On October 10, 1868, Cuban planter Carlos Manuel de Céspedes freed his slaves and issued the Grito de Yara, calling for Cuba's independence from Spain. The uprising spread quickly across Oriente province, launching the Ten Years' War, a bloody conflict that failed to win independence but planted the seeds for the eventual Cuban war of 1895 and shaped the island's national identity.
Carlos Manuel de Céspedes was a wealthy lawyer and sugar planter who had grown disillusioned with Spanish colonial rule's heavy taxation and denial of political rights to Cuban-born whites, let alone the enslaved majority. On the morning of October 10, 1868, at his estate near the town of Yara in Oriente province, he freed his own slaves and rang the bell summoning about 147 men to declare Cuba's independence.
The rebels were poorly armed, some carrying only machetes, and Spanish troops quickly scattered them near Yara itself just days later, prompting mockery from loyalists who dubbed the affair the 'Grito de Yara' with some derision. But the rebellion did not die. It spread through the eastern countryside, drawing thousands of recruits, including former slaves promised freedom for fighting, and evolved into the Ten Years' War, Cuba's first major armed bid for independence.
The war ground on until 1878, killing roughly 200,000 people, and ended in the Pact of Zanjón without securing independence. Yet it forged a generation of Cuban nationalist leaders and produced the enduring symbolism of October 10 as a day of Cuban patriotism, still commemorated on the island today.