International press exposures of the tortures brought immense discredit on Spain at the same time as the repression of independence movements in Cuba and the Philippines. In particular, the campaign in France likened the Spanish repression to that in Tsarist Russia. In Britain, a Spanish Atrocities Committee organized mass demonstrations. The exiled prisoners participated in mass meetings and provoked indignation when they showed their wounds and recounted the horrors of Montjuïc. Such campaigns stimulated support for the Cuban and Philippine rebels. However, the repression succeeded in putting an end to terrorism in Barcelona for some years at least. Some of the more violent militants had fled. Intellectuals like Tarrida and Anselmo Lorenzo advocated non-violent action. One of the last violent initiatives of this period took place in September 1897. The journalist Ramon Sempau shot and wounded Narciso Portas and his second-in-command, Joan Teixidó, in a public urinal in the Plaça de Catalunya. However, although Sempau was initially sentenced to death two days later by a military court, his case was passed to a civilian court – an indication of the impact on public opinion of the revelations about the Montjuïc atrocities. The following October, to widespread public approbation, he was found to have acted in self-defence. Portas became the target of public loathing. Cafés emptied when he entered them and he was the object of another failed assassination attempt in Madrid. He was obliged to go everywhere with several bodyguards. Alejandro Lerroux, at the height of his popularity in Barcelona, called him an ‘executioner and a hitman’, comparing him to Nero and Caligula. Portas challenged Lerroux to a duel. He refused on the grounds that a gentleman could have nothing to do with a torturer. Finally, Portas bumped into him in the Calle de Alcalá in Madrid. They went at each other with their walking sticks but neither could be said to have won the day.39
The Montjuïc trial and the preceding repression opened a new phase in the history of the anarchist movement. A direct consequence of the Montjuïc affair was the revenge assassination, on 8 August 1897, of the then Prime Minister, Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, by a twenty-six-year-old Italian anarchist journalist, Michele Angiolillo. It had been widely rumoured that the tortures had been carried out on the direct orders of Cánovas. This was suggested during demonstrations held in Paris and London in protest against the mistreatment of the prisoners. Angiolillo had attended a huge rally in Trafalgar Square at which some of the victims showed the burns and scars that they carried from Montjuïc. After meeting them, he travelled to Spain. He went to Santa Águeda near Mondragón in the Basque Country where Cánovas was taking the waters. He shot him three times. When Cánovas’s wife Joaquina de la Osma shrieked ‘assassin’ at him, he bowed courteously and said: ‘I respect you because you are an honourable lady but I have done my duty and I am calm. I have avenged my brothers from Montjuïc.’ In fact, the savage violence inflicted on the anarchists was successful in curtailing individual terrorism and inclining the movement towards the use of the general strike.40 Cánovas was replaced by the now seventy-two-year-old Sagasta, who immediately put an end to the strategy of total war in Cuba. In this sense, the assassination may have boosted the liberation movements in Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico.
According to Joaquín Romero Maura,
the most significant factor of the Montjuich repression lies perhaps elsewhere. For the excesses committed by the police did not occur simply because the men in charge of the investigation happened to be heartless and brutal. The Spanish Administration was top-heavy, cumbersome, undisciplined and often corrupt. Scrupulous civil servants had only their conscience to restrain them from abuses. The legislation regarding civil service responsibilities was confused and rarely applied, and no efficient control mechanisms existed. Under these circumstances, with the police force as badly paid as most other lower grade civil servants, its recruitment totally haphazard and providing no security of tenure, scrupulousness could hardly be expected. But the conditions which in other branches of the civil service gave rise to bribery and tiresome delays, resulted in the police harassing individuals and making unwarranted arrests; arbitrariness was accentuated by a lack of self-assurance bred of inefficiency.41
The proliferation of social violence within Spain was matched and indeed intensified by the deterioration of the situation in what remained of the empire. The Cuban rebellion had resurfaced in 1895 and, despite the despatch of large numbers of troops, remained an immense drain on Spanish resources. Swift-moving and flexible guerrilla forces, known as the mambises, were more than a match for the Spanish garrisons. They were supported by consignments of arms, ammunition and other supplies from sympathizers in Florida. By the beginning of 1896, they had virtually won the war. The appointment of the ruthless General Weyler was Madrid’s response. To deprive the mambises of the logistical support of the peasantry, Weyler adopted the policy of reconcentración. Large numbers of peasants were forcibly moved to concentration camps where, without adequate food, sanitation and medical care, around 160,000 died, nearly 10 per cent of the island’s population. Weyler’s brutal strategy intensified hatred of the colonial power and increased American support for the rebels. In October 1897, thanks to international censure and Sagasta’s desire for conciliation with the rebels, Weyler was obliged to resign. However, it was too late for his departure to make a difference.42
In 1897, the Philippines were also in revolt with their defence an additional drain on Spanish resources. To make matters worse, on 15 February 1898 the battlecruiser USS Maine blew up in Havana harbour, killing 266 American sailors. The explosion may well have been accidental or possibly the work of Cuban anarchist provocateurs hoping to see the blame placed on Spain. This was certainly the consequence and it pushed American popular opinion further in favour of the Cuban rebels. Outrage in the United States at Weyler’s measures together with their impact on American trade with Cuba forced President William McKinley to reiterate a demand first made in 1848 that Spain abandon Cuba, albeit by selling the island to the US. In Spain, a wide spectrum of jingoistic sentiment, excluding only the conscripts who had to go and fight, was in favour of war.43
On 25 April, President McKinley, egged on by Theodore Roosevelt, declared war on Spain. Spain’s troops in Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico numbered more than the entire United States army, nearly a quarter of a million to 28,000. However, they were scattered across many garrisons. In Cuba, the more efficient American forces, in alliance with powerful local guerrilla movements, quickly targeted key strategic objectives. Armed with rapid-fire Gatling guns, they seized the advantage over the demoralized Spanish conscripts. Moreover, the Americans had dramatically shorter supply lines and were favoured by British command of the seas. In naval terms, the difference was not just of superior resources but rather that the US strategy of heavily armoured battleships with long-range firepower had exposed the weaknesses of the Spanish option of swift cruisers with lighter guns. On the morning of 1 May 1898, at the Cavite naval station in the Bay of Manila, Commodore Dewey annihilated the Spanish Pacific fleet. On 3 July, the Spanish Atlantic fleet was also wiped out just outside the bay of Santiago de Cuba. The war had lasted less than three months. It was the end of Spanish naval power and prestige. The subsequent peace treaty in December 1898 saw Spain lose all its colonies apart from Morocco.44
Despite the reality that a vastly more numerous Spanish army had been defeated, there grew the myth cherished by General Franco that Spanish heroism had held out against overwhelming odds and been ‘cheated’ by technological superiority. Contemporary imagery about the greasy capitalist pig trampling on the dying Spanish