sugar tariff favoring home-grown beet sugar helped foment the rekindling of revolutionary fervor in 1895. Following the Ten Years War, American sugar interests bought up large tracts of land in Cuba. interest in purchasing Cuba had begun long before 1898. Spain proclaimed the autonomy of Puerto Rico on November 25, 1897, although the news did not reach the island until January 1898 and a new government established on February 12, 1898. Puerto Ricoĭuring the 1880s and 1890s, Puerto Ricans developed many different political parties, some of which sought independence for the island while others, headquartered like their Cuban counterparts in New York, preferred to ally with the United States. Aguinaldo negotiated a deal with the Spaniards who exiled him to Hong Kong with 400,000 pesos that he subsequently used to buy weapons to resume the fight.

Bonifacio was succeeded as head of the Philippine revolution by Emilio Aguinaldo y Famy, who had his predecessor arrested and executed on May 10, 1897. On August 26, 1896, after learning that the Katipunan had been betrayed, Bonifacio issued the Grito de Balintawak, a call for Filipinos to revolt. During his absence, Andrés Bonifacio founded Katipunan, dedicated to the violent overthrow of Spanish rule. He returned to Manila in 1892 and founded the Liga Filipina, a political group dedicated to peaceful change. For the next ten years he traveled in Europe and wrote several novels considered seditious by Filipino and Church authorities. He began his political career at the University of Madrid in 1882 where he became the leader of Filipino students there. José Rizal, a member of a wealthy mestizo family, resented that his upper mobility was limited by Spanish insistence on promoting only 'pure-blooded' Spaniards. The Philippines too was beginning to grow restive with Spanish rule. Following the grito de Baire, the call to arms on February 24, 1895, Martí returned to Cuba and participated in the first weeks of armed struggle when he was killed on May 19, 1895. The moral leader of this struggle was José Martí, known as 'El Apóstol,' who established the Cuban Revolutionary Party on Januin the United States. In the 1890's Cubans began to agitate once again for their freedom from Spain. That war concluded with a treaty that was never enforced. During the years from 1868-1878, Cubans personified by guerrilla fighters known as mambises fought for autonomy from Spain. Cubaįollowing the liberation from Spain of mainland Latin America, Cuba was the first to initiate its own struggle for independence.

The only remnants that remained in the empire in the Western Hemisphere were Cuba and Puerto Rico and across the Pacific in Philippines Islands, and the Carolina, Marshall, and Mariana Islands (including Guam) in Micronesia. By 1825 much of this empire had fallen into other hands and in that year, Spain acknowledged the independence of its possessions in the present-day United States (then under Mexican control) and south to the tip of South America. Across the Pacific, it included the Philippines and other island groups. At its greatest extent, the empire that resulted from this exploration extended from Virginia on the eastern coast of the United States south to Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America excluding Brazil and westward to California and Alaska. Backgroundīeginning in 1492, Spain was the first European nation to sail westward across the Atlantic Ocean, explore, and colonize the Amerindian nations of the Western Hemisphere. As a result Spain lost its control over the remains of its overseas empire - Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines Islands, Guam, and other islands.

The war ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris on December 10, 1898. On Apthe United States declared war on Spain following the sinking of the Battleship Maine in Havana harbor on February 15, 1898. Photographic History of the Spanish American War, p.

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