He was known for his controversial scorched-earth policy, which entailed dynamiting passenger trains and torching the Spanish loyalists' property and sugar plantations—including many owned by Americans.

[4] By the time the Spanish–American War broke out in April 1898, the rebellion was virtually defeated in most of Western Cuba, with only a few operating pockets in the center and the east.

He refused to join forces with the Spanish in fighting off the United States, and he retired to the Quinta de los Molinos, a luxury villa outside of Havana after the war's end formerly used by captains generals as summer residence.

[6] After the Spanish forces were defeated and fled the Dominican Republic in 1865 by the order of Queen Isabel II, many supporters of the Annexionist cause left with them, and Gómez moved his family to Cuba.

After the death in combat of Major General Ignacio Agramonte y Loynáz in May 1873, Gómez assumed the command of the military district of the province of Camaguey and its famed Cavalry Corps.

[8] In early 1875, with fewer than 2,000 men, Gómez crossed the Trocha—a string of Spanish military fortifications—and burned 83 plantations around Sancti Spíritus and freed their slaves.

[9] In 1876, Gómez surrendered his command when he was told by General Carlos Roloff that the officers of Las Villas would no longer follow his orders since he was Dominican.

For example, when Puerto Rico experienced a period of severe political repression in 1887 by the Spanish governor, Romualdo Palacio, which led to the arrest of many local political leaders, including Román Baldorioty de Castro, Gómez offered his services to Ramón Emeterio Betances, the previous instigator of the island's first pro-independence revolution, the Grito de Lares, who was then exiled in Paris.

He was shot in the neck in 1875 while he was crossing the fortified line or Trocha from Júcaro in the south to Morón, in the north; he was leading the failed attempt to invade Western Cuba.

Soon afterward, Gómez implemented another warfare technique that proved to be very successful in crippling Spanish economic interests in Cuba: torching sugar cane haciendas and other strategic agricultural assets.

On March 5, 1898, the Captain-General of Cuba, Ramón Blanco y Erenas, proposed for Gómez and his Cuban troops to join him and the Spanish Army in repelling the United States in the face of the Spanish–American War.