Cespedes, who was a plantation owner in Cuba, freed his slaves and made the declaration of Cuban independence in 1868 which started the Ten Years' War[1] (1868–1878).

Céspedes was a landowner and lawyer in eastern Cuba, near Bayamo, who purchased La Demajagua, an estate with a sugar plantation, in 1844 after returning from Spain.

Hugh Thomas summarized that the war was a conflict between criollos (creoles, born in Cuba) and peninsulares (recent immigrants from Spain).

In Spain, the country to which he moved intending to pursue his law studies, he participated in revolutionary and anti-government activities, being arrested and forced into exile in France.

After returning to Cuba, and convinced of the need to oppose militarily the metropolis as the only way to achieve the independence of the island, he came into contact with other opponents of the colonial regime, among them Salvador Cisneros Betancourt, Bartolomé Masó and Pedro Figueredo.

His first wife died in 1867 of tuberculosis and in 1869 he married for the second time to Ana Maria de Quesada y Loynaz (1843–1910) and they had 3 children, Oscar, and twins Gloria (1871–?)

and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes y Quesada (1871–1939), who was briefly President of Cuba after Gerardo Machado was deposed in 1933.Between his two marriages, it is believed he had carried on an affair during or shortly afterwards with Candelaria "Cambula" Acosta y Fontaigne (b.

He famously answered that Oscar was not his only son, because every Cuban who had died for the revolution he started, was also his son.He had been, before the conflict, something of a musician, and he was part-composer of a romantic song called La Bayamesa.