The Politics of Intervention

60 THE POLITICS OF INTERVENTION

was a finished guerrilla chieftain, having served with
Antonio Maceo.
Guerra's call-to-arms shocked the government into action.
Its first moves may have been its most disastrous, for Estrada
Palma arrested the leading members of the revolutionary
junta. Within a week he had Jose Miguel Gomez, Castillo
Duany, Monteagudo, Garcia Velez, Juan Gualberto Gomez,
and most of their fellow plotters safely behind bars.^5 The
remaining conspirators went into hiding, and in most cases
did not get to the rebel armies during the next five weeks.
The most important fugitive was Alfredo Zayas, president of
the Liberal party. The arrests, however, had two important
effects. The first was to put the revolt in the hands of a
second rank of local military chieftains; the other was to
make the rebels' recruiting easier and their antigovemment
propaganda more credible.^6
Hard on the heels of the arrests, more rebel bands formed
in Havana Province (under Enrique Loynaz del Castillo and
Ernesto Asbert) and in Santa Clara, so that after one week
the rebels had two thousand men on the loose. Mounted
and armed with rifles and revolvers of varying serviceability,
the scattered columns were commanded by self-appointed
generals and colonels, who called their forces the Constitu­
tional Army. The privates of the officer-heavy Constitutional
Army were, largely, unemployed rural workers, "illiterates
without land, wanting adventure and novelty ... to them
all causes were good if they offered an opportunity to do the
August."^7 "Doing the August," or "going to the woods" to
improve one's lot, was an old Cuban custom, and as long as
the insurgent officers kept up the picnic atmosphere there
would be plenty of recruits. The revolt gave the Cuban
campesino an incomparable opportunity for "saving the
country and at the same time eating meat."^8
The political goals of the Constitutional Army generals were
no different from those of the Liberal party. As Pino Guerra
led his swelling column of horsemen around Pinar del Rio,
knocking aside or avoiding scattered detachments of the