#maximo gomez

Cuban Dreams - 2016

The architecture in Cuba is incredible, the attention to detail is amazing, I mean just look at that statue dedicated to Máximo Gómez.

Yipeta coge fuego en la avenida Máximo Gómez (RD)

Una yipeta se incendió hace unos momentos en las intercepciones de las avenidas Máximo Gómez esquina Mayor Valverde, en el Distrito Nacional.

Se trata una yipeta Sisuki, azul, la cual se prendido en fuego totalmente y desprende una gran humareda negra. El hecho se registra en el frente del Banco Popular.

Al lugar se presentaron agentes del cuerpo de bomberos y del Sistema de Emergencias 911.…

Máximo Gómez y Báez (November 18, 1836 in Baní, Dominican Republic - June 17, 1905 in Havana, Cuba) was a Dominican Major General in the Ten Years' War (1868–1878). He was also Cuba's military commander in that country's War of Independence (1895–1898).

Máximo Gómez was born in the town of Baní, in the province of Peravia, in the Dominican Republic. During his teenage years, he joined in the battles against the frequent Haitian incursions of Faustin Soulouque in the 1850s. He was trained as an officer of the Spanish Army at theZaragoza Military Academy (Spanish). He had arrived originally in Cuba as a cavalry officer - a Captain - in the Spanish Army and fought alongside the Spanish forces in the Dominican Annexation War (1861–1865). After the Spanish forces were defeated and fled the Dominican Republic in 1865 by order of Queen Isabel II, many supporters of the Annexionist cause left with them, and Maximo Gomez moved his family to Cuba.

Gomez retired from the Spanish Army and soon took up the rebel cause in 1868, helping transform the Cuban Army's military tactics and strategy from the conventional approach favored by Thomas Jordan and others. He gave the Cuban Mambises their most feared tactic: The "MacheteCharge".

On October 26, 1868 at Pinos de Baire, Gomez led a Machete Charge on foot, ambushing a Spanish column and obliterating it. The Spanish Army was terrified of these charges because the majority (there were at least 200 Spanish casualties in the attack) were infantry troops, mainly conscripts, who were fearful of being cut down by the machetes. Because the Cuban Army always lacked sufficient munitions, the usual combat technique was to shoot once and then charge the Spanish.

In 1871 Gómez led a campaign to clear Guantánamo from forces loyal to Spain, in particular the rich coffee growers - mostly of French descent whose their ancestors had fled from Haiti after the Haitians slaughtered the French.

Gómez carried out a bloody but successful campaign, and most of his officers went on to become high-ranking officers, including Antonio and José Maceo, Adolfo Flor Crombet, Policarpo Pineda "Rustán", and many others.

Following the death in combat of Major General Ignacio Agramonte y Loynáz in May 1873, Gómez assumed the command of the military district of the province of Camaguey and its famed Cavalry Corps. Upon first inspecting the corps he concluded they were the best trained and disciplined in the nascent indigenous Cuban Army and would significantly contribute to the war for independence.

In the interlude between the two Cuban independence wars, Gómez held odd jobs in Jamaica and Panama (among them, he supervised a laborers' brigade during the construction of the Panama Canal), but remained as an active player for the cause of Cuban independence, as well as that for the rest of the Antilles). For example, when Puerto Rico experienced a period of severe political repression in 1887 by the Spanish governor of the time, Romualdo Palacio (which led to the arrest of many local political leaders, including Román Baldorioty de Castro), Gómez offered his services to Ramón Emeterio Betances, the previous instigator of the island's first pro-independence revolution, the Grito de Lares, and who was exiled in Paris at the time. Gómez sold most of his personal belongings to finance a revolt in Puerto Rico, and volunteered to lead any Puerto Rican troops had such revolt occur. The revolt was deemed unnecessary later in the year, when the Spanish government recalled Palacio from office to investigate charges of abuse of power from his part, but Gómez and Betances established a friendship and logistical relationship that lasted until Betances' death in 1898.

Gómez rose to the rank of Generalísimo of the Cuban Army - a rank akin to that of Captain General or in modern terms that of General of the Army - due to his superior military leadership.

He adapted and formalized the improvised military tactics that had first been used by Spanish guerrillas against Napoleon Bonaparte's Armies into a cohesive and comprehensive system at both the tactical and strategic level. The concept of insurrection and insurgency, and the asymmetric nature thereof can be traced intellectually to him.

He was shot in the neck in 1875, while crossing the fortified line or Trocha from Júcaro in the south to Morón in the North; while leading the failed attempt to invade Western Cuba. After that he always wore a kerchief around his neck to cover the bullet hole, which remained open after healing (he usually plugged it with a wad of cotton). His second and last wound came in 1896 while fighting in the rural areas outside Havana while completing a successful invasion of Western Cuba.