Ten Years' War (Cuba)

Cuba's first major war for independence from Spain lasted from October 1868 to May 1878 and was fought mainly in the eastern half of the island. Begun by Cuban-born planters, it came to involve freed slaves and men of every class, but ended without independence under the Pact of Zanjón. Its veterans and its symbols, including the national anthem, shaped the later struggles that ended Spanish rule in 1898.

By the 1860s Cuba was still ruled from Madrid as part of the Spanish Empire. Cuban-born elites resented high taxes, censorship, military courts and their lack of any voice in the Spanish parliament, while European-born Spaniards dominated trade. In 1865 creole leaders asked Madrid for tariff reform, representation, legal equality and real enforcement of the ban on the slave trade, which had been widely evaded. Economic crises in 1857 and 1866–67 deepened the discontent, especially among planters and landowners in the east.

A conspiracy formed in Bayamo in 1867 and spread to Manzanillo, where the sugar-mill owner Carlos Manuel de Céspedes became its leader. When the Spanish learned of the plan, the rising was brought forward. On 10 October 1868, at his estate of La Demajagua, Céspedes proclaimed independence, freed his own slaves and called on Cubans of every race to join him. Within weeks some 12,000 volunteers had taken up arms, and the rebels captured Bayamo, where the song later adopted as the national anthem, "La Bayamesa", was composed. Spanish troops retook the burned city in January 1869.

Camagüey rose in November 1868 and Las Villas in February 1869, but the rich western provinces around Havana stayed largely quiet. In April 1869 an assembly at Guáimaro adopted a constitution that placed the army under a civilian legislature and elected Céspedes president of the Republic in Arms. Máximo Gómez, a former cavalry officer in the Spanish army, trained the rebels, known as mambises, in the machete charge, and commanders such as Antonio Maceo rose through the ranks.

Spain answered with reinforcements and a large militia of Volunteers, many of them Cuban-born loyalists, which gave the war something of the character of a civil war. The Volunteers executed eight Havana students in 1871, and in 1873 Spanish forces seized the ship Virginius and executed 53 people on board. Peasants and rebel families were killed or herded into camps. Among the rebels, quarrels over civilian versus military authority led to Céspedes being deposed in 1873; he was killed by a Spanish patrol in February 1874. Gómez's attempt to carry the war west in 1875 failed to win over the planters and slaves there.

The end of the Third Carlist War in Spain in 1876 freed more troops, and Spanish forces in Cuba eventually exceeded 250,000. General Arsenio Martínez Campos combined pressure with offers of amnesty and reform. With their government dissolved, rebel leaders accepted the Pact of Zanjón on 10 February 1878. Maceo rejected it in the Protest of Baraguá in March, but his surrender ended the war on 28 May 1878.

Death tolls are uncertain. One widely cited estimate puts the total at about 190,000, roughly 100,000 Cubans, most of them civilians, and about 90,000 on the Spanish side, many of them soldiers who died of disease. The pact freed slaves who had fought in the war, and Spain abolished slavery in Cuba gradually from 1880. Unrest returned in the Little War of 1879–1880, and many veterans led the 1895 war that ended with the Spanish–American War. Leaders of the Cuban Revolution later presented their movement as a continuation of 1868. Cuba still marks 10 October as a national holiday.

Our 1878 map shows Cuba as a Spanish colony in the year the war ended; the 1900 map shows it after Spanish rule had ended.