[Menydh]

The defeat in the Spanish-American War of 1898 signified the lost of our last colonies of Overseas: Cuba, Puerto Rico and The Philippines. This happened in the period known in Spanish hisroy as "The Restauration". The Restauration started in December 1874 with a coup d'etat by General Martínez Campos, near Sagunto (Valencia), and with the support of the brigade of General Dabán they proclaimed Alfonso XII as King of Spain, ending thus with the First Republic.

The policy of The Restauration.


The new constitutional Monarchy, under the inspiration of Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, articulated the new state, moderated, under the basis of the Constitution of 1876. This Constitution gave the king much power and, at the same time, left opened the possibility to introduce Liberal principles through in Spanish legislation through the laws that had to develop the constitutional tex.

According to the text in the Constitution of 1876, all those who accepted the Monarchy of Alfonso XII could take part in the political system: The "exclusivism" had driven Alfonso XII's mother out of the borders of Spain. The idea was to allow in the new political arena as many parties or factions as possible.

The system found its stability with a two-party sytem in which the binomy Cánovas-Sagasta, chiefs of the two most important parties --Conservative and Liberal respectively--, alternated in office. This was made possible by the powers that the Constitutions gave the King to dissolve the Courts and through the fraud in the electoral results.

This way, once the king gave his trust to one of the two political leaders and requested him to form a new government, immediately after took place an elections in which, inevitably, the party in office obtained a wide majority. The Restauration created a system based in fraud and in the corruption of the political system which extended to the Adminstration, both local and country wise.

The first government of the Restauration, directed by Cánovas, found over the table two problems: the Carlist War and the rebellion in Cuba.

The offensive carried out by the forces of the Government on the Carlist sanctuary gave its results, and on February 19th, 1876 Estella surrended. On the 28th of this same month, the Pretender Don Carlos left Spain. War was over.

The second big problem was the already long war in Cuba, knwon as the "War of the Ten Years", which had started in 1868 with an event that what was known as the "Cry of Yara".

Once finished the Carlist War, the Government could send important reinforcements to Cuba. During the early 1877 there were some one hundred thousand men in the island. This same year General Martínez Campos took over the command of the army of operations and, combining the military action with the political negotiation, he managed to put an end to the rebellion with the Peace of Zanjón on February 12th, 1878. With this peace the rebels were offered, among other things, the concesion to the Island of the same political and administrative conditions that Puerto Rico enjoyed, and a forgive and forget policy for all political crimes committed since 1868.

With the consecution of the peace, Spain lived a time of tranquility from 1878 until 1895, only altered by small incidents like the "Guerra Chiquita" (smallish war), a short lived seccecionist raising in Santiago de Cuba, and the question of the frontier of Melilla (Northern Africa) in 1893.

On November 25th, 1885, King Alfonso XII died and his wife, Queen Mª Cristina de Habsbourg-Lorena, became the Regent. The change that the Regency supposed in the dome of the political power did not alter the functioning of the Spanish politics. Around the year 1898, Spain moved down in the downward slope of the Restauration.

During the time transcurred from 1878 till 1895, the different governments in Madrid did not know how, or could not, to attend the petitions of reforms that were arriving from Cuba. These changes seeked to ease the road to the independence. This was a pending subject, the true problem that neither Cánovas nor Sagasta knew how to resolve, and not because they did not know about it.

In the letter that General Polavieja wrote to General Blanco, Capitán General (Commander-in-Chief) of Cuba, on June 4th, 1879, and by which special circumstances --as he himself points-- was not received by General Blanco but by General Martínez Campos, at the time Minister of War, we can read the following:

"Convinced of it as we are, we must, in my opinion, instead of trying to impel at any cost and at all time the independence of Cuba --which would be a futile attempt--, get ready for it and stay in the Island only the time that is rational to stay, and take the convenient measures to avoid being thrown out violently, with the damage that this would mean to our interests and to our good name, before the time in which we must friendly abandon it."


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