nursing School of Costa Rica, was president of the College of Nurses from 1967 to 1969, and ran the Traditional Midwives Programme, training the women already delivering babies in rural districts to a standard meant to bring maternal and infant deaths down. She argued publicly for family planning as a matter of women's quality of life, and in 2002 entered the country's Gallery of Women. She died on 12 January 2024, aged 97.