His family, which had ancient colonial backgrounds, probably Portuguese and Canarian, was part of the weak upper strata that remained in the country after the upheavals caused by the Treaty of Basel of 1795, which stipulated the transfer to France.

Then he was already responding to the masterful characterization of his figure that, as if he were painting him live, made by the historian Sócrates Nolasco:[2] It is difficult to find another liberator of America so patient to read insults against his reputation without being moved or answering them.

[7] Due to the civil war of 1857 and 1858, when the leading sectors of Santiago questioned Báez's actions, Cabral held the main military responsibility for Baecism, as commander of the province of Santo Domingo.

Faced with such action, some friends of Báez united under the leadership of Francisco del Rosario Sánchez, who defined the reasons for the opposition to the annexation and proposed to conclude an alliance with the Haitian government of Fabré Geffrard to fight against it.

The world saw, astonished, the scream that the oppressed classes raised in the western part of the island of Santo Domingo turned into harangues and cheers for freedom, and the descendants of Africa formed a republic that remains today on the path of civilization and progress.

The above does not mean that Cabral had responsibility in the holocaust of Sánchez and his companions, since they were victims of the betrayal of Santiago de Óleo, one of the influential men in the El Cercado area, who set up an ambush with a view to reconciling with the Spanish government.

In accordance with this mood, when the Spanish rulers ordered an amnesty that favored those who had opposed the annexation, Cabral lowered the battle flag because he judged that there was no possibility of renewing the insurrectional fight.

Cabral managed to remove Juan de Jesús Salcedo and other leaders who were involved in looting scenes from circulation, and gave assurances to those who had sought the protection of the Spanish out of fear.

Since the Spanish troops abandoned the country, on July 11, 1865, a regionalist feeling emerged among the southern generals, who considered that it was no longer valid for the capital of the Republic to continue in Santiago, as was the intention of the Cibaeño president Pedro Antonio Pimentel.

[13] Covered with enormous prestige, the protector set out to reconcile all Dominicans, so he offered positions in the government train to prepared people who had collaborated with the Spanish authorities, regardless of whether they had been followers of Santana or Báez.

[13] Following this logic, and in line with his modesty, he adopted a low profile as president, delegating a large part of his powers to Juan Ramón Fiallo, a lawyer he trusted, who advocated a moderate orientation aimed at attracting the support of conservative sectors.

He accused him of having illegally occupied office through violence, exercising power arbitrarily and without subjection to the law, ignoring the liberal constitution and having supplanted it with that of 1854 that enshrined despotism, as well as filling the prisons with opponents, put pressure on congressmen, allow excesses and exactions, compromise the country's credit through a large debt abroad and waste budget resources.

Luperón did not aspire to the presidency, Pimentel had not recovered from the discredit in which he was plunged at the end of the war and Cabral continued to be the leader who enjoyed the greatest recognition in the influential circles of the capital.

Perhaps for this reason, since then some have interpreted that the blues were the same old followers of Santana, always determined to oppose Báez, a false conclusion since it ignored the emergence of an ideological current inspired by the ideals of the Restoration, which sought to give rise to a formal entity carrying liberal principles, which was called the National Party.

Faced with this, the blues clung to power, convinced that they represented justice, order and civilization, and that the revolution promoted by their enemies entailed the disappearance of respect for social interests and the rule of naked despotism.

[18] In October 1868 the Reds began an insurrection in Monte Cristi, thanks to the support they received from Haitian President Sylvain Salnave and with the approval of the ruling circle in the United States, which operated through two unscrupulous adventurers, Joseph Fabens and William Cazneau.

An alliance was being consolidated between the Reds and Salnave's supporters to oppose the concert between Haitian and Dominican liberals that tried to prevent a power, especially the United States, from occupying any portion of the island of Santo Domingo.

The United States government, in effect, had outlined the guidelines of expanding its influence throughout the Caribbean, in order to consolidate naval superiority over the European powers and incorporate territories that would allow the supply of sugar, coffee and other tropical goods.

When the opportune moment arrived, after signing a unity pact with the other blue chiefs in the Haitian city of Saint Marc and while the civil war was developing in the interior of Haiti, Cabral got Saget's men to clear the way for him to the border, accompanied by few followers.

Additionally, Báez enjoyed an extraordinary charisma among the population, while the blues did not have any figure that unified them, victims of the disputes for hegemony between Cabral, Luperón and Pimentel, as well as, to a lesser extent, between some prestigious intellectuals.

It was a vulgar sale, since corrupt officials from the United States ruling circle were involved in the operation, who hoped to seize enormous areas of Dominican territory at a bargain price.

In order to offer emergency aid to the Báez regime, a lease agreement for the Samaná peninsula was signed, which would come into force in the event that objections to the annexation appeared in the United States Congress.

[24] The blues had been quite marginalized, but that does not mean that they constituted an insignificant minority, as proclaimed by the red publicists Félix María Delmonte and Javier Angulo Guridi, who took pleasure in accusing the patriots of being bandits, agents of Haiti, calling them crooks.

There is no doubt that the blues had the support of the most conscious portion of the population, but that could not be translated into practice, with the exception of the southern border area, due to the deployment of terror by the Baecista gangs or of how overwhelming the adhesion of a large part of the mass of the people to the figure of the former Spanish field marshal was.

He resorted to guerrilla warfare, a tactic that he had applied during the Restoration War from his late companion, Matías Ramón Mella, and that recognized the superiority of the enemy, which is why he avoided frontal clashes and relied on the control of the territory through small detachments that subjected the opponent to harassment.

[26] Between 1869 and 1872, the war between the reds and the blues was characterized by expeditions led by government dignitaries, such as Francisco Antonio Gómez, Manuel Altagracia Cáceres, Juan de Jesús Salcedo and Valentín Ramírez Báez, the latter the father's brother of the President and his delegate in Azua.

[27] In February 1870, after Cabral had been directing the guerrilla resistance for nearly a year, the Haitian president Sylvain Salnave was overthrown and, leading 1,500 men, abandoned Port-au-Prince with the intention of escaping the besiegers of the city.

In his opposition to President Grant's plan to annex Dominican territory, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner argued that the resistance led by General Cabral constituted evidence contrary to the results of the plebiscite orchestrated by Báez.

This is a mixture completely incapable of assimilating civilization, and disqualified, under any possible circumstances, from becoming citizens of the United States and exercising, as all do under our present modified system, the privileges of representation and of being represented.Once the Six Years' government fell, Cabral became outdated as a politician, as José Gabriel García rightly perceived in a letter.

Cabral did not act alone in approaching his former boss, since, for the sake of peace, several of the prominent intellectuals of Santo Domingo, such as: Emiliano Tejera, José Gabriel García and Mariano Cestero, offered their assistance to the last Báez government.