Mario Garcia Menocal (1866-1941) was the third president of Cuba. An engineer and a major general of the army during Cuba's War for Independence, he became a prominent public figure during the first decades of the Cuban Republic.

Mario Menocal was born in the province of Matanzas on Dec. 17, 1866. When Cuba's Ten Years War (1868-1878) against Spain broke out 2 years later, he was taken to the United States and then to Mexico, where his father settled as a sugar planter. At 13 he went to the United States to attend several schools, obtaining a degree in engineering from Cornell University in 1888.

Soon after graduation Menocal began practicing his profession. He joined an uncle in Nicaragua who was studying the feasibility of a Nicaraguan canal route. In 1891 Menocal returned to Cuba and was employed by a French company. He surveyed a proposed railway in Camagüey Province but soon...