Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"At mid-century, plantation slaves in western Cuba grew nearly a third of all the sugar sold on the world market. And Cuba was still a land of opportunity for ambitious Peninsular Spaniards, from opulent dukes and duchesses to officious royal bureaucrats and ill-paid soldiers and store clerks. The royal Spanish governor of Cuba ruled with an iron hand, and when a Cuban patriotic spirit arose in the 1860s, he suppressed it savagely. Now Cuba’s own grueling wars of independence began. The first installment was the Ten Years’ War, 1868–78, which Spanish forces were able to contain in eastern Cuba, away from the big plantations, partly by building a fortified line all the way across the island." [Born in Blood & Fire: A Concise History of Latin America, 4th Ed., p. 175]