The Cuban Wars of Independence

The Cuban Wars of Independence. The Cuban Wars of Independence (1868-1898) were the thirty-year struggle that ended four centuries of Spanish rule in Cuba. The island, Spain's richest remaining colony, was a world of sugar plantations worked by hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans, and its Creole landowners chafed under Spanish rule and taxation. In 1868 the planter Carlos Manuel de Cespedes freed his slaves and proclaimed the Grito de Yara, launching the Ten Years' War, the first great war of Cuban independence.

The first war devastated the east of the island without winning freedom. Under generals such as Maximo Gomez and the Black hero Antonio Maceo, the rebels fought Spain to a standstill, but divisions and exhaustion brought an uneasy peace in 1878. A second rising, the Little War of 1879-80, also failed, though slavery itself was finally abolished in 1886. Yet the cause lived on, above all in the writings of Jose Marti, the poet and organizer who built the Cuban Revolutionary Party among the exiles and workers of the diaspora.

In 1895 Marti and Gomez launched the final war. Marti was killed in one of its first battles, but the war swept west across the island: Gomez and Maceo led the invasion army from east to west, and Spain, under General Weyler, answered with the brutal policy of reconcentration, herding the rural population into camps where tens of thousands died. By 1898 Spain could neither win nor withdraw, and the explosion of the American battleship Maine in Havana harbor brought the United States into the war.

The Spanish-American War ended in months, and Spain lost Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Cuba became independent in name but an American protectorate in fact, occupied and bound by the Platt Amendment. Marti's dream of a free and sovereign Cuba, deferred in 1898, remained the standard by which Cubans judged the century that followed.

To read more about this topic:

Library of Congress: Cuban Perspective: The World of 1898 Cuban Studies Institute: The Independence War, 1895-1898 Wikipedia: Cuban War of Independence Library of Congress: Jose Marti