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Updated: May 23, 2025
The presence of Maceo and four thousand very imperfectly disciplined guerrilla troops, most of whom were coloured men, not too careful in their discrimination between friend and foe, was a double menace of a very serious character to Don Hermoso: for, on the one hand, they were certain, sooner or later, to attract a large body of Spaniards to the neighbourhood, for the purpose of hunting them down; while, on the other, should the patriots find themselves hard pressed, it was quite on the cards that they might take it into their heads to sweep down upon the estate and destroy it utterly, in order to prevent the possibility of the Spaniards seizing it and operating therefrom against them.
Gomez and Maceo, instead of being driven hither and thither, led Campos a dance, and he was prevented from solidifying the two trochas he had formed. Gomez never attempted pitched battles or sieges, but harassed the enemy in every way possible, cutting off their convoys, picking them off in detail, getting up night alarms, and in every way annoying them.
Half an hour later, when the dead had been stripped of their weapons and ammunition, Antonio Maceo and a little body of his subordinate officers, using the scaling ladders left on the field by the Spaniards, crossed the gap in the wrecked bridge, and made their way up to the house for the purpose of thanking Don Hermoso for the letter of warning which he had dispatched to them, and with a request for the loan of all the spades and other tools which he could spare to enable the insurgents to bury the dead: and by sunset that night a long, low mound of fresh- turned earth, showing red amid the vivid green of the grass-grown plain, was all that was left as evidence of the tragedy; while Maceo and his four thousand patriots were wearily wending their way back to their mountain fastness, the richer by two six-pounder field guns, a thousand stand of arms, with a considerable quantity of ammunition, and the entire spoils of the Spanish camp.
The Spaniards remained within the town until Maceo had rested his army and departed for Jarahuica. Before the end of the year Campos' campaign was admitted to be a failure. He could not depart from his humane policy, however, and at the beginning of the year 1896 he returned to Spain.
The whites, headed by Maximo Gomez, and the negroes and mulattoes by their chieftain, Antonio Maceo, both of whom had done valiant service in the earlier war, started upon a campaign of deliberate terrorism. This time they were resolved to win at any cost.
In January, 1896, a new movement westward was made, Maceo leading his men into the province of Pinar del Rio, which occupies the western end of the island. Here was the great tobacco district, one into which insurrection had never before made its way.
Some hearts and souls are blank plates and will always remain so. Poor thing! she little knew he had got beyend canvassin' and all other cares and troubles of life two hundred years ago. But Miss Meechim wuz dretful worked up about the gambling going on at Maceo, and she sez it is as bad as at Monte Carlo. And sez she, "Oh, how bad it makes me feel to see such wickedness carried on.
On the 13th of July the two armies met, Maceo, with nearly three thousand men, being posted on a stock-farm several miles from Bayamo. The fight began with a sharp attack on the Spaniards, intended to strike the division under Campos; but by an error it fell upon the advance guard, led by General Santocildes, which was saluted by a brisk fire from the wooded hill-sides.
It was reported that night that Maceo had received the arms of the first expedition that set forth three days before the "Three Friends" landed. They were not from the "Commodore," for they reported that they were now on the lookout for that vessel. They said, too, that at the end of the week four expeditions were afloat.
The sun had gone down and the moon was flooding the fronds of the palms with pale, silvery light. Maceo held a short conference with Quintin Bandera, and not long afterward the blacks wheeled in column and disappeared. Meantime the Cuban cavalry continued its course. By midnight it had reached Cemetery Hill, overlooking the town of San Luis. The moon was half way down the sky.
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