Those first guerrilla Cuban independence soldiers—known as mambises— led by Carlos Manuel de Céspedes rose up in La Demajagua on October 10, 1868, without taking into account that they were largely outnumbered by a Spanish force one hundred thousand strong, whom they fought basically with the machetes they used for agricultural work.
The Spanish army of the 19th century had among its warlike traditions the one bequeathed by the soldiers who decimated the invading troops of Napoleon Bonaparte in Spain (1808-1814), marked by surprise attacks against marching columns using bladed weapons such as the popular knives and other work tools of the peasants who joined the pro-independence forces of those days.
However, 60 years later, the Spanish colonial troops faced combat tactics similar to those applied during the Napoleonic invasion of the peninsula.
A few days after the uprising, on October 26, 1868, the Dominican Máximo Gómez, then in his early 30s but already a veteran of the civil wars in his homeland, took a bold decision and led some 40 combatants, armed mostly with just a machete, to hide within the dense vegetation on both sides of the Tienda del Pino de Baire, approximately one kilometer west of the town of the same name, to ambush an enemy column.
Led by Colonel Demetrio Quiros Weyler, the 700-soldier force was attacked by Gómez’s terrifying machete-wielding mambises, who left many dead Spaniards in their wake. Those who survived fled towards Baire.
It was the first machete charge ever launched against the colonialist army, which lost more than 200 men to a type of attack that Spain’s rules of engagement were unable to counteract.
The mambises, who usually did battle without firearms or with insufficient ammunition, would soon embrace and improve the machete charges taught by Gómez, turning them into a favored tactic.
Antonio Maceo and his brother José, Calixto García and other future military chiefs were Gómez’s best students. In the province of Camagüey, Major Ignacio Agramonte organized the cavalry that made the machete charges legendary.
The well-known ‘toque a degüello’ (bugle call to slaughter) became since then the terror of the Spanish contingents, whose defensive formation of square blocks bristling with bayonets proved to be useless against the advance of the insurgent cavalry.
The machete charge was the basis of the combat tactics of the mambises during the wars of independence. It stood out as an example of the Cuban people’s fighting spirit and creativity to succeed against Spanish soldiers sent thousands of miles from their country to defend a cause very much at odds with the glory days when they made history by liberating their homeland from the foreign yoke.
