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Essay on Cuba Civil War from 1912
On 18 July 1912, Lt. Pedro Ivonnet was shot in Oriente "according [to] good usage, while trying to escape." His body, flung across a horse, was brought to Santiago de Cuba, where it was paraded through the streets of the capital of the eastern province and exposed to the public before burial in a common grave. Ivonnet's killing ended what Cubans called the "race war" of 1912, allegedly a racist revolution launched by Afro-Cubans of the Partido Independiente de Color (independent Party of Color) to impose their dictatorship on the whites of the island.
In many ways, Ivonnet embodied the hopes and disappointments of Afro-Cubans after independence. A descendant of refugees from the Haitian Revolution ( 1791-1804), he was an oriental (i.e., a native of Oriente) and a veteran of the Liberation Army of 1895-98. He had fought by the side of Afro-Cuban general Antonio Maceo and the rebels from Oriente when they invaded the western section of the island to liberate it from Spain. This direct experience of armed power and command had enhanced his selfesteem and broadened his organizing capacities and expectations for the future. A disillusioned Moderate in the early 1900s, Ivonnet joined the Partido Independiente de Color after its creation in hope of achieving a better black political representation. Imprisoned in 1910 with dozens of independientes for allegedly conspiring to establish a black republic, he witnessed from jail the banning of his party on grounds that it was racist.
Two years later in Oriente, he led the armed protest to relegalize his party. His killing tragically illustrates that one decade after independence, Cuban society was still deeply divided along racial lines and was still haunted by the fear of a black revolution.Afro-Cubans made up approximately one-third of Cuba's population at the turn of the century.....
