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Historic Precedents Taken from Historiología Cubana, If the American Revolution had not made its impact felt on the "evolutionist" viewpoint of the Hispano-Cuban, because it had been a substance foreign to that people, the French Revolution on the other hand would shake the Spanish colonial structure to its foundations and would reach deeply into the metropolis itself, opening a new horizon for civic concerns among the peoples of the time. The liberal school of thought embodied in the "Social Contract" and in the revolutionary declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen would revive the early individualism of the Conquerors as well as their patriotism, which had grown lethargic in their descendants through the period of colonization. So it was that the decadence of one century met with the humanist feeling of another, and the violence of that encounter was to make itself felt around the world. Numerous circumstances, not just one, were to yank Hispano-Cuban society from its routine of forward-and-backward motion. The liberation of the slaves in Haiti, the French invasion and occupation of Spain, and the independence movements in Central and South America were all pivots on which that society would turn. The strenuous efforts made in Cuba to keep secret the Haitian developments went for naught. The Bonapartist incursion in Iberia unleashed a period of civil conflict that lasted until 1874 and left its inescapable mark on Cuba; while the movement unleashed by Bolívar was changing the map of the Americas and nullifying Spain's power there. In Cuba, due to its lack of a native population and because of its insular situation, the process of change would be slower and less violent than elsewhere on the continent. Here, one did not find the rancor of a subjugated aborigine majority, nor neighboring countries that were boiling over with change. Cuba's was a heterogeneous people, largely uneducated, and without the least notion of a Fatherland since a number of its people had been brought here by force, while others merely aspired to go back to Spain with riches, and most had only time to think about winning their daily bread in a land that did not give up its wealth in a compliant way but forced men to pull their livelihoods from its entrails. The only things the various members of the society held in common were the task of confronting life's vicissitudes, and a universally-held religious faith.
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