14ymedio, Yunior García Aguilera, Madrid, December 6, 2023 — When Spain and the United States signed the Treaty of Paris, Cuba’s future was uncertain. The Americans had made it clear that they were not interested in annexation but there was no clear path to sovereignty either. The island’s fields had been torched by war, small landowners had no animals to plow them, and the railway infrastructure lay in ruins. What then did it mean for the majority of those we call “the public” or that other thing we call “freedom”?
The rebels’ machetes and bullets killed just over 3,000 Spaniards while various diseases claimed more than 40,000 lives. Some 80,000 Cubans fought on the Spanish side, either as volunteers or replacement troops. The Army of Liberation, however, never amounted to even half that number. Worst of all, most of its soldiers did not join the struggle until its final month, after the United States had already intervened in the conflict and it was clear that Spain would lose control of Cuba.
Jumping aboard the victory bandwagon has always been easy. At that point in the war, everyone on the island could sing “La Bayamesa”. On more than one occasion, the rebel commander Máximo Gómez became frustrated with the widespread public indifference to the conflict. At the end of the Ten Years’ War, as he was preparing to go into exile, a crowd gathered at the port of Santiago de Cuba. Gómez would later write in his diary, “I gaze out with great sorrow at a throng of more than 8,000 young Cubans who did not have the courage to take up arms to liberate their country.” It is understandable that he would choose not attend the ceremony transfering power from the panchos to the gringos on January 1, 1899. For h