BY GUILLERMO JIMÉNEZ SOLER
When Washington declared war on its Spanish rival in April 1898 in order to seize Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam for its own imperial interests, the Cuban people had just defeated the Spanish army in a three-year war for independence. The article below, reprinted from the July 12, 1998, issue of Granma International, describes the 1895-98 Cuban war for liberation. It was published under the title, "The war the Cubans won and lost."

One century ago, when the United States intervened in the three-year war that Cuba had been waging against Spain since 1895, the island's victory was generally accepted both among the conquered and the conquerors.

According to Admiral Cervera, chief of the Spanish naval squadron annihilated by the U.S. Navy in the bay of Santiago de Cuba on July 3, 1898, "War (with the United States) was accepted by Spain when the island of Cuba was de facto lost."

As Generalissimo Máximo Gómez, head of the Cuban Liberation Army (EL), commented immediately after defeated Captain-General Weyler was replaced by General Blanco at the end of 1897: "Spain lacks the conditions...to prolong the war for a further two years, and the Cubans are able to resist for as long as they want."

By the end of the first year of the war, the setback suffered by the Spanish forces had become an evident fact. They had proved incapable of detaining the westward march commanded by Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo, which in just three months had whipped like a hurricane from Mangos de Baraguá in the east of the country, reaching Mantua in the extreme west on January 22, 1896.

To contain this insurrectional tidal wave, in June 1895 Spain had dispatched to the island the most well-known and capable of its generals, Arsenio Martínez Campos. But as early as Christmas 1895, in a speech in the capital on December 27, he had virtually acknowledged his incapacity to control it. Four days previously, only 15 minutes after having initiated the Coliseo battle, the general abandoned the field of operations. One week earlier, he had suffered a spectacular defeat at Mal Tiempo where a headlong machete charge ordered by the Máximo Gómez left over 300 casualties. In confirmation of his premonition, the day after his speech, the Spanish forces were definitively left in the rear of the Liberation Army after the Calimete battle.

Faced with such a disaster, Spain tightened the rope by appointing Valeriano Weyler as Martínez Campos' successor. Weyler was Spain's most merciless general but in the long run he also was unable to defeat the Cubans, in spite of exterminating a large section of the population on his way.

But, as Gómez had predicted, "after the westward march, it was all a question of time," having subsequently formulated his plan to defeat the Spanish forces without directly engaging them. Thus, for more than 18 months, from January 1897, 40,000 of Weyler's soldiers fought 41 battles against 3,000 of Gómez' men in La Reforma, in central Cuba, without being able to dislodge them from an area of a few square miles.

From December 1895 onwards, apart from the ports and two or three localities, the Liberation Army controlled the territory of Camaguey and Oriente. After the culmination of the westward march, the entire countryside was dominated by the Cuban troops who, operating a few minutes from the capital, made incursions into its perimeters.

That superiority attained by the Cuban forces was based on Gómez' strategy of extending this war across the entire island, destroying in its path the colonial system's economic support and deploying a war of attrition against the enemy by immobilizing large numbers of troops in Trochas and other larger towns, as well as utilizing the climate and tropical diseases to the Liberation Army's benefit.

Those tactics were based on campaigns of forced marches, nocturnal marches, countermarches, encirclements and movements to distract the enemy forces, utilizing units with great mobility and combining a swift cavalry with a rapid and versatile infantry capable of turning into the former. Using great initiative and improvisation the Liberation Army selected the terrain and the timing for the battles, availing themselves of an efficient information system.

Spain's defeat was a total one, given that it had not stopped in "sacrificing up to the last man and the last peseta" in order to crush the insurrection, having organized the largest and best-equipped army commanded to date by some of its most valiant generals, and which exceeded the sum total of soldiers confronted by all the continent's liberators, from George Washington to Simón Bolívar, and in an area more extensive than that of Cuba.

Those 15,000 outstanding soldiers stationed in Cuba at the beginning of the insurrection swelled to reach some 300,000 to 350,000 in service at the peak moment of 1897. Of these, around 200,000 were regular troops, their correlation of forces in relation to the Liberation Army oscillating between four to one at the start of the westward march in October 1895, and six to one at the end of 1897. In spite of this, on May 19, 1897, Sagasta, leader of the Liberal Party could only bewail in the Spanish Cortes the fact that "after having dispatched 200,000 men and having shed so much blood on the island we are merely masters of the ground on which our soldiers tread."

However, at the beginning of 1898, shortly before the U.S. intervention, that impressive war machine had been reduced by half due casualties, sickness and repatriations of the wounded.

That was not fortuitous, as Generalissimo Gómez counted among his forces the ravages of the climate and tropical diseases, which devastated the raw recruits. Gómez commented that "his three best generals were June, July and August," and in his deliberate campaigns during those months he pushed the enemy troops toward the most swampy and inhospitable areas.

During 1897, some 400,000 Spanish soldiers were hospitalized, equivalent to each serving soldier occupying a bed three or four times in the year. That year, Sagasta lamented "that the Cuban war is costing us 100 soldiers who die there daily."

Thus, Spain's arrogant policy had become mired in a bog converted into a genuine national tragedy with the loss of close to half a million men, according to Spanish historians' calculation, while the Liberation Army suffered only 10,665 casualties.

Moreover, the treasury of the metropolis was bankrupt. By mid-1897, the state coffers were exhausted and in June, Spain was forced to have recourse to the first of various internal and external loans. The economic collapse was of such magnitude that future generations of Spaniards coined an expression to describe any major loss: "more was lost in Cuba."

By now, the dominant slogan in the Spanish Senate was "not even one more man or peso" for Cuba. Thus, by the end of 1897, the Spanish army was unable to mount operations and its government even less able to continue sending it reinforcements. General Blanco, on replacing Weyler in October of that year, informed Prime Minister Sagasta that "...the army was spent and weak, crowding the hospitals, without the strength to fight or barely lift their weapons..."

Its defeat was widely accepted in Madrid, a view shared by both the ruling party and the opposition, who, of one accord, offered Cuba the crumb of an autonomous government which was installed on January 1, 1898, when it was too late to withdraw the offer.

The situation in 1898 was succinctly resumed by the outstanding Spanish politician Pi y Margall: "We have not been able to defeat them with 200,000 men because they are the masters of the countryside, they know every last fold of the terrain in which they are fighting, they are aided by the climate and they are fighting for independence; they are moved and exalted by an ideal and we have none. Our soldiers go there by force...."

The opportune and skillful participation of the United States, with the complicity of the defeated Spanish governors, would rob the Cubans of such a great victory.  
 
 
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