vision of it, which goes something like this: For four centuries the country was a colony of Spain, with the last thirty years spent fighting for independence. For sixty years after, Cuba was a neo-colony of the United States. It was only in 1959, with the triumph-of-the-Revolution, that Cuba achieved true independence, or “dignity,” as Castro has called it. The rhetorical vanishing point of this “one-hundred-year struggle” is that it elevates Castro’s revolution by making it the logical culmination of a fight for freedom that is embodied in the haloed but eventually thwarted figure of Martí. “The Revolution begins now,” Castro had proclaimed to a jubilant crowd in Santiago in January 1959. “This time, luckily for Cuba, the revolution will truly come into being.” That is why “patriot” leaders have ever since been elevated to the heroic status of Agramontes, while anyone with an opposing point of view has been condemned and vilified. “Within the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, nothing,” Castro was fond of saying. Yet little was predestined about Cuba in the 1890s, or in 1958 on the eve of Fidel Castro’s revolution, or even now. Nothing is immutable, except perhaps geography. Time can reduce even history’s most ardent revolutionary ideas to ashes.
Indeed by 1893, fifteen years after the Ten Years’ War ended and a decade after Bernabé set up his first mill, the heroic Camagüey that Gómez remembered had changed. Age had softened the revolutionary resolve of the province’s old war heroes. Gómez himself was in his sixties, Agramonte had died, and his adjutant colonel, Loret de Mola, had sworn never to raise arms again, as he could not bear for his wife and children to suffer another war. The devastation of the fighting that followed Céspedes’s exhortation to ruin in the first war of independence had left many of Camagüey’s once-proud families homeless, penniless, and with only their names—often on the headstones of graves. Now in his fifties, the colonel was more interested in prosperity and reconciliation than revolution, sentiments captured by what was then called the Autonomist movement. Although now often forgotten, the Autonomists remain of current interest as they represented a stream of political thought, honorable rather than heroic, that held out the possibility of a different Cuba, a country-that-might-have-been, rather than the blood-drenched cradle of revolution it became.
“Headed by Cubans of great bravery,” as Martí described them, the Autonomists did not seek independence from Spain or annexation by the United States. They looked around South America and saw that independence had not brought the continent what it promised: Colombia was locked in civil war, so too Venezuela, while Mexico was a dictatorship. Instead, they imagined Cuba as part of a Spanish commonwealth, took Canada or Australia as their models, and were, in general, middle-class reformists who wanted the same rights in Cuba as the Spaniards already had, but no more. They hewed to a middle path of self-rule. They were Cuba’s “Third Way,” and were particularly strong in Camagüey—Rafael Montoro, their most eloquent proponent, was Camagüey’s representative to the Spanish court.
Bernabé and the Colonel supported the Autonomist project. In May 1893 they formed part of a group of Camagüeyano notables that wrote to Martí in New York, condemning the idea of a new war of independence. Their unsigned letter began by expressing the usual courtesies and then politely explained that a successful rebellion required that all Cubans have a revolutionary spirit “beating in their hearts” and “only a few felt that.” Bernabé’s opposition subsequently went even further when he actively foiled a revolutionary plot the following spring. It was led by Enrique Loynaz del Castillo, a twenty-two-year-old patriot rebel from Camagüey who idolized Martí. In New York, Loynaz had recently
Indeed by 1893, fifteen years after the Ten Years’ War ended and a decade after Bernabé set up his first mill, the heroic Camagüey that Gómez remembered had changed. Age had softened the revolutionary resolve of the province’s old war heroes. Gómez himself was in his sixties, Agramonte had died, and his adjutant colonel, Loret de Mola, had sworn never to raise arms again, as he could not bear for his wife and children to suffer another war. The devastation of the fighting that followed Céspedes’s exhortation to ruin in the first war of independence had left many of Camagüey’s once-proud families homeless, penniless, and with only their names—often on the headstones of graves. Now in his fifties, the colonel was more interested in prosperity and reconciliation than revolution, sentiments captured by what was then called the Autonomist movement. Although now often forgotten, the Autonomists remain of current interest as they represented a stream of political thought, honorable rather than heroic, that held out the possibility of a different Cuba, a country-that-might-have-been, rather than the blood-drenched cradle of revolution it became.
“Headed by Cubans of great bravery,” as Martí described them, the Autonomists did not seek independence from Spain or annexation by the United States. They looked around South America and saw that independence had not brought the continent what it promised: Colombia was locked in civil war, so too Venezuela, while Mexico was a dictatorship. Instead, they imagined Cuba as part of a Spanish commonwealth, took Canada or Australia as their models, and were, in general, middle-class reformists who wanted the same rights in Cuba as the Spaniards already had, but no more. They hewed to a middle path of self-rule. They were Cuba’s “Third Way,” and were particularly strong in Camagüey—Rafael Montoro, their most eloquent proponent, was Camagüey’s representative to the Spanish court.
Bernabé and the Colonel supported the Autonomist project. In May 1893 they formed part of a group of Camagüeyano notables that wrote to Martí in New York, condemning the idea of a new war of independence. Their unsigned letter began by expressing the usual courtesies and then politely explained that a successful rebellion required that all Cubans have a revolutionary spirit “beating in their hearts” and “only a few felt that.” Bernabé’s opposition subsequently went even further when he actively foiled a revolutionary plot the following spring. It was led by Enrique Loynaz del Castillo, a twenty-two-year-old patriot rebel from Camagüey who idolized Martí. In New York, Loynaz had recently
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