The Fruitful Truce (1879-1895)
After a short stay in Haiti, where he was pursued by the Spanish and faced assassination attempts by the Spanish consulates, and also in Jamaica, Maceo eventually settled in the Costa Rican province of Guanacaste. The president of Costa Rica assigned Maceo to a military unit and provided him with a small farm to live on. Maceo was contacted by José Martí and urged to initiate the War of 1895, called by Martí the “necessary war”.
Maceo, with the experience and wisdom gained from previous revolutionary failures, argued that there were a number of impediments to military success in a brief but intense epistolary exchange with Martí, warning about the causes of the partial defeat in the Ten Years' War (1868–78). Martí responded with his formula of “the army, free; but the country, as a country with all its dignity represented,” and convinced Maceo of the high probabilities of success if the war was to be prepared carefully. As a precondition, Maceo demanded that highest command should be in the hands of Gómez, which was approved without reservation by the Delegate of the Cuban Revolutionary Party (Martí). In Costa Rica, he faced, gun in hand, another attempt of assassination by Spanish agents at the exit of a theatre, with fatal result for one of the aggressors.
Read more about this topic: Antonio Maceo Grajales
Famous quotes containing the words fruitful and/or truce:
“It is a fruitful island of the sea-world, a great Ithaca, there parched and stony and here trodden by flocks and curly- headed bulls and heavy with thick-set grain.”
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