The topics discussed were controversial, derived from different positions on military and political powers, taking into account the experiences of the previous conflict of 1868, when the division was the main cause of the disaster of the Revolution.
About that dialogue, Martí would write in his Campaign Diary: “Maceo and Gómez speak quietly, close to me, they call me slowly, there in the doorway: that Maceo has another idea of government: a meeting of the generals with command, for its representatives and a General Secretariat, the country, then, and all its offices, which creates and animates the Army, as the Secretariat of the Army.”
The tense nature of the conversation is evident in another of Martí’s comments: “We are going to a room to talk. I can’t untangle the conversation from Maceo: but is he staying with me or going with Gómez? And he speaks to me cutting off my words as if I were the continuation of the legal government and its representative. And in a hurt tone: “I love him – he tells me – less than he loved him for his
reduction to Flor in the charge of the expedition and expenditure of his money” I insist on separating us before the representatives who meet to elect a government.
It should be remembered that Maceo was, initially, the one designated at the head of the expedition that landed in Baracoa on the 1st. April 1895, but when obstacles were raised due to available resources, Martí appointed Flor Crombet as leader, which did not prevent Maceo from joining the trip.
Martí adds in his Campaign Diary, referring to Maceo: “He does not want each chief of operations to command his own, born from his strength, he will command the four from the East. In 15 days they will be with you and they will be people that the wise Martí cannot entangle me there.”
It is worth remembering that Martí began the race as a Delegate of the Cuban Revolutionary Party, and on April 15, 1895 – four days after the
landing, he was named Major General of the Cuban Liberation Army by Gómez.
Our Apostle continues analyzing that at the table he turns to the matter and says that it hurts and disgusts him, and he understands that he has to shake the position with which they try to make him dizzy, of citizen defender of the hostile obstacles to the military movement, And he reiterates his position of a free Army and the country with all its representative dignity.
This is how the La Mejorana meeting went.
After 13 days, the Dos Ríos holocaust occurred. That same day, in a letter to his friend Manuel Mercado, Martí would record that “The Revolution desires full freedom in the Army, without the obstacles that a Chamber without royal sanction previously placed before it (…).
The contradictions debated in La Mejorana did not prevent the unity of the Cuban forces in a contest that, under the postulates signed by Martí and Gómez on March 25 of that year in Montecristi, Dominican Republic, broke Spanish power and led them to a victory this time frustrated not by disunity, but by the North American intervention that marked the passage of
Cuba, from a colony of Spain to a neocolony of the United States.
History sometimes has great coincidences. and here is one of them; the 1st January 1898, the state government appointed a Yankee governor in Cuba, ending Spanish colonial rule. But exactly 60 years later, the 1st. January 1959, the Revolution triumphed, putting an end to North American neocolonial rule over our country.
