Cuban War of Independence (1895-1898) and José Martí

The Cuban War of Independence (1895-1898) was the last and decisive Cuban uprising against Spanish colonial rule. Planned in exile by the poet and revolutionary José Martí and led in the field by Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo, it began on 24 February 1895 and turned into a devastating war in which Spain’s reconcentration policy killed vast numbers of civilians. By 1898 neither side could win, and the intervention of the United States ended four centuries of Spanish rule while opening a new era of American influence.

Background: Spain’s “ever-faithful isle”

By the 1890s Cuba and Puerto Rico were among Spain’s last colonies in the Americas. Cuba was the world’s leading sugar producer, its economy increasingly tied to the United States, which bought most of its sugar.

Cubans had already fought one long war for independence, the Ten Years’ War (1868-1878), which ended in the Pact of Zanjón with limited reforms but no independence, followed by the short-lived Little War of 1879-1880. Slavery was finally abolished in Cuba in 1886. Many of the veterans, including Gómez and Maceo, refused to accept Spanish rule as permanent.

José Martí and the Cuban Revolutionary Party

José Martí, born in Havana in 1853, had been imprisoned and exiled as a teenager for supporting independence. He spent most of his adult life abroad, above all in New York, where he worked as a journalist, poet and diplomat for several Latin American countries.

In 1892 Martí founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party, uniting exile clubs in cities such as New York, Tampa and Key West, many of them supported by Cuban cigar workers. He insisted that the new war must be quick, must unite Cubans of all races, and must create a democratic republic free of both Spanish rule and dependence on the United States.

In January 1895 US authorities seized three ships Martí had prepared at Fernandina, Florida, a serious setback. Even so, the order to rise was sent, and on 25 March 1895 Martí and Gómez signed the Manifesto of Montecristi in the Dominican Republic, setting out the aims of the war.

The war begins and Martí’s death

The uprising began on 24 February 1895, with risings in eastern Cuba remembered as the Grito de Baire. Antonio Maceo landed near Baracoa on 1 April, and Martí and Gómez came ashore at Playitas on 11 April.

On 18 May Martí began a letter to his Mexican friend Manuel Mercado that he never finished. In it he wrote of the United States, “I have lived inside the monster and I know its entrails.” The next day, 19 May 1895, he was killed in a skirmish with Spanish troops at Dos Ríos. His death deprived the movement of its chief political thinker, but turned him into a martyr and Cuba’s greatest national hero.

The invasion of the west

In late 1895 Gómez and Maceo carried the war from the east to the rich western provinces. Leaving Mangos de Baraguá on 22 October 1895, Maceo’s columns fought their way the length of the island and reached Mantua, at the western tip of Pinar del Río, on 22 January 1896.

The insurgents, called mambises, relied on mobile guerrilla tactics and the machete charge. Gómez ordered the burning of sugar cane and the halting of production to wreck the colonial economy and Spanish revenues. Many of the rebel soldiers and officers were Afro-Cuban, and Maceo was one of the army’s most celebrated commanders.

Spanish authorities and some conservative Cubans tried to portray the rising as a race war that would turn Cuba into another Haiti, a fear that had weakened earlier rebellions. Martí and the insurgent leadership countered with the ideal of a nation in which being Cuban mattered more than being white or black. Historians such as Ada Ferrer have shown how central, and how contested, that ideal was within the rebel army itself.

Weyler and reconcentration

In February 1896 Spain replaced the conciliatory General Arsenio Martínez Campos with Valeriano Weyler. From October 1896 Weyler ordered rural people in war zones to move into fortified towns within days or be treated as rebels. The aim was to separate the insurgents from civilian support.

The result was a humanitarian catastrophe. Crowded into camps and towns without adequate food, shelter or sanitation, hundreds of thousands of reconcentrados suffered from hunger and diseases such as yellow fever, smallpox and dysentery. Estimates of the death toll vary widely; many historians put it at between about 100,000 and 300,000 or more, with John Lawrence Tone estimating around 155,000 to 170,000.

Spain sent close to 200,000 soldiers, one of the largest armies ever sent across the Atlantic up to that time. Tens of thousands of them died, the great majority from disease rather than combat. On 7 December 1896 Maceo was killed in fighting at San Pedro, near Punta Brava in Havana province, another heavy blow to the insurgents.

Stalemate and US intervention

In August 1897 the Spanish prime minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo was assassinated by an Italian anarchist. His successor, Práxedes Mateo Sagasta, recalled Weyler and offered Cuba autonomy from January 1898, but the insurgents, who held much of the countryside, rejected anything short of independence.

In the United States, sensational newspaper coverage of Spanish cruelty, sympathy for Cuban exiles and concern for American property raised pressure for action. On 15 February 1898 the battleship USS Maine exploded in Havana harbour. In April 1898 Congress demanded Spain’s withdrawal, and the Spanish-American War followed. The Teller Amendment declared that the US had no intention of annexing Cuba.

Cuban forces under Calixto García supported the American landings near Santiago de Cuba, but when the city surrendered in July 1898 Cuban troops were kept out of the ceremony and the city. Cuba was not represented at the peace talks.

Timeline

• 1892, 10 April: José Martí formally launches the Cuban Revolutionary Party.
• 1895, 24 February: Uprising begins (Grito de Baire).
• 1895, 11 April: Martí and Gómez land at Playitas.
• 1895, 19 May: Martí is killed at Dos Ríos.
• 1896, 22 January: Maceo’s invasion column reaches Mantua in the far west.
• 1896, 21 October: Weyler’s reconcentration order in Pinar del Río.
• 1896, 7 December: Antonio Maceo is killed near Punta Brava.
• 1898, 15 February: USS Maine explodes in Havana harbour.
• 1898, 10 December: Treaty of Paris; Spain relinquishes Cuba.

Aftermath and legacy

Under the Treaty of Paris, Spain gave up Cuba, which was placed under US military government. The Republic of Cuba was proclaimed on 20 May 1902, but the Platt Amendment, written into its constitution, allowed the United States to intervene in Cuban affairs and to lease the naval base at Guantánamo Bay. Many Cubans felt their war had been taken from them.

The war ran parallel to the Philippine Revolution against Spain, and together the two conflicts brought the end of Spain’s overseas empire. Martí’s writings, including the poems of Versos sencillos, made him a symbol claimed by every Cuban government and opposition movement since. Weyler’s camps are often cited as an early example of mass civilian internment in modern warfare.

Why it matters

The Cuban War of Independence ended Spanish rule in the Americas and created the modern Cuban nation, but its outcome, independence under US supervision, set the stage for a century of tension between Cuba and the United States. It also produced Martí, whose vision of a free, racially united Cuba remains central to Cuban identity.