Lafuente Estefanía was born in Toledo in 1903. His father, Federico Lafuente López-Elías, was a lawyer and also an author. He studied industrial engineering and worked in Spain, Angola, South America, and the United States, where he traveled between 1928 and 1931. During the Spanish Civil War he would become an artillery general in the Republican army. Upon their defeat, he refused to go into exile, and during the subsequent repression he was incarcerated several times and nearly executed.