Cuban Independence Movement, nationalist uprising in Cuba against Spanish rule. It began with the unsuccessful Ten Years’ War (Guerra de los Diez Años; 1868–78) and culminated in the U.S. intervention that ended the Spanish colonial presence in the Americas (see Spanish-American War).
The demands of sugar—labourers, capital, machines, technical skills, and markets—strained ethnic relations, aggravated political and economic...
Dissatisfied with the corrupt and inefficient Spanish administration, lack of political representation, and high taxes, Cubans in the eastern provinces united under the wealthy planter Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, whose declaration of independence in October 1868, the Grito de Yara (“Cry of Yara”), signaled the beginning of the Ten Years’ War, in which 200,000 lives were lost. Céspedes had the support of some landowners, whose main interest was economic and political independence from Spain, whereas the farmers and labourers were more concerned with the immediate abolition of slavery and greater political power for the common man.
In 1876 Spain sent Gen. Arsenio Martínez Campos to crush the revolution. Lacking organization and significant outside support, the rebels agreed to an armistice in February 1878 (Pact of Zanjón), the terms of which promised amnesty and political reform. A second uprising, La Guerra Chiquita (“The Little War”), engineered by Calixto García, began in August 1879 but was quelled by superior Spanish forces in autumn 1880. Spain gave Cuba representation in the Cortes (parliament) and abolished slavery in 1886. Other promised reforms, however, never materialized.
