Havana, Cuba: Cubans are commemorating today the 151st anniversary of the beginning of the Ten Years War, a contest waged to break the chains of the Spanish yoke.

The Guerra Grande as it is also known in history began on October 10, 1868 under the direction of lawyer Carlos Manuel de Céspedes with the support of a group of patriots, Prensa Latina publishes.

Céspedes - who freed his slaves that same day at the Demajagua sugar mill - attacked the next day a settlement in the town of Yara, hence the revolution takes its name, also remembered as the Scream of Yara.

No one ignores that Spain rules the Island with a bloody iron arm, Cespedes said then.

"We are deprived of the right of assembly, except under the presidency of a military chief," he added; “we cannot ask for the remedy to our ills, without being treated as a rebel, and we are not granted another resource than silence and obedience”.

"Resentments don't mislead us, ambitions don't flatter us, we just want to be free and equal," Céspedes said.

The insurrection spread throughout the eastern part of the country and several groups gathered in different parts of the Island to support the call of Céspedes, baptized here as the Father of the Homeland.

The landowners of the western zone were not ruined like those of the East, hence many had a reactionary role in the independence campaign, thinking that the war would affect their economic interests.

The prohibition of forming political parties, the refusal of Spain for those born on this Island to hold public office and carry out meetings, except under the supervision of a Spanish military leader, were among the causes that gave rise to the Hispanic-Cuban conflict.

From the economic point of view, there was slavery, which in addition to being cruel was a brake on the economic development of the island, because at that time the use of skilled workers was essential.

The western region was more developed, had more slaves, greater production and more trade facilities than the eastern zone. This caused many eastern landowners to ruin.

Spain imposed high taxes and tributes as it pleased, maintained a rigid commercial control that greatly affected the national economy and used the funds extracted from the island for matters completely outside the interest of the Creoles as finance wars in this continent.

There was an awareness of the need to introduce wage labor as the only way to advance the sugar industry, and this would never be achieved under Spanish rule.

Socially, the largest of the Antilles lived a marked division of classes, racial prejudices, lack of freedom of the press, and slaves, peasants, small producers, blacks and free mulattos and other sectors were subjected to double exploitation, by Spanish officials and Cuan landowners.

Relevant figures emerged over a decade of struggles, including Ignacio Agramonte, who died in 1873, and Antonio Maceo and the Dominican Máximo Gómez, who would also contribute their decisive efforts to the war of 1895.

The Ten Years War did not have a happy ending, it was influenced by an uncontrollable caudillismo and regionalism unleashed among the Cubans who caused unity to fail and therefore the efforts to achieve independence from Spain. 

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