“Free Cuba is incompatible with slave Cuba; and the abolition of the Spanish institutions must understand and understand, by necessity and by reason of the highest justice, that of slavery as the most iniquitous of all.
” This is how Céspedes described, on December 27, 1868, the character of the nascent nation whose independence he forged with the edge of the machete. The text issued in the form of a proclamation, – and later known as the Decree of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes for the abolition of slavery – granted the emancipation of slaves in the territories of free Cuba and pointed out how useful it was for the liberated to join the the insurrectionary force.
Various historians agree that the document shows the maturation of the Manzanillo lawyer’s thought. Although in The Manifesto of October 10, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, when dealing with the social question, after establishing the principle that “all men are equal”, limited himself to adding “… we … we want emancipation, gradual and low compensation, slavery … », a little over two months later he was betting on the total liberation of the slave mass.
