Spanish general Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau, also known as “the butcher” for his harsh treatment of the Cubans.
Led by former slave Juan Gualberto Gómez, the revolution began with the Grito de Baire, or Outcry of Baire, on February 25, 1895. Named for the small town in which the fighting began, the Grito de Baire initially looked like it might turn into another little war. Spanish authorities crushed the revolutionaries and captured their leaders quite easily, leading to small press reports in Spain and the United States that the revolt would lead to nothing.
Things changed, however, after Maceo reached Cuba on March 31 and Martí and Gómez reached the island on April 11. These three leaders finally met on May 4 at La Mejorana to formulate a strategy for reviving the revolution. Gómez announced a scorched-earth policy for military conduct. Believing that the inequality of wealth created Cuba’s troubles, Gómez said the solution was to strike at that wealth by destroying sugarcane plantations and other wealthy businesses. This strategy would deplete the Spanish revenue that came from taxing the businesses. Gómez felt that making the war expensive for Spain would even the rebels’s odds against the large, well-equipped Spanish army.
Back in Spain, as the government planned its response to the rebellion, a scandal involving newspaper criticism of the Spanish military forced Premier Práxedes Mateo Sagasta (1825–1903) to resign. His replacement, Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, decided to send Ten Years’ War veteran Arsenio Martínez de Campos to be Cuba’s governor and military general. Martínez de Campos intended to end the revolution while implementing new laws to give minimal relief to Cuba’s political and economic concerns.
Martínez de Campos planned a military strategy similar to the one that he had used in the Ten Years’ War. First, he divided the army into two parts. One part remained in the cities and towns to defend them against rebel attack. The second part roamed the countryside to engage the rebels in battle. Using Spanish trochas—fortified barriers that at one point crossed the entire island between Mariel and Majana—Martínez de Campos hoped to corner, surround, and then overwhelm the rebel army with large numbers of Spanish troops.
The rebel army, which was strongest on the poorer eastern end of the island, set out to dominate the countryside with its scorched-earth policy. With support from rural residents, the Cuban rebels planned to break through the main trocha, spread over the western end of the island, and starve the country to death with economic destruction. Fighting without Martí, who died in his first battle on May 19, 1895, the rebel army implemented this strategy in June of that year. Gómez ordered his soldiers to kill plantation owners and workers who resisted the army’s economic tactics. He also prohibited the transportation of goods, such as leather, wood, tobacco, coffee, and honey, into towns held by the Spanish army.
By January 1896, the Liberating Army, as the rebels came to be called, had achieved its greatest military success. Forces led by both Gómez and Maceo had broken through the main trocha and spread westward. Martínez de Campos declared a state of war in Cuba’s capital of Havana, which faced threats from rebel forces.
Spain had deployed 186,000 soldiers to fight rebel forces that roamed in bands of hundreds and thousands of men. Despite this huge numerical advantage, the Spanish army faced a military stalemate (deadlock) due to its soldiers’s poor marksmanship, its habit of withdrawing into town garrisons (military posts) after victories to avoid ambushes, and especially the tropical summertime diseases of Cuba. When asked to name his best generals, Gómez identified June, July, and August, according to Philip S. Foner in The Spanish-Cuban-American War and the Birth of American Imperialism.
Enter “the butcher”
Back in Spain, discontent with Martínez de Campos had reached the breaking point. Many felt he was being too easy on the rebels. Faced with this pressure, Martínez de Campos resigned on January 17, 1896. Premier Cánovas replaced him with General Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau (1838–1930), whom the Chicago Times-Herald called “the most brutal and heartless soldier to be found in a supposedly civilized country.”
Soon after arriving in Cuba, Weyler issued the first of many reconcentración, or reconcentration, orders. His strategy was to starve the rebels of the food, shelter, and other support they received from civilians living in the countryside. Weyler ordered the pacificos, as the non-rebels were called, to leave their homes and move into Spanish-occupied cities and towns. The Spanish army then destroyed the food and shelter the pacificos had left behind.
Weyler’s reconcentration policy turned out to be an international public relations disaster for Spain. Food and shelter already was scarce in the cities and towns occupied by Spanish troops. The relocated pacificos ended up hungry and dirty, living in filthy conditions that spelled death for hundreds of thousands of them. The American press, already tending to support the Cuban rebels, criticized Weyler’s inhumane policies and called him “the butcher.” Yet the media usually failed to condemn the inhumane tactics used by the rebel army. Such biased coverage helped to generate public support in the United States for its eventual war with Spain.
In the Cuban countryside, Maceo’s dwindling army kept the Spanish forces on the run. Maceo complained to the revolutionary government, however, that he was not receiving his fair share of arms and ammunition, a problem he blamed on racism. Maceo managed to last for almost one year against Weyler’s forces. Then, on December 7, 1896, after crossing around a trocha by sea, Maceo’s rebels faced an unusual nighttime battle at San Pedro de Hernández. Sleeping in a hammock and weak from many war wounds, Maceo was unprepared to fight because the Spanish usually retreated into the safety of their garrisons at night. Battling while atop a horse, Maceo received two bullets that ended his life.
Without Maceo, who led the most effective assaults on Spanish-occupied towns during the revolution, the war continued to be a military stalemate. Weyler controlled the cities, ports, and military forts. Gómez and the rebels controlled the countryside. As early as October 1896, there was pressure in Spain to recall Weyler, who was generating bad international press while failing to end the revolution.
In August 1897, Premier Cánovas died by an assassin’s bullet. The queen regent of Spain soon put the liberal Sagasta back into the office of premier, and Sagasta replaced Weyler with General Ramón Blanco y Erenas (1831–1906). Under Sagasta, the Spanish government eventually agreed to end the reconcentration camps, stop fighting, and make Cuba a free unit of government under Spain. Cuba, however, wanted complete independence, and events in early 1898 brought Spain to war with the United States.
Cuba and the concentration camps
After Marshal Campos had failed to pacify the Cuban rebellion, the Conservative government of Antonio Cánovas del Castillo sent out Weyler, and this selection met the approval of most Spaniards, who thought him the proper man to crush the rebellion. While serving as a Spanish general he was called “Butcher Weyler” because hundreds of thousands of people died in his concentration camps.
He was made a governor of Cuba with full powers to suppress the insurgency (rebellion was widespread in Cuba) and restore the island to political order and its sugar production to greater profitability. Initially, Weyler was greatly frustrated by the same factors that had made victory difficult for all generals of traditional standing armies fighting against an insurgency. While the Spanish troops marched in regulation and required substantial supplies, their opponents practiced hit-and-run tactics and lived off the land, blending in with the non-combatant population. He came to the same conclusions as his predecessors as well–that to win Cuba back for Spain, he would have to separate the rebels from the civilians by putting the latter in safe havens, protected by loyal Spanish troops. By the end of 1897, General Weyler had relocated more than 300,000 into such “reconcentration camps,” believed by many to be the origin of the name for such tactics used by the British in the Second Boer War and thus evolved into a designation to describe such methods used by twentieth century regimes as Hitler and Stalin. Although he was successful moving vast numbers of people, he failed to provide for them adequately. Consequently, these areas became cesspools of hunger and disease, where many hundreds of thousands died.
Weyler’s reconcentration policy had another important effect. Although it made Weyler’s military objectives easier to accomplish, it had devastating political consequences. Although the Spanish Conservative government supported Weyler’s tactics wholeheartedly, the Liberals denounced them vigorously for their toll on the Cuban civilian population. In the propaganda war waged in the United States, Cuban emigrés made much of Weyler’s inhumanity to their countrymen and won the sympathy of broad groups of the U.S. population to their cause.
Weyler’s strategy also backfired militarily due to the rebellion in the Philippines that required the redeployment by 1897 of some troops already in Cuba. When Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo was assassinated in June, Weyler lost his principal supporter in Spain. He resigned his post in late 1897 and returned to Europe. He was replaced in Cuba by the more conciliatory Ramón Blanco y Erenas.
