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Early Incidents of the Present War: Masso

Other efforts were made in favor of peace. On the day following Leyva's departure from "La Odiosa," Masso received there his old friend, Juan Baptista Spottorno, a man of such prominence in the revolutionary party that he was president of the Cuban organization for some time during the last war, and a committee of five ex-rebel chiefs left Manzanillo for Havana, to ask the captain-general to stop hostilities. It was all useless. Masso would not surrender without delay, and Calleja would not countermand Lachambre's orders. Further endeavors on the part of Leyva, embodied in a remarkable letter of protest to Masso, and later on, the action of the Central Junta of the Cuban Home Rule party in publishing an important " Appeal to the People of Cuba," could not prevent the dreaded conflagration.

By this time, the situation in the eastern province was a rather peculiar one from a military standpoint. The rebel force mustered about 1,600 men, divided in twelve bands--the largest not 250 strong--scattered in several districts of that thinly populated section of Cuba. The government troops were also few in number and serving mainly in the seaport garrisons, for the whole army was less than 14,000. General Lachambre was at once reinforced by a column under Colonel Santocildes. Nearly all the rebel bands were composed of cavalrymen, as horses were plentiful in the country, and the Cubans are excellent riders; but they were very badly armed, having only their machetes, and a few old guns. For this reason their operations consisted chiefly in trying to overcome small garrisons of regulars or volunteers, to obtain their arms or ammunition. The first occurrence of this kind was dramatically interesting. Veguitas, a small town on the road between Manzanillo and Bayamo, was ungarrisoned, and the arms belonging to the company of local volunteers had been gathered in a certain house. Esteban Tamayo knew this, entered the town with his fifty followers, went directly to the residence of Cayetano de la Maza, the captain of said volunteers, and ordered him to deliver the arms of the company. Maza made no resistance, and Tamayo's men were soon provided with guns and cartridges, only to discover at once that they had been rendered useless. The disappointment filled the whole band with rage; the captain was prefunctorily courtmartialed and sentenced to be shot then and there, and the customary number of men proceeded to execute the terrible sentence. At that critical moment a young woman sprang between the victim and the muzzles of the rifles, and facing them, cried to the rebels: "He will not die before you have killed a Cuban woman." She was Senorita Maria de la Maza, the captain's niece, whose marvelous act of devotion and bravery paralyzed the executioners and caused intense astonishment to the whole party. The sentence was reconsidered, resulting in a grant of pardon, and the band left Veguitas. Several small columns of regulars and local guerillas went out to the country in pursuit of the rebel parties, the latter taking to the inaccessible woods when they could not fight to advantage, and falling upon badly protected villages to get guns and cartridges, in which they were sometimes successful, after more or less skirmishing and loss of men on both sides. In this way the military operations of the present revolution were started, and the hide-and-seek methods have prevailed ever since. It is a fact that no better plan of campaigning could be adopted in Cuba to make an armed conflict last indefinitely, for the topographical and climatic conditions of the country demand guerilla warfare. The mountains are covered with the thickest woods imaginable, while the dry plains are a mass of manigua (very high bushes and grasses), and the rest of the territory is quite marshy. Only the cultivated lands, after harvesting, could afford a place for regular battles. Whether the contending armies be large or small, nothing but guerilla warfare is possible in Cuba, and large battles being out of the question, any of the parties can, at will, make the conflict one of long duration. This will explain why 50,000 or more men of the revolutionary army, and over 130,000 Spanish regulars, actually on the field, have engaged in military operations for one year, and no decisive encounter has been reported yet. Hardly a day has passed without the occurrence of some fighting, but nearly every encounter was merely a skirmish with more or less combatants in it, giving occasion to many examples of individual bravery, but affording very few opportunities to register brilliant victories on either side. Some of them will be mentioned here as characteristic specimens of Cuban warfare, in which all dangers and discomforts are multiplied, while martial glory is generally at a discount. But other events must be reviewed in succession. The Cuban Junta in New York had not been idle, and it soon began to organize expeditions of men, arms, and accoutrements which were gladly received by their friends in Cuba. Antonio Maceo and his brother Jose, with Flor Crombet, Cebreco, and other comrades, a score in all, had left Costa Rico and succeeded, not without some difficulty, in landing near Baracoa, on the 31st of March. On their way to the interior, Flor Crombet was killed, and some were made prisoners by detachments of regulars, but the Maceos and Cebreco finally joined the band of Periquito Perez, about Guantanamo, and then Antonio Maceo took command of the revolutionary army in the Oriental province.

Jose Marti and Maximo Gomez also set foot on Cubanland at Cabonico (Baracoa district) on the 14th of April, and after hiding in a cave for two days, they marched inland, and met the party under Felix Buen, who received them with military honors, and recognized Gomez as general-in-chief of the Cuban army. The influx of help and the presence of the principal leaders caused the revolt to spread more and more everyday, and the men in arms soon numbered over 6,000.

Spain had reinforced her colonial army with a number of battalions when the Sagasta Cabinet resigned, and the Conservative party took charge of the government. Premier Canovas then had Martinez Campos appointed governor-general of Cuba, who left at once for his destination with another reinforcement of 25,000 men. He landed at Guantanamo on the 16th of April, and also visited Santiago and other ports, as he wished to give preliminary orders, before reaching Havana. His elaborate instructions referred to every department of military service, especially to the proper diet and medical attendance of his soldiers, to the treatment of prisoners of war, and to the protection of non-combatants.