Cuba: Independence Movement

Cuba's independence movement developed over three decades of intermittent warfare against Spanish colonial rule, distinguishing it from the swifter transitions experienced by much of Spanish America earlier in the nineteenth century. Discontent over high taxation, limited political representation, and the persistence of slavery on the island fueled growing unrest among Cuban planters and intellectuals, culminating in the outbreak of the Ten Years' War in October 1868, when sugar mill owner Carlos Manuel de Céspedes and his followers proclaimed independence in a call to arms known as the Grito de Yara.

The Ten Years' War ended in 1878 without achieving independence, but it produced a new generation of Cuban nationalists, among them the writer and political organizer José Martí. Exiled for much of his adult life, Martí spent years in New York building support for a renewed struggle, founding the Cuban Revolutionary Party in 1892 to unite exiled and island-based revolutionaries. Fighting resumed in February 1895, though Martí was killed in a skirmish weeks after returning to Cuba to join the campaign.

The war continued for three more years until the United States intervened in 1898 following the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana harbor, entering the conflict on the side of the Cuban insurgents. Spain's defeat later that year ended nearly four centuries of colonial rule, though Cuba remained under U.S. military occupation until formal independence was declared in 1902.