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Antonio Maceo
Twice he refused a peace that left slavery standing, and twice he went back to the field.
The rise
Born on 14 June 1845 near Santiago de Cuba to a free Afro-Venezuelan farmer and to Mariana Grajales, he enlisted as a private weeks after the Cry of Yara in October 1868. Wounds and results carried him from commander to brigadier general inside five years, and his men began calling him the Bronze Titan.
What they did
At Mangos de Baraguá on 15 March 1878 he told the Spanish commander Martínez Campos to his face that the Pact of Zanjón bought neither independence nor abolition, and the war went on under a constitution written on the spot. Back from exile in 1895, he and Máximo Gómez drove the invasion column from Baraguá to Mantua, the island's western tip, in three months.
The full picture
Promotion was withheld from him for years on grounds his own side did not hide: his colour and his origins. Rivals used him to raise the spectre of a Black republic, a charge he had to answer in writing. He was killed at San Pedro, near Punta Brava, on 7 December 1896, shot twice while cutting a fence, with the war still unwon.
Why it matters
He refused to let Cuban independence be separated from the end of slavery, and made that refusal the founding act every later Cuban government has had to claim.
“Keep that document; we want nothing to do with it. No, we do not understand each other.”