It was the dawn of October 10, 1868, at La Demajagua sugar mill in eastern Cuba, the lawyer Carlos Manuel de Céspedes and López del Castillo, in the middle of a handful of men and slaves, read the manifesto that sealed the determination of independence: "When a people reaches the extreme of degradation and misery in which we see each other, no one can reproach him for using weapons to get out of a state so full of reproach."
The next day of his uprising in arms, he took advantage of the night to attack with his small army the Spanish garrison in the town of Yara.
But the results were not as expected. The attackers were unaware that the Spaniards had received considerable reinforcement in men. They had to disperse in several directions.
Céspedes managed to reorganize a group of fighters. In the midst of that difficult situation, someone exclaimed with discouragement; “Everything has been lost,” to which he replied with energy and security: “there are still twelve men left; they are enough to make the independence of Cuba”.
The revolution advances. They get up in arms in Camagüey and Las Villas. The representatives of these two territories and that of the East, meet in the city of Guáimaro, where the Constituent Assembly elects him President of the Republic in Arms.
He knew the plot that was carried out to replace him as president and as a man of honor; he sacrificed his ideas to maintain the unity that the moment required.
On October 27, 1873, at the Bijagual camp, he was deposed as president by the representatives of the House.
That act was the result of quarrels, rivalries and clash of interests.
Then he was forced to accompany the new government and the Chamber for two months. They denied his departure abroad. He was banished to the San Lorenzo farm, in the Sierra Maestra.
They wanted to break the noble patriot who declared a traitor to everyone who entered into negotiations with the Spaniards. And they failed.
We should recall that when the Captain General of the Island, Caballero de Rodas sent him a message telling him that his youngest son Oscar had been captured and sentenced to death. He proposed his son's life through a personal arrangement.
Céspedes' response was blunt: "Oscar is not my only son; I am the father of all Cubans who have died for the Revolution."
But that heroic deed starred by Carlos Manuel de Céspedes and that lasted 10 years, served as inspiration for José Martí, the Cuban National Hero, to join the wills of the old and new patriots in the War of Independence of 1895. The revolutionaries of the decades of the 30s, in the neocolonial Republic, they felt heirs of those initiators.
As Dr. Eusebio Leal wrote “… it was necessary on October 10, 1868, as it was on February 24, 1895 and January 1, 1959.
The Cuban Revolution marches with firm steps more than 150 years from the founding date.
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