It was on Monday, September 16, 1895 when the deputies of the five corps of the Liberation Army, gathered days before in the Camagüey town of Jimaguayú where Ignacio Agramonte Loynaz fell in combat in 1873, approved the Constitution of the Republic in Arms, a document that assumes the unifying line advocated by José Martí.
That Magna Carta gave institutional character to the stage of the revolution initiated on February 24 and created a Government Council, of which Salvador Cisneros Betancourt was the president, Bartolomé Masó his vice president and Carlos Roloff Mialofsky the secretary of war, and according to the legal norms for the development of the struggle against Spanish colonialism, the military operations would be directed by General in chief Máximo Gómez Báez and as second in command the Lieutenant General Antonio Maceo, who would replace him in case of vacancy.
The new Constitution included in its postulates of article 13: «The peace treaty with Spain that must have as a base the absolute Independence of the Island of Cuba», which closed the ways to the betrayal and claudication present in the Zanjón Pact that aborted the war of 1868, without the emancipation and the abolition of slavery.
With that of Jimaguayú, the tradition of proclaiming the Mamboist constitutions in the insurgent camp (Guáimaro in 1869 and Baraguá in 1878) was also enriched, as a demonstration of the attachment of the patriotic forces to legality, order, justice, equality and the rights of human beings.
The constitution of Jimaguayú gathered the experiences of Guáimaro and the central ideas of the manifesto of Montecristi, and marked progress in terms of governmental organization, since it achieved the necessary balance between political and military factors; its approval was undoubtedly an unquestionable step forward in the effort to provide the revolution of 1895 with an organizational structure that would facilitate the achievement of the strategic objectives outlined under the sign of unity.
