To Gómez and many others, nothing made sense. The decades-long struggle for Cuban independence had ended in the defeat of Spain. But as if by sleight of hand, someone had shifted the ground from under them, switched the very war in which that defeat had happened. The Cuban War of Independence—the third war in thirty years—seemed suddenly irrelevant, supplanted (like the Black officers suddenly demoted in favor of newcomers) by the Spanish-American War. That was the new name for the war, a name in which Cuba deserved not even a mention. In the struggle between Cuba and Spain, then, it was the
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