22 THE POLITICS OF INTERVENTION
selves changed from ingenios (the grinding equipment of a
single plantation) to centrales, the depersonalized rural indus
trial complexes of mills, railroads, barracks, stores, and offices,
fed sugar by satellite growers (colonos), either small owners
or renters. Under the pressure to grow more and more sugar,
the institution of Negro slavery became an anachronism,
then disappeared altogether in the 1880's during the war
for independence. At the same time, small farmers, tobacco
planters, and cattlemen ceased to dominate the country's
agricultural life.
The thirty years' war for independence, fought in the name
of the most idealistic human goals, contributed to Cuba's
institutional disintegration. It was a war not only for political
freedom but also for racial emancipation, and also a civil
war, waged between Cubans without quarter. Sustained by
revolutionary ardor, it was never completely revolutionary
in terms of institutional change.^2 As a war for independence,
it was exploited by yet another foreign power, the United
States. The war which won independence also mortgaged
Cuba's future because it perpetuated the Spanish influence
on Cuban afiFairs, accelerated American interest in Cuba's
economic and political life, and created a class of insurgent
leaders ill-prepared for the tasks of nation-building. This new
political elite, sired by the insurrection, was a class unto
itself, the politicos. The politicos embodied the socio-psycho
logical heritage of the war: xenophobia and personalismo.
Under their leadership, Cuba was a state built on the social
norms of guerrilla warfare.
In 1868 the independence movement had been the child of
a politically dissatisfied Cuban planter elite. During the next
ten years, death and exile gradually changed the leadership
and character of the movement until it became an uneasy
alliance of rural and urban workers, student radicals, Negro
leaders, and exiled liberals, often intellectuals or professional
men. The movement's component parts in 1895 were charac
terized by the democratic idealism of Jose Marti, the racial
and economic reformism of Antonio Maceo, the non-revolu