. Maximo Gomez was living in
San Domingo, and, when he was offered the command of the revolutionary
forces, he promptly accepted the responsibility. The offer came to him
through Jose Marti, the head of the organization.

The grim veterans were resolute in their purpose. After studying the
situation, they agreed that a general uprising should be set on foot in
all the provinces on February 24, 1895. It was impossible to do this,
but the standard of revolt was raised on the date named in three of the
provinces.

One Spanish official read truly the meaning of the signs. He was
Calleja, the captain-general. Though the revolt in the province of
Santiago de Cuba looked trifling, he knew it was like a tiny blaze
kindled in the dry prairie grass. He wished to act liberally toward the
insurgents, but the blind government at Madrid blocked his every step.
Since it had played the fool from the beginning, it kept up the farce to
the end. They ordered Calleja to stamp out the rebellion, and he did his
utmost to obey orders.

Could the royal and insurgent forces be brought to meet in fair combat,
the latter would have been crushed out of existence at the first
meeting. But the insurgent leaders were too shrewd to risk anything of
that nature. They resumed their guerrilla tactics, striking hard blows,
here, there, anywhere that the chance offered, and then fled into the
woods and mountains before the regulars could be brought against them.

Such a style of warfare is always cruel and accompanied by outrages of a
shocking character. The Cubans were as savage in their methods as the
Spaniards. They blew up bridges and railroad trains with dynamite,
regardless of the fact that, in so doing, it was the innocent instead of
the guilty who suffered. They burned the sugar cane, destroyed the
tobacco and coffee plantations, and impoverished the planters in order
to shut off the revenues of Spain and deprive her forces of their needed
supplies; they spread desolation and ruin everywhere, in the vain hope
that the mother country could thus be brought to a realizing sense of
the true situation.

But Spain was deaf and blind. She sent thousands of soldiers across the
Atlantic, including the members of the best families in the kingdom, to
die in the pestilential lowlands of Cuba, while trying to stamp out the
fires of revolution that continually grew and spread.

The island was cursed by three political parties, each of which was
strenuous