The three escapes of José Maceo, Cuban insurgent, 1879-1885

Colonial warfare and the Laws of War in late 19th-century global Spain

Abstract

The article tracks the global microhistory of the deportation and punishment of José Maceo —a Cuban guerrilla leader during the so-called Guerra Chiquita (1879-‍1880)— in mainland Spain and North African and insular Spain from 1880 to 1884. The article tracks, in particular, two of his three escapes: his escape to British Gibraltar requesting political asylum (1882) and his final flight to French Algeria (1884) after the Gibraltarian extrajudicial extradition of 1882. This extradition unleashed a political storm in the British Parliament and forced the Gladstone government to negotiate secretly with the Sagasta government. Additionally, the article reveals, above all, which was the legal and moral language that José Maceo’s British ‘lawyers’ used in Westminster to discredit Madrid and the counterinsurgency war commanded by Camilo Polavieja, military governor of eastern Cuba in 1879-‍1880. This was the language of the Laws of War. The odyssey of Maceo and his family in Spanish prisons beginning in the summer of 1880 —his prison breaks and their echo in Great Britain and France (1882-‍1884)— exemplifies the extent to which the notion of «waging war with humanity» had taken root in late 19th-century Europe as a source of military and political legitimation. This even included the case of a civil and colonial war in which Polavieja had waged against the anti-colonial rebels —the Afro-Cuban guerrilla— by denying them, precisely, the status of «lawful combatants».