After being captured on his return to Cuba from a revolutionary mission that had been entrusted to him abroad, Colonel of the Liberation Army Luis Ayestaran Moliner was tried and condemned to death. Its execution took place in Havana on September 24, 1870.
Moliner was born in Havana on April 16, 1846. He studied at El Salvador and graduated as a lawyer at the University of Havana.
He is recognized as the first Havanese who came to join the liberation forces.
He joined the war on November 20, 1868, at the coffee plantation, near Nuevitas, Camaguey.
In March 1869 he was part of the commission created by the Camagüeyans to meet with the villareños, who had been raised since February of that year with the objective of agreeing on the type of government that should be established in the Republic in Arms.
This event was known as the Meeting of Tínima, held on April 7, 1869 on the farm of the same name.
He was elected by the Constituent Assembly of Guaimaro as a member of the House of Representatives.
He participated directly in several combats, the most important of which was Minas de Juan Rodriguez in Guaimaro, on January 1, 1870, under the orders of Major General Ignacio Agramonte.
On May 8, 1870 the House of Representatives decided to send him to New York with a secret and delicate mission.

On July 14 of that year, he left in a small boat bound for Nassau, from where he continued on the steamer Morro Castle to New York, where he arrives on the 29th.
On the return trip to Cuba, he left the United States on August 10 on the Magnolia steamer heading for Nassau, and from there he continued on September 7 on the Guanahaní schooner, driving a valuable cargo of arms and ammunition.
On the 14th, when a Spanish vessel was spotted and the possibility of being captured was imminent, they launched the cargo into the sea and landed at Cayo Arenoso, between Cayo Romano and the northern coast of Camaguey.
Initially Ayestarán managed to enter Cayo Romano, but only a few days later he was taken prisoner, exactly on September 18.
He was then transferred by the Spanish authorities to Havana where he was immediately tried and sentenced to the maximum penalty.
Faced with the certainty that the Havana patriot Luis de Ayestarán would be executed and Moliner wrote to his mother, he told him: "I will die as I have lived, with the conscience of having fulfilled a duty, of not having done any harm to anyone, and much good to countless people ".