On January 29, 1895, José Martí signed the order for the uprising and the resumption of the war of independence in Cuba. Following the instructions of the Delegate of the Cuban Revolutionary Party (PRC), its representative in Havana, Juan Gualberto Gómez, from Matanzas, set February 24 as the start date.
On January 29, 1895, the order for the uprising in Cuba was drafted in New York and signed by José Martí, as delegate of the PRC; General José María (Mayía) Rodríguez, personal representative of General Máximo Gómez as Commander-in-Chief; and Commander Enrique Collazo, sent by the Revolutionary Junta of Havana.
The secretary of the Cuban Revolutionary Party (PRC), Gonzalo de Quesada y Aróstegui, Serafín Sánchez Valdivia, and the Cuban of Polish origin, Carlos Roloff Mialofsky, all veterans of the Ten Years' War, also signed the order, which stipulated that the uprising would begin on February 24, primarily in Oriente province.
The document specified that the uprising should be carried out as simultaneously as possible throughout the island, because if it began in one region without the support of the rest, there was a risk that the revolution would fail and, even worse, that the revolutionary forces would be weakened for many years.
On February 7, Juan Gualberto Gómez sent Martí a telegram with the code "transfers accepted." This signified the final agreement for the war. The Havana Junta met and agreed to launch the uprising on February 24, a Sunday holiday, and communicated this to Martí and the local military leaders by coded cable.
At the same time, Juan Gualberto sent commissions to confirm the uprising of February 24th. Commissioner Pedro Betancourt Dávalos went to Las Villas, where Colonel Francisco Carrillo accepted; Commissioner Juan Tranquilino Latapier went to Oriente to secure the participation of Major General Guillermón Moncada and Colonel Bartolomé Masó.
No uprisings occurred in Pinar del Río; in Havana, the leaders were captured, as they were in Las Villas; while leaders from Camagüey withdrew from the conspiracy, and only one other leader would later rise up there. Probably the area that suffered the most dramatic losses on the day of the uprising was Matanzas, as several of its leaders were betrayed and killed that same day, either assassinated, like Manuel García Ponce, or killed in the attempt to rebel, like Antonio Curbelo; while the other leaders were captured or later executed by the Spanish.
Although the uprising plan did not fully succeed in the West and Central regions, it was successful in the East. On February 22, Guillermón Moncada received the order by telegram and notified the other leaders in the territory. He left Santiago de Cuba, heading for Alto Songo, where he finally joined the fight. Alfonso Goulet rose up in El Cobre and Victoriano Garzón in El Caney. The areas of Ti Arriba, Palma Soriano, and Mayarí also joined the war.
That same day, February 24, the fighting began in what are now the provinces of Guantánamo, Granma, and Holguín. On the 25th, all the rebel forces met in Baire and, in an assembly of leaders and officers, appointed provisional officers and organized themselves by territory for the war.
On April 11, 1895, at approximately 10:30 p.m., José Martí arrived on the Cuban coast at a small beach located three kilometers east of the town of Cajobabo, in what is now the municipality of Imías, on the southern Caribbean coast of Guantánamo province.
It was on this rugged, rainy night that Martí landed to join the Necessary War, accompanied by Major General Máximo Gómez, Generals Francisco Borrero and Ángel Guerra, Colonel Marcos del Rosario, and Captain César Salas.
After recovering from their sea voyage, Martí, Gómez, and the other expeditionaries took up residence with pilots and set out to make contact with insurgents who supported the revolutionary cause, eventually meeting with General Antonio Maceo Grajales.
Martí thus reflects on the landing in his Diary: “April 11: We arrived at a rocky beach, La Playita (at the foot of Cajobabo); I stayed in the boat last, emptying it, a great joy. We turned the boat and the water jug over, drank Málaga wine, wading upstream over thorny rocks and mud. We heard noises and prepared ourselves near a fence. Skirting around, we reached a house. We slept nearby, on the ground.”
In the midst of the difficult trek through the mountains, during which Martí, despite being unaccustomed to it, never uttered a single complaint, he records in his diary that “Gómez, at the foot of the mountain, on the path shaded by banana trees, with the ravine below, tells me, kindly and tenderly, that besides recognizing me as the Delegate, the Liberating Army, by him its leader, elected in a council of commanders, appoints me Major General. I embrace him. Everyone embraces me.”
Finally, José Martí is in Cuba to join the war for independence against Spain, which began on February 24, 1895, after devastating setbacks such as the failure of the Fernandina expedition and uniting Cubans from outside and inside for such an endeavor, without imagining that their landing place would years later be a piece of land sacred to the Homeland where a monument would be erected that remembers that historical event.