Cuba - Lonely Planet [14]
The 1880s brought an end to slavery, a boom in railway construction and Cuba’s worst economic crisis for over a century. With the price of sugar falling on the world market, the island’s old landowning oligarchy was forced to sell out to a newer and slicker competitor as the US investors started to buy up Cuban land on the cheap. By the end of the 19th century, US trade with Cuba was larger than US trade with the rest of Latin America combined, and Cuba was America’s third-largest trading partner (after Britain and Germany). The island’s sweet-tasting mono-crop economy was translating into a US monopoly, as much of Cuba’s sugar land was owned by US interests, and some wealthy Cuban landowners were readvocating the old annexation argument.
Spanish-Cuban-American War
Cometh the hour, cometh the man: José Martí, poet, patriot, visionary and intellectual, had grown rapidly into a patriotic figure of Bolívarian proportions in the years following his ignominious exile in 1871 (see boxed text,), not just in Cuba, but in the whole of Latin America. After his arrest at the age of 16 during the First War of Independence for a minor indiscretion, Martí had spent 20 years formulating his revolutionary ideas abroad in places as diverse as Guatemala, Mexico and the US. Although impressed by American business savvy and industriousness, he was equally repelled by the country’s all-consuming materialism and was determined to present a workable Cuban alternative.
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For one of the most thoughtful re-evaluations of Cuban history in recent years, check out Richard Gott’s Cuba: A New History. This British academic was one of only two people present in Bolivia in October 1967 to identify the corpse of Che Guevara (he had met Guevara once in the early 1960s).
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Dedicating himself passionately to the cause of the resistance, Martí wrote, spoke, petitioned and organized tirelessly for independence for well over a decade and by 1892 had enough momentum to coax Maceo and Gómez out of exile under the umbrella of the Partido Revolucionario Cubano (PRC; Cuban Revolutionary Party). At last, Cuba had found its Bolívar.
Predicting that the time was right for another revolution, Martí and his compatriots set sail for Cuba in April 1895, landing near Baracoa two months after PRC-sponsored insurrections had tied down Spanish forces in Havana. Raising an army of 40,000 men, the rebels promptly regrouped and headed west, engaging the Spanish for the first time on May 19 in a place called Dos Ríos. It was on this bullet-strafed and strangely anonymous battlefield that Martí, conspicuous on his white horse and dressed in his trademark black dinner suit, was shot and killed as he charged suicidally toward the Spanish lines. Had he lived he would certainly have become Cuba’s first president; instead, he became a hero and a martyr whose life and legacy would inspire generations of Cubans in the years to come.
Conscious of mistakes made during the First War of Independence, Gómez and Maceo stormed west in a scorched-earth policy that left everything from the Oriente to Matanzas up in flames. Early victories quickly led to a sustained offensive, and by January 1896 Maceo had broken through to Pinar del Río, while Gómez was tying down Spanish forces near Havana. The Spaniards responded with an equally ruthless general named Valeriano Weyler, who built countrywide north–south fortifications to restrict the rebels’ movements. In order to break the underground resistance, guajiros (country people) were forced into camps in a process called reconcentración, and anyone supporting the rebellion became liable for execution. The brutal tactics started to show results and on December 7, 1896 the Mambís (the name for the 19th-century rebels fighting Spain) suffered a major military blow to their confidence when Antonio Maceo was killed south of Havana trying