Antonio Maceo

Antonio Maceo y Grajales was born in Santiago de Cuba on the fourteenth of June 1845, the son of a Venezuelan-born free Black farmer Marcos Maceo and the Dominican-born free Black landowner Mariana Grajales. He grew up working on his family's farm and trained in his father's small-scale agricultural and military traditions.

He enlisted in the Cuban independence movement in October 1868 at the outset of the Ten Years' War (1868-1878). He rose from private to brigadier general within seven years. By the end of the war he commanded the eastern theater of the Cuban Liberation Army.

When Spain offered terms at the 1878 Pact of Zanjón that did not abolish slavery in Cuba, Maceo refused to sign. His public refusal — the Protest of Baraguá on the fifteenth of March 1878 — kept the cause of Cuban abolition alive through the next decade. Spain abolished slavery in Cuba in 1886, eight years after his refusal; the Second War of Independence began in 1895.

In the Second War — alongside José Martí — Maceo led the invasion that carried the Cuban Liberation Army from Oriente in the east across the entire length of the island to Pinar del Río in the west. The 1895-1896 Invasion of the West was one of the longest sustained military advances in nineteenth-century colonial warfare and broke Spanish authority in two-thirds of the country.

He was killed in combat at San Pedro de Hernández, just outside Havana, on the seventh of December 1896. He was fifty-one. He had fought in over six hundred engagements; he had been wounded twenty-six times.

His mother Mariana Grajales — who had blessed each of her thirteen children's enlistment in the independence cause and seen seven killed in the wars — is honored in Cuban national memory as the Mother of Cuba.

He is honored here as the Bronze Titan whose invasion of western Cuba broke Spanish rule.