Cuban Nationalists

The movement called itself nationalist in a very specific sense. It was not a party of one class or one race. Its founder, José Martí, deliberately built an organisation that would include sugar workers from Key West, tobacco rollers from Tampa, black veterans of the Ten Years' War and white planters' sons who had lost patience with Madrid. Its programme was independence without social revolution, and independence without annexation to the United States — two aims that turned out to be incompatible with the balance of power in 1898. When the republic finally arrived in 1902, it came with a clause written in Washington that allowed American troops to land whenever the United States judged Cuban independence to be at risk.

The label "Cuban nationalists" is the map's shorthand for that coalition, not the name anyone used at the time. Martí's followers spoke of the Revolution, the República en Armas, and the Necessary War. What they had in common was a conviction that Spain's empire in the Americas had to end, and a fairly precise idea of what should replace it: a secular, racially integrated republic of smallholders and wage-earners, governed by civilians rather than generals. They got the first, lost control of the second, and spent the next three decades arguing about the third.

At a glance

What did the Ten Years' War leave behind?

The first Cuban war for independence began on 10 October 1868, when Carlos Manuel de Céspedes freed his slaves at La Demajagua and raised the standard at Yara in Oriente. It lasted ten years, killed tens of thousands, wrecked the eastern sugar economy, and ended without victory for either side. The Pact of Zanjón, signed on 10 February 1878, promised Cuban representation in the Spanish Cortes, provincial assemblies and the abolition of slavery. Antonio Maceo refused it in the Protest of Baraguá a month later, on 15 March 1878, and his refusal became the founding gesture of Cuban nationalism — the moment at which the movement learned to regard a negotiated peace as a defeat.

What Zanjón delivered was real but slow. Slavery was abolished by stages: the 1870 Moret law had freed the children of slaves and those over sixty, the 1880 emancipation law set up a patronato of apprenticeships, and the system finally ended in 1886. Cubans got seats in the Cortes and a measure of municipal self-government, and in 1878 the Liberals reorganised as the Autonomist Party under José María Gálvez, which for twenty years pressed for colonial autonomy within the Spanish monarchy rather than separation from it. A second, smaller rising — the Little War of 1879–80 — collapsed for want of arms and organisation. Reform moved at the speed of Madrid's convenience: when the colonial minister Antonio Maura brought a serious autonomy bill to the Cortes in June 1893, the parties that had no interest in applying it quietly buried it.

The peace also transformed the island's economy in ways that made another war more likely. Cuba became the world's leading sugar producer, and its sugar moved north. Spanish immigrants arrived in large numbers — roughly 709,000 between 1868 and 1894 — but Spanish capital did not keep pace with American. By 1894 nearly nine-tenths of Cuban exports went to the United States, which supplied 38 per cent of imports; Spain took 6 per cent of exports and provided 35 per cent of imports. The island's prosperity now depended on the American tariff, and the American tariff was about to be used as a weapon.

Why did Martí build a party before he built an army?

José Martí was born in Havana in 1853, the son of poor Spanish immigrants. At sixteen he was arrested for denouncing a pro-Spanish classmate, sentenced to six years' hard labour and put to work in the quarries of San Lázaro; the sentence was commuted after a few months and he spent the rest of his youth in Spain, where he published El presidio político en Cuba, an indictment of the colonial prison system. He returned to the Americas in the 1870s, lived in Mexico, Guatemala and Venezuela, and settled in New York in 1881, where he spent fourteen years writing for Latin American newspapers, producing poetry, and organising a revolution.

His instrument was the Cuban Revolutionary Party, founded in New York on 10 April 1892. Its bases were drafted earlier in the year and its newspaper, Patria, carried the argument to the émigré clubs of New York, Philadelphia, Key West and Tampa. The party's structure was deliberately unlike a nineteenth-century liberal party: it was a single body with a treasury, a delegate (Martí himself), and clubs whose subscriptions came largely from cigar workers, who also paid to have novels and newspapers read aloud in the factories. Between 1892 and 1895 the party raised money, bought weapons, chartered ships and maintained a correspondence with officers inside Cuba that would have done credit to a general staff.

Martí's purposes were three, and he kept them in a fixed order. Independence first. A republic conducted "with republican method and spirit", in the Library of Congress's phrase, so that the war would not produce a military dictatorship. And a movement that would pre-empt both annexation by the United States and a racial war inside Cuba. He had watched the United States closely for fifteen years, admired its energy and its constitution-makers, and feared its appetite; he wrote that Cuban independence had to be achieved quickly, before Washington could present the island with a choice between Spanish rule and American tutelage. The rising was originally set for the autumn of 1894, but the three chartered steamers that were to carry the expedition were seized by United States marshals early in 1895, and the timetable slipped.

How did the rising of 1895 begin?

The signal was given for 24 February 1895, and the rising took its name from the small town of Baire in Oriente, where the local conspirators proclaimed independencia o muerte. Risings followed across the eastern provinces, in Camagüey and Las Villas, and in a scatter of towns in the west. The west was where the plan failed: the Havana organisation was rolled up by the police before it could move, and its leaders were arrested, deported or executed. The Library of Congress chronology records that the Baire rising was "quelled by Spanish authorities that same day"; in fact the Spanish garrisons could not quell the countryside, and within weeks the east was out of their control, but the failure in the centre and west meant that the war began as a regional insurgency, exactly as the Ten Years' War had.

The leaders arrived separately. Antonio Maceo, with his brother José and Flor Crombet, landed near Baracoa on 1 April; Martí and Máximo Gómez came ashore at Playitas de Cajobabo on 11 April. On 25 March, before embarking, Martí and Gómez had signed the Manifesto of Montecristi, the movement's statement of war aims. Its most quoted sentence is a denial: "La guerra no es contra el español" — the war is not against the Spaniard, who may live respected and even loved in a free Cuba if he accepts it. The manifesto promised indemnity rather than vengeance, and addressed the racial question directly, insisting that the new republic would rest on "the sincere esteem of the white Cuban for the equal soul … of his black compatriot". It was a careful document, written by two men who knew that a Cuban war could be presented abroad as a race war, and it was largely ignored in the event.

Martí was killed on 19 May 1895 at Dos Ríos, on the Contramaestre, in his first skirmish. He was forty-two and had been in Cuba for five weeks. The consequences were immediate and structural: the movement lost the only figure who could arbitrate between the civilian politicians of the emigration and the two generals in the field, and it lost him before the political institutions of the republic had been built.

How did the rebels govern themselves?

Four months after Martí's death, on 16 September 1895, delegates of the five army corps met at Jimaguayú in Camagüey and adopted a constitution. It is a remarkable document to read beside the usual picture of guerrilla banditry. The assembly declared Cuba "a free and independent state with its own government, under the supreme authority of the name Republic of Cuba", and then set up a Government Council of a president, a vice-president and four secretaries for war, interior, foreign relations and finance. It empowered that council to levy taxes, raise loans, issue paper money, grant letters of marque, raise troops and ratify treaties. It gave command of all armed forces to a General-in-Chief, with a Lieutenant-General as second. And it laid down in Article 11 that any peace treaty with Spain must have "the absolute independence of the Island of Cuba" as its basis.

The republic had no capital, no port, no customs house and no recognised currency, and it governed anyway. It taxed cane and cattle in the territory it held, issued paper vales that circulated at a discount, kept agents in New York and London, and negotiated with foreign consuls about the property of neutrals — Article 20 taxed foreign-owned estates while their governments refused to recognise Cuban belligerency. Its presidents were Salvador Cisneros Betancourt, a Camagüey landowner, and from 1897 Bartolomé Masó. Neither commanded troops, and neither could give orders to Gómez.

The unresolved question was whether the civil power or the generals held the final say. The Jimaguayú constitution placed the army under the General-in-Chief and allowed the Council to intervene in military operations only when it judged it "absolutely necessary". A second constituent assembly, meeting at La Yaya in Camagüey on 10 October 1897, rewrote the constitution to subordinate military command to civilian rule — the classic response of a weak republic to a strong army, and a sign of how much the civilians had come to fear their own generals. The dispute never became a coup. It did mean that when the war ended, the Cuban side had a government that could negotiate in principle and no instrument with which to make the United States negotiate with it in fact.

How did the war reach the west?

The strategic lesson of the Ten Years' War was that a rebellion confined to Oriente would be starved or bought off. In October 1895 Gómez and Maceo therefore did what the earlier war had never attempted: they carried the war west, from Mangos de Baraguá in Oriente to the far end of Pinar del Río, across every fortified line Spain had built. The column left on 22 October 1895. It crossed the Júcaro–Morón trocha in Camagüey, gathered the veterans of Las Villas — Serafín Sánchez, Carlos Roloff, men who brought rifles and experience — and entered Matanzas in December. On 22 January 1896, three months to the day, it reached Mantua on the western coast.

The campaign was cavalry warfare of a peculiar kind. The insurgents rode, fought dismounted or from the saddle, and used the machete less as a battle tactic than as a final instrument against broken infantry — a point John Lawrence Tone has made against the romantic legend of the carga al machete. Their advantage was knowledge of ground, horses and the ability to disperse. The Spanish army, four and five times their size, held the towns, the railways and the fortified line, and could not be beaten in a set battle; but it could not be everywhere, and its columns were slow, its cavalry poor and its supply dependent on the very roads the insurgents cut.

What the invasion did not do was win the war. It spread it, which was the point, and it burned the sugar districts that paid for the Spanish army — the strategy the Cubans called la tea, the torch. Maceo was killed on 7 December 1896 near Punta Brava, in Havana province, on his way back from the west, and with him went the movement's most audacious field commander and its most prominent man of colour. Gómez, a Dominican who had fought in the Ten Years' War and was never a Cuban citizen, survived to the end and remained General-in-Chief. But by 1897 the war had settled into a stalemate of garrisons and columns, with the Cubans dominant in the countryside of Oriente and Camagüey and the Spanish dominant in the cities and the west. Spain was also fighting in the Philippines, where a revolution had begun in 1896, and troops and money that might have finished Cuba were being diverted to Asia.

What was reconcentration, and how many died?

Valeriano Weyler arrived in February 1896 with substantial reinforcements and a theory that the war could be won by separating the insurgents from the peasantry that fed them, hid them and gave them horses. The instrument was reconcentración: the forced removal of the rural population into garrison towns. It was not a single decree. Weyler issued orders for particular districts through 1896, and the best-known of them, dated 21 October 1896, applied to the province of Pinar del Río: "Ordeno y mando: todos los habitantes en los campos o fuera de la línea de fortificación de los poblados se concentrarán en el término de ocho días en los pueblos ocupados por las tropas" — all inhabitants in the countryside must concentrate within eight days in the towns occupied by troops, and anyone found outside after that would be treated as a rebel. Across the island, according to Andreas Stucki's study, at least 400,000 people were interned in more than eighty concentration points.

The results were catastrophic for reasons that had little to do with a plan of extermination and everything to do with capacity. The camps were towns, not compounds; the intent, as the Library of Congress puts it, was to keep civilians alive until Spain won. But the towns had no housing, no latrines and no food beyond what a ruined countryside could supply, and the Spanish army had neither the transport nor the medical service to feed and care for hundreds of thousands of displaced peasants. Measles, dysentery, tuberculosis and hunger did the rest. Weyler's own government in Madrid defended the policy; the Spanish Liberals attacked it; the American press, briefed largely by Cuban exiles in New York, made it the moral centre of the case for intervention.

The death toll is the most disputed figure in Cuban history. Contemporary American estimates ran to 400,000 and more, which is impossible. The United States War Department's own census of 1899 compared the population of that year with the Spanish census of 1887 and concluded that the "direct and indirect losses by the war and the reconcentration policy, including a decrease of births and of immigration and an increase of deaths and of emigration, reached a total not far from 200,000". Tone, working from Spanish military and municipal records, puts mortality among the concentrated population at 25 to 30 per cent, which on Stucki's 400,000 means between 100,000 and 120,000 deaths, and other scholars have read his evidence as implying more. Both kinds of number can be true at once: the census measures the whole demographic loss, Tone measures deaths among those actually interned. What is not in doubt is the scale — a population that should have grown to about 1,800,000 by 1899 had fallen to 1,572,797.

Responsibility was not Spain's alone, and this is where the history becomes uncomfortable. Tone's work, following Cuban sources, shows that Gómez and Maceo had begun forcing the rural population to choose sides in 1895, moving those who would not fight to the east and treating those who stayed as Spanish auxiliaries; and that the tea had already destroyed the rural economy of whole districts before Weyler's bandos arrived. Peasants were fleeing to the towns in search of food before they were ordered to. Weyler systematised a disaster that the war had already begun.

Why did autonomy arrive too late?

Spanish policy had one last card, and in 1897 it played it. Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, who had backed Weyler, was assassinated at Santa Águeda on 8 August 1897; the Liberals under Práxedes Mateo Sagasta took office, recalled Weyler on 31 October and replaced him with Ramón Blanco, and on 25 November 1897 issued the decree establishing an autonomous constitution for Cuba and Puerto Rico. The text was not a sham. It created an island parliament of two chambers, a directly elected Chamber of Representatives, a Council of Administration of thirty-five members (seventeen of them nominated by the Crown), and a cabinet of secretaries responsible for justice, finance, education, public works, agriculture and commerce. It gave the island control of its own budget, and it came with universal male suffrage and formal equality of rights between Spaniards and Cubans.

The autonomous government took office on 1 January 1898, presided over by Gálvez, with three Autonomist secretaries and two Reformists. In the elections that followed, the Autonomists took about 70 per cent of the seats to the Cortes and 80 per cent of the insular parliament — the party of opposition had become the party of government in a colony that was still at war. The insurgents' answer was to decree the death penalty for any Cuban who accepted "peace by autonomy", and the offer therefore divided the island instead of pacifying it: the men who might have made autonomy work were precisely the men the revolution regarded as traitors.

Whether autonomy could have ended the war is one of the great counterfactuals of Cuban history, and the evidence points both ways. Blanco suspended hostilities in April 1898 and the Spanish government appropriated money for relief, but the insurgents refused a ceasefire without independence. The Autonomists governed for four months, in wartime, with the treasury empty and the countryside in ruins; they never had the chance to show whether a Cuban parliament under the Spanish crown could have held the loyalty of Cubans. What the episode does demonstrate is that Madrid was willing, by 1897, to concede in substance what it had refused for twenty years — and that the concession came after the point at which anyone in Cuba believed it.

What did the Maine set off?

The American intervention was not caused by the explosion of the USS Maine, but the explosion made it possible. The ship blew up in Havana harbour on the night of 15 February 1898, killing 266 of her 354 officers and men — the contemporary American official account in the 1899 census report counts "2 officers and 264 sailors". A United States naval court of inquiry reported on 28 March that the ship had been destroyed by a mine; a Spanish inquiry found that the explosion had been internal. The question has never been settled. A United States Navy reappraisal published in 1976 argued for spontaneous combustion in a coal bunker, and later examinations have not closed the case.

The political sequence ran faster than the investigation. The Spanish minister in Washington, Enrique Dupuy de Lôme, had resigned in February after a private letter mocking McKinley reached the Hearst press. Senator Redfield Proctor of Vermont, who had toured Cuba at his own expense, told the Senate on 17 March that the reconcentration was as bad as reported, and the American business community, which had opposed intervention, changed its mind within weeks. McKinley asked Congress for authority on 11 April; Congress passed the joint resolution on 19–20 April by 311 votes to 6 in the House and 42 to 35 in the Senate; Spain severed relations; the United States blockaded Cuba on 22 April; Congress declared war on 25 April.

Two features of that resolution shaped everything that followed. The Teller Amendment disclaimed any intention of annexing Cuba and promised to leave the island to its people once pacified. And the resolution recognised Cuban independence without recognising the Cuban government: the insurgents were allies of convenience, not belligerents with a seat at the table. Martí had spent his last years trying to make Cuban independence a fact before the United States could make it a gift. The joint resolution is the measure of his failure, and not because he was wrong about Washington.

What did the Americans actually do in the war?

The war in Cuba lasted ten weeks and was fought in one corner of the island. The navy blockaded, destroyed the Spanish squadron at Manila Bay on 1 May, and landed marines at Guantánamo Bay in June. The army — some 17,000 men of the Fifth Corps under William Shafter — came ashore at Daiquirí and Siboney on 22–24 June and fought its way towards Santiago at El Caney and San Juan Hill on 1 July. The Spanish Caribbean squadron under Cervera tried to break out on 3 July and was destroyed, and Santiago surrendered on 17 July. American deaths in the whole war were around 3,000, of which the great majority came from disease rather than combat.

Cuban troops did the work that American accounts usually assign to the Rough Riders. Calixto García's forces held the roads inland, screened the landings, supplied intelligence and besieged Santiago from the north while the Americans attacked from the east. When the city surrendered, Shafter refused to let the Cuban army enter, on the ground that he wished to prevent clashes between Cubans and Spaniards, and García resigned his command in protest. The same exclusion was repeated at Paris. The peace protocol of 12 August was signed by the United States and Spain; the Treaty of Paris of 10 December 1898 was negotiated by five American and five Spanish plenipotentiaries, with no Cuban in the room, and its first article transferred Cuba from Spanish sovereignty to American occupation.

The American army that occupied Cuba in January 1899 was, by the standards of the time, an unusually conscientious one. John Brooke and then Leonard Wood ran a military government that built schools, reorganised the courts, and made war on yellow fever — the Reed commission's experiments in 1900 established the mosquito as the vector — while also reorganising the customs service, the postal service and the police. Wood's government also conducted the census of 1899, a formidable piece of social description that doubled as an instrument of rule: it counted, classified and priced the island it was governing.

How did independence end up constrained?

The republic was proclaimed on 20 May 1902, and the constraint was written in before the proclamation. In 1900 a Cuban constitutional convention met to draft a constitution, and Washington made clear that the army would not leave until the document incorporated the terms Congress had attached to the Army Appropriations Act of 2 March 1901 — the Platt Amendment. Its eight articles barred Cuba from treaties with foreign powers that impaired its independence, from borrowing beyond its means, and from ceding naval bases; gave the United States the right to intervene "for the preservation of Cuban independence, the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty"; and required Cuba to lease land for coaling and naval stations. The convention accepted the text on 12 June 1901 by 16 votes to 11, with four abstentions, and appended it to the constitution.

The amendment was incorporated in a treaty of 1903, the same year in which the lease of Guantánamo Bay was signed. Under it the United States intervened in 1906, 1912, 1917 and 1920; it was repealed in 1934 as part of the Good Neighbor policy, though the base remained. The first president of the republic was Tomás Estrada Palma, the old revolutionary delegate in New York, who had spent the war years raising money and arguing Cuba's case abroad and who now governed a country whose sovereignty had been defined in another capital.

The deeper constraint was economic. Three and a half years of war had destroyed perhaps two-thirds of the island's productive capacity; the sugar mills were burned, the cane replanted only slowly, and the capital that rebuilt them came from the United States. The peace that Martí had wanted to be Cuban was, in its economic architecture, American — a fact that Cuban nationalists would spend the next sixty years contesting, and that the revolution of 1959 would make the centre of its legitimacy.

What did the war do to Cuban society?

The demographic record is brutal and precise. Between the census of 1887 and that of 1899 the number of women rose by 14,924 and the number of men fell by 51,202 — a deficit that no ordinary mortality pattern can produce, and one that the census itself read as the signature of a war that killed young men. The same census found 1,067,354 whites (67.9 per cent) and 505,443 people classified as coloured (32.1 per cent), a ratio close to that of 1887 and a reminder that the war did not redistribute the island's racial composition so much as ravage it.

Race was the movement's promise and its fault line. White Cubans had dreaded a repetition of Haiti since the destruction of the French colony in the 1790s, and Spanish propaganda worked hard to present the Liberation Army as its second coming. The Liberation Army was disproportionately black and mulatto in its ranks, above all in Oriente, and Martí had insisted that Cuban nationality was not a matter of colour: in the Montecristi manifesto he wrote of the mutual esteem of white and black Cubans as the foundation of the republic, and he warned against demagogues who would play on the impatience of their own race. After 1902 that programme was quietly shelved. The army was disbanded in 1899, pensions were distributed unevenly, and black veterans found themselves excluded from the offices and patronage they had earned. In 1912 the Independent Party of Colour, formed to demand its share, was destroyed by the army in a massacre that killed thousands. The republic's founding silence about race is one of the reasons the war's history was for so long written as a story about Spain and the United States rather than about Cubans.

The war also transformed the land. Spanish and Cuban-owned estates passed into American hands along with the mills; the immigration that had brought 709,000 Spaniards between 1868 and 1894 reversed; and a rural population that had been dispersed across smallholdings and squatting rights was pushed into towns and into wage labour on the rebuilt plantations. Cuban historians have argued for decades about how much of that transformation was caused by the war and how much by the tariff and the trusts. It is clear that the war accelerated a transfer of property that was already under way, and that the peace fixed it.

How do historians judge the war?

The first historiographical battle is over the name. The conflict that Americans call the Spanish-American War was, in Cuban usage, the Necessary War, and the difference is not decorative: it decides whether 1895–98 is a Cuban war that the United States joined, or an American war that Cuba happened to host. The Library of Congress's own essay on Cuba in 1898 notes that the rebels had been fighting for three years before the Americans arrived, and that the war, together with the tariff disputes of the 1890s, had destroyed two-thirds of the island's productive capacity.

The second battle is whether the Cubans could have won alone. Cuban nationalist historiography has generally held that Spain had already lost — that its writ ran no further than its garrisons, that the countryside belonged to the mambises, and that American intervention robbed Cuba of a victory it had earned. Tone's study, weighing Spanish and Cuban records, concludes that neither side was beaten in the spring of 1898: the Spanish could not destroy the insurgency, the Cubans could not take the cities, and American intervention did not create the outcome so much as accelerate it. The evidence for both positions is real, and the argument is not settled.

The third battle is over the camps. Stucki's comparative study places Cuban reconcentration in a longer genealogy of colonial counter-insurgency, from the Ten Years' War through the American Philippines and the British camps of the Boer War, and resists both the claim that Weyler invented the concentration camp and the claim that what happened in Cuba was a foreshadowing of the twentieth century's extermination camps. What remains undisputed is the arithmetic: a war fought by a colonial state with insufficient means, against an insurgency that deliberately destroyed the rural economy, killed somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 Cubans, most of them civilians, and made the island's independence possible only in a form its own founders had spent their lives trying to avoid.

Common myths about Cuban nationalism

Timeline of the Cuban war of independence

What the map shows next

At 1895 on the map the war is four months old and still a rising in the east: Baire in February, the landings in April, Martí dead in May, the Republic in Arms proclaimed at Jimaguayú in September. The year ends with the invasion column marching west, which was the movement's answer to the strategic dead end of the Ten Years' War. At 1898 on the map it has become an American war: the island is blockaded, Santiago has fallen, and in December Spain signs away the last of its American empire with no Cuban in the room.

At 1899 on the map the map changes character entirely: the Spanish Empire has gone from the Caribbean and the island is under United States military government, the first of the twentieth-century occupations that would shape the region. The entries that carry the story forward are the Republic of Cuba from 1902 and, half a century later, the Cuban Communists who would make the Platt Amendment's long shadow the centre of their legitimacy.