Guáimaro Constitution

The Guáimaro Constitution was the governing document written by the idealistic and politically liberal faction in the insurgency that contested Spanish colonial rule in Cuba and imposed on Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, the conservative who claimed leadership of the independence movement. It was nominally in effect from 1869 to 1878 during the Ten Years' War against Spain, the first of a series of conflicts that led to Cuban independence in 1898.

On 10 October 1868, a group in Oriente Province led by sugar planter and mill owner Carlos Manuel de Céspedes proclaimed Cuba's independence from Spain, launching a decade of hostilities known as the Ten Years' War. He assumed the title of captain general and ruled a small independent area in the style of a Spanish colonial governor. A second group of rebels, Havana students from prominent families, had formed their own Revolutionary Committee and rejected both Céspedes' conservativism and his claim to lead the insurgency which, in their view, he had launched precipitously in order to assume its leadership. They assembled in Camagüey Province in December. Political idealists, they were led by Ignacio Agramonte, a young lawyer with radical liberal views. He said: "We Camagüeyans are determined not to depend ever on any dictatorship whatsoever, nor to follow in the footsteps of the first authority of the Eastern [Oriente] department." The Revolutionary Committee announced that in the area it controlled "the military power is subordinated to the civil power, and the authority of the latter is limited by the rights of the people." Though engaged in a military campaign, they mistrusted military authority, which they associated with martial law and dictatorship, as evidenced by regimes–all born of earlier independence movements decades earlier–in many Latin American countries, including Francisco Solano Lopez in Paraguay, Mariano Melgarejo in Bolivia, and Gabriel Garcia Moreno in Ecuador.

A military defeat in January 1869 left Céspedes without a territory under his control. In March a third rebel group announced its support of the Camagüeyans. To salvage his position Céspedes agreed to a compromise. He relinquished his claim to military authority, accepted the position of president of the new republic, and agreed that the powers of that office would be defined by a constitution.

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