The island of Cuba represented for Spain one of its richest territories in potential . During the 18th century, an economic policy had been developed based on massive investments in sugar, tobacco and coffee plantations, highly valued products in Europe.
The economic boom had created a Creole landowning aristocracy and a wealthy commercial class with expansionist urges. But their separatist sentiments faded in the face of fear of the revolution in Haiti . Given that the black population, slave or free, outnumbered the white population, the Creole remained hesitant for decades and preferred the guarantee of order that the presence of Spanish power implied. While the Spanish-American continent was separating from Spain, Cuba preferred not to follow in its footsteps. The Creole oligarchy did not want to lose its privileges or its slaves, the basis of its economy and its social hierarchy.
During the government of Luis de las Casas At the end of the 18th century, the first movements in favor of independence were noted. The first came from the free black José Antonio Aponte , whose anti-slavery conspiracy was put down in 1812. To calm things down and avoid what was happening in its other colonies, Spain suppressed the tobacconist's shop and granted a certain freedom of trade.
In 1820 the Constitution of Cádiz was proclaimed again . Cuba sent to Cortes three intellectuals led by Félix Varela , who called for the abolition of slavery and the recognition of American independence. The return of Fernandino absolutism in 1823 forced the three deputies to take refuge in the United States. Varela thus became the forger of the independence and civic consciousness of the island.
The agents of Gran Colombia, infiltrated in the country, introduced the conspiracy of the Suns and Rays of Bolívar , harshly repressed in 1823. The Mexican secret society of the Black Eagle also intended to eliminate the threat posed by Cuba, as a Spanish base in America. The failure of the Pan American Congress in Panama (1826), of Bolivarian inspiration, aborted these projects. Francisco de Agüero and Manuel Sánchez, insurgent precursors of independence, were executed in Camagüey in 1826.
In 1833 the metropolis sent Miguel Tacón to Cuba as captain general. , who ruled with an iron fist and earned the hatred of the Creole enlightened class for the exile he imposed on illustrious intellectuals such as José Antonio Saco, with autonomous and anti-slavery ideals.
During the government of General Leopoldo O'Donnell, in 1844 an alleged conspiracy of slaves, called La Escalera, was suppressed. . O'Donnell took the opportunity to mix moderate intellectuals such as José de la Luz y Caballero and Domingo del Monte into it, to get rid of them.
The first important feats of arms took place in the middle of the century. They were promoted by a Spanish general of Venezuelan origin, Narciso López , who prepared some expeditions financed by North American annexationist interests, one in 1850 and another in 1851, both failed. López died executed.
Joaquín de Agüero in Camagüey and Isidoro Armenteros in Trinidad, rose up in 1850 to make the country independent, with little success.
Simultaneously to these movements that advocated separatist violence, there were two other political currents cherished by the Creole sugar and coffee bourgeoisie:annexationism and reformism .
The first aspired to integrate the island into the northern Union, where the enjoyment of the double blessing of political liberties and the preservation of slaves was expected; the second favored a policy that would gradually lead to increasing insular autonomy, after whitening of the population through a massive immigration of Spaniards to neutralize the danger of the country's overwhelmingly black majority.
In Oriente, the most rebellious province of Cuba, an illustrious lawyer and landowner from Bayamo, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes , proclaimed independence on October 10, 1868 , he emancipated his slaves and led the war, which was joined by Aguilera, Maceo, Mármol, Agramóme and Cisneros Betancourt.
The bloody struggle ended in 1878 with the Peace of Zanjón, in which both parties made concessions. General Arsenio Martínez Campos neutralized the insurgents and managed to prolong Spanish rule in Cuba for another twenty years. However, the Cuban General Antonio Maceo did not accept the Peace and after the Baraguá Protest the combat continued, but it soon failed and he went into exile.
Martian ideology
The soul of the second independence stage, José Martí , was a determined democrat who wanted a free Cuba equidistant both from Spain, which was subjugating it, and from the United States, which he foresaw that he could subdue it with other types of more subtle chains. He was hostile to the autonomist movement, which advocated a certain independence from Spain but maintaining the guarantee of its army , and also to annexationism, which advocated the merger with the US, as one more state. His thought connects with the Bolivarian in the idea of a continental fusion of the American peoples of Spanish expression, as reflected in his famous phrase One is America from the Rio Grande to Patagonia . He had drunk from the sources of the Liberator's thought his commitment to a great Hispanic-American parliamentary state.
In 1892, Martí managed to consolidate the Cuban Revolutionary Party , whose programmatic objective was the independence of Cuba and Puerto Rico. In his organizational work, Martí always had the collaboration of the Puerto Rican patriot Eugenio María de Hostos . In 1895, when they met with the Dominican Máximo Gómez, they both published the Montecrisli Manifesto , in which the unity of whites and blacks, rich and poor, was called to fight for the constitution of a republic based on a wide spread of small rural property and presided over by the sense of justice, thus becoming the great agglutinative of all Cuban social forces. When the war broke out in 1895, Martí fell fighting in Dos Ríos, in the eastern region of the island, on May 19, 1895. With him went one of the most illustrious brains of the continent, a great revolutionary and democrat comparable to Bolívar. , San Martin, Lincoln and Juarez.
General Martínez Campos, who had returned in 1895 as governor, considers himself a failure and points to General Valeriano Weyler as his successor. . This inaugurates a military policy that consisted of withdrawing the support of the peasantry from the insurgents by concentrating them by force in the cities, which produced epidemics and mass deaths from starvation. Lacking a peasant base to feed them, the Cubans began to suffer serious military setbacks.
North American pressure and Cuban public opinion forced Spain to relieve Weyler and grant Cuba full autonomy at the end of 1897, but the measure was late.
The North American press, in the first place the one directed by magnate William Randolph Hearst, supported the Cuban cause and incited public opinion in his country against the Spanish presence in Cuba. The blasting of the battleship Maine (February 1898) meant the opportunity that the US was waiting for to intervene in the war in favor of the Cubans. President MacKinlcy, initially reluctant to war, obtained authorization from the US Congress in April 1898 through the Joint Resolution (Joint Resolution), which began with the words Cuba is, and by right it should be, free and independent… On the 22nd of the same month, the US squadron, commanded by Admiral Sampson, blocked the main ports of the island. The Spanish-Cuban-American War had begun.