During the Revolution of 1950 in Puerto Rico, forty police and National Guard troops attacked the Salón Boricua barbershop in Santurece.

They used rifles, pistols, carbines, grenades, and a Browning .50 caliber machine gun. They shot at the barber shop for three hours, convinced that two dozen Nationalists were shooting back at them.

It was a savage defense. The Nationalists inside returned fire from every window, the upstairs balcony, and even the front door. The machine gunfire was so intense, that an interior staircase crashed down, and the entire barber shop collapsed.

The National Guard crept in carefully…and much to their chagrin, they found only one lone barber inside. Vidal Santiago Díaz had fought them all by himself!

The soldiers were so embarrassed, that one of them shot Vidal again, at point blank range, with a bullet straight into his brain. But when they carried out his corpse, they received one last shock.

The corpse opened its eyes.

The barber was still alive!

And just like that, Vidal Santiago Díaz became a great hero of the independence movement.  

He was the barber who stood up to an empire, with a bullet in his brain.