Cry of Yara uprising and the 10th of October Manifesto Céspedes and his followers had planned the uprising to begin 14 October, but it had to be moved up four days earlier, because the Spaniards had discovered their plan of revolt. In the early morning of 10 October, Céspedes issued the cry of
independence, the "10th of October Manifesto" at
La Demajagua, which signaled the start of an all-out military uprising against Spanish rule in Cuba. Céspedes freed his slaves and asked them to join the struggle. 10 October is now commemorated in Cuba as a national holiday called the
Cry of Yara (
Spanish:
Grito de Yara).Carlos Manuel de Céspedes called on men of all races to join the fight for freedom. He raised the
new flag of an independent Cuba, and rang the
Bell of La Demajagua to celebrate his proclamation from the steps of the sugar mill of the
manifesto signed by him and 15 others. It cataloged Spain's mistreatment of Cuba and then expressed the movement's aims: During the first few days, the uprising almost failed: Céspedes intended to occupy the nearby town of
Yara on 11 October. In spite of this initial setback, the uprising of Yara was supported in various regions of the
Oriente province, and the independence movement continued to spread throughout the eastern region of Cuba. On 13 October, the rebels took eight towns in the province that favoured the
insurgency and acquisition of
arms. By October's end, the insurrection had enlisted some 12,000 volunteers.
Military responses That same month,
Máximo Gómez taught the Cuban forces what would be their most lethal tactic: the
machete charge. He was a former
cavalry officer for the
Spanish Army in the
Dominican Republic. Forces were taught to combine use of firearms with machetes, for a double attack against the Spanish. When the
Spaniards (following then-standard tactics) formed a
square, they were vulnerable to
rifle fire from
infantry under cover, and
pistol and
carbine fire from charging cavalry. In the event, as with the
Haitian Revolution, the
European forces suffered the most fatalities due to
yellow fever because the Spanish-born troops had no acquired
immunity to this endemic
tropical disease of the island.
Escalation After three days of combat, the rebels seized the important city of
Bayamo. In the enthusiasm of this victory, poet and musician
Perucho Figueredo composed Cuba's national anthem, "
La Bayamesa”. The first government of the
Republic in Arms, headed by Céspedes, was established in Bayamo. The city was retaken by the Spanish after 3 months on 12 January, but the fighting had
burned it to the ground. The war spread in Oriente: on 4 November 1868,
Camagüey rose up in arms during the
Las Clavellinas Uprising and, in early February 1869,
Las Villas followed. The uprising was not supported in the westernmost provinces of
Pinar del Río,
Havana and
Matanzas. With few exceptions (Vuelta Abajo), resistance was clandestine. A staunch supporter of the rebellion was
José Martí who, at the age of 16, was detained and condemned to 16 years of hard labour. He was later deported to Spain. Eventually he developed as a leading Latin American intellectual and Cuba's foremost national hero, its primary architect of the 1895–98
Cuban War of Independence. After some initial victories and defeats, in 1868 Céspedes replaced Gomez as head of the Cuban Army with United States General
Thomas Jordan, a veteran of
Confederate States Army in the
American Civil War. He brought a well-equipped force, but General Jordan's reliance on regular tactics, although initially effective, left the families of Cuban rebels far too vulnerable to the "
ethnic cleansing" tactics of the ruthless
Blas Villate, Count of Valmaceda (also spelled Balmaceda).
Valeriano Weyler, known as the "Butcher Weyler" in the 1895–1898 War, fought alongside the Count of Balmaceda. After General Jordan resigned and returned to the US, Cespedes returned Máximo Gómez to his command. Gradually a new generation of skilled battle-tested Cuban commanders rose from the ranks, including
Antonio Maceo Grajales,
José Maceo,
Calixto García,
Vicente García González and
Federico Fernández Cavada. Raised in the United States and with an American mother, Fernández Cavada had served as a colonel in the
Union Army during the American Civil War. His brother
Adolfo Fernández Cavada also joined the Cuban fighting for independence. On 4 April 1870, the senior
Federico Fernández Cavada was named Commander-in-Chief of all the Cuban forces. Other war leaders of note fighting on the Cuban
Mambí side included
Donato Mármol,
Luis Marcano-Alvarez,
Carlos Roloff, Enrique Loret de Mola,
Julio Sanguily,
Domingo de Goicuría,
Guillermo Moncada,
Quintin Bandera, Benjamín Ramirez, and
Julio Grave de Peralta. Because of the escalating violence, after the first year of the war, around 100,000 Cubans fled the country. Generally speaking, those rich enough settled in Europe or else in northern cities in America like
New York,
Philadelphia, or
Boston. Meanwhile, the poorer workers moved to south
Florida, first settling in
Key West, and then in
Tampa.
Constitutional assembly On 10 April 1869, a constitutional assembly took place in the town of
Guáimaro. It was intended to provide the revolution with greater organizational and juridical unity, with representatives from the areas that had joined the uprising. The assembly discussed whether a centralized leadership should be in charge of both military and civilian affairs, or if there should be a separation between civilian government and military leadership, the latter being subordinate to the first. The overwhelming majority voted for the separation option. Céspedes was elected president of this assembly; and General
Ignacio Agramonte y Loynáz and
Antonio Zambrana, principal authors of the proposed
Constitution, were elected secretaries. After completing its work, the Assembly reconstituted itself as the House of Representatives and the state's supreme power. They elected
Salvador Cisneros Betancourt as president,
Miguel Jerónimo Gutiérrez as vice president, and Agramonte and Zambrana as secretaries. Céspedes was elected on 12 April 1869, as the first president of the Republic in Arms and General
Manuel de Quesada (who had fought in Mexico under
Benito Juárez during the French invasion of that country), as Chief of the Armed Forces.
Spanish repressions By early 1869, the Spanish authorities had failed to reach an agreement with the insurrection forces. Harsher measures to repress the insurrection and its supporters were taken, and troops began to flood in from the Peninsula. Apart from the regular army, the government relied on the Voluntary Corps, a militia created in 1855 a few years earlier to face the announced invasion by
John A. Quitman in collaboration with Ramón Pintó. By early-1869 more than 70,000 men, both
peninsulares and creoles had joined the Volunteers. The serial executions were stopped only by the intervention of a British man-of-war under the command of
Sir Lambton Lorraine. Apart from their controversial role in the cities, hundreds of Volunteer units were created in the countryside. Most of the Volunteers there were Cubans loyal to Spain who organised sections and companies to defend their hometowns from rebel attacks, giving a tone of civil war to Cuba's first war of independence. According to a Spanish journalist, by 1872, 52,000 of the 80,000 Volunteers were Cuban-born.
Rebel political strife Ignacio Agramonte was killed by a stray bullet on 11 May 1873, and was replaced in the command of the central troops by Máximo Gómez. Because of political and personal disagreements and Agramonte's death, the Assembly deposed Céspedes as president, replacing him with Cisneros. Agramonte had realized that his dream Constitution and government were ill-suited to the Cuban Republic in Arms, which was the reason he quit as secretary and assumed command of the Camaguey region. He became a supporter of Cespedes. Céspedes was later surprised and killed on 27 February 1874, by a swift-moving patrol of Spanish troops. The new Cuban government had left him with only one escort and denied permission to leave Cuba for the US, from where he intended to help prepare and send armed expeditions.
Continued warfare Activities in the Ten Years' War peaked in the years 1872 and 1873, but after the deaths of Agramonte and Céspedes, Cuban operations were limited to the regions of Camagüey and
Oriente. Gómez began an invasion of Western Cuba in 1875, but the vast majority of slaves and wealthy sugar producers in the region did not join the revolt. After his most trusted general, the American
Henry Reeve, was killed in 1876, Gómez ended his campaign. Spain's efforts to fight were hindered by the civil war (
Third Carlist War) that broke out in Spain in 1872. When the civil war ended in 1876, the government sent more Spanish troops to Cuba, until they numbered more than 250,000. The severe Spanish measures weakened the liberation forces ruled by Cisneros. Neither side in the war was able to win a single concrete victory, let alone crush the opposing side to win the war, but in the long run Spain gained the upper hand.
Failing insurgency The deep divisions among insurgents regarding their organisation of government and the military became more pronounced after the Assembly of Guáimaro, as resulting in the dismissal of Céspedes and Quesada in 1873. The Spanish exploited regional divisions, as well as fears that the slaves of Matanzas would break the weak existing balance between whites and blacks. The Spanish changed their policy towards the Mambises, offering amnesties and reforms. The Mambises did not prevail for a variety of reasons: lack of organization and resources; lower participation by whites; internal racist sabotage (against Maceo and the goals of the Liberating Army); the inability to bring the war to the western provinces (Havana in particular); and opposition by the US government to Cuban independence. The US sold the latest weapons to Spain, but not to the Cuban rebels.
Peace negotiations and hold-outs Tomás Estrada Palma succeeded
Juan Bautista Spotorno as president of the Republic in Arms. Estrada Palma was captured by Spanish troops on 19 October 1877. As a result of successive misfortunes, on 8 February 1878, the constitutional organs of the Cuban government were dissolved; the remaining leaders among the insurgents started negotiating for peace in Zanjón, Puerto Príncipe. General
Arsenio Martínez Campos, in charge of applying the new policy, arrived in Cuba. It took him nearly two years to convince most of the rebels to accept the
Pact of Zanjón; it was signed on 10 February 1878, by a negotiating committee. The document contained most of the promises made by Spain. The Ten Years' War came to an end, except for the resistance of a small group in Oriente led by General Garcia and
Antonio Maceo Grajales, who protested in Los Mangos de Baraguá on 15 March. == Aftermath ==