The Morúa law was a masterwork of political hypocrisy. Named after Senator Martín Morúa Delgado - himself an Afro-Cuban - it prohibited political parties organized along racial lines. On its surface, the law promoted national unity. In practice, it silenced the only organized political voice Afro-Cubans had. The Independent Party of Color had been growing rapidly since 1908, drawing support from veterans, sugarcane workers, and communities across the island who saw in Estenoz's movement something no other party offered: explicit advocacy for their interests. A racial party with real numbers could upend the patronage networks that kept Cuba's white elite in power. So they banned it. The party regrouped underground, and by early 1912, Estenoz and co-leader Pedro Ivonnet concluded that only direct action could force negotiation. They were wrong about what kind of action the government would take in return.

The uprising began on May 20, 1912 - deliberately chosen as Cuba's independence day. Fighting erupted primarily in Oriente Province, where most Afro-Cubans lived and the sugarcane economy concentrated their labor. The rebels numbered several hundred, mainly peasants, lightly armed. Minor outbreaks flared in Las Villas Province to the west, but Oriente was the center of gravity. Estenoz's forces initially had some success, but the military imbalance was overwhelming. President Gómez requested aid from U.S. President William Howard Taft, who dispatched additional Marines to Guantánamo Bay, where a battalion of 688 was already stationed. By late May, Colonel Lincoln Karmany commanded the 1st Provisional Regiment of Marines - 32 officers and 777 enlisted men - ostensibly to protect American corporate interests in the region's sugar plantations.

What followed was not merely military suppression but a campaign of racial terror justified by propaganda. The Cuban government and press responded with rhetoric designed to strip the rebels of their humanity. President Gómez called on Cubans to defend "civilization" against "ferocious savagery" - language that cast Afro-Cuban citizens as something less than human. The conservative newspaper El Dia argued that Cuba should adopt Jim Crow-style segregation, declaring that "dominated races do submit." The president circulated the story of a "raped teacher" - misinformation planted to inflame white fears. These were deliberate choices that gave the army permission to treat the conflict not as a political rebellion but as a race war requiring extermination. Juan Gualberto Gómez, a respected Afro-Cuban independence leader, published a manifesto condemning the racial demonization, but his voice was drowned out by officially sanctioned hatred.

The killing went far beyond the battlefield. Between 3,000 and 6,000 people died in the suppression of the uprising - a number that dwarfs the size of the rebel force and makes clear that the Cuban army targeted Afro-Cuban communities broadly, not just armed combatants. Estenoz was killed during the fighting, and his death splintered the remaining rebels into small factions. The most significant was led by Pedro Ivonnet, who retreated into the forests and mountains of Oriente to wage guerrilla resistance. By mid-July, the army had driven him out. Ivonnet surrendered on July 18, 1912. He was killed, the official report claiming he died while "trying to escape" - a euphemism understood then as now. With Ivonnet dead, Gómez declared the Marines unnecessary. They withdrew to Guantánamo Bay and then to the United States, the last departing aboard the USS Prairie on August 2.

The aftermath was total defeat. The Independent Party of Color was dissolved. No organization would again advocate explicitly for Afro-Cuban rights for decades. Conditions remained unchanged - the same sugarcane labor, the same exclusion from power, the same marginalization that had driven Estenoz to organize in the first place. The massacre became one of the most underexamined episodes in Cuban history, buried under subsequent upheavals: the Machado dictatorship, the Batista era, the 1959 revolution. Scholar Aline Helg, whose work "Our Rightful Share" brought the events back into focus, argued that the 1912 massacre was a foundational act of the Cuban republic - a signal that racial equality, despite its prominence in independence rhetoric, would not be tolerated as political reality. The sugarcane still grows where it grew then, and the mountains where Ivonnet made his last stand are green and quiet.