Elpidio Valdés was born in the 1870s, in a field of battle during the Ten Years' War. Mambí son of an officer and a peasant woman. In 1895, he joined the Liberation Ejército the beginning of the War of Independence. His father caught in an ambush at the beginning of the war, in which his mother continued to work in exile. Reach the rank of colonel and survives the end of the war and during the Republic. He married in full battle with his girlfriend Maria Silvia with whom he has a son.