The trocha across the island, from Jucaro on the south to Moron on the north, originally constructed during the Ten Years’ War, was a line of blockhouses, connected by barbed wire tangles, along a railway.  This obstructed but did not stop the Cuban advance.  The authorities declared martial law in the provinces of Havana and Pinar del Rio on January 2, 1896.  Gomez advanced to Marianao, at Havana’s very door, and that city was terrified.  Maceo was operating immediately beyond him in Pinar del Rio, through the most important part of which he swept with torch and machete.  The Spaniards built a trocha there from Mariel southward.  Maceo crossed it and continued his work of destruction, in which large numbers of the people of the region joined.  He burned and destroyed Spanish property; the Spaniards, in retaliation, burned and destroyed property belonging to Cubans.  Along the highway from Marianao to Guanajay, out of many stately country residences, only one was left standing.  Villages were destroyed and hamlets were wrecked.  On one of his expeditions in December, 1896, Maceo was killed near Punta Brava, within fifteen miles of Havana.  Gomez planned this westward sweep, from Oriente, six hundred miles away, but to Antonio Maceo belongs a large part of the credit for its execution.  The weakness of the Ten Years’ War was that it did not extend beyond the thinly populated region of the east; Gomez and Maceo carried their war to the very gates of the Spanish strongholds.  There were occasional conflicts that might well be called battles, but much of it was carried on by the Cubans by sudden and unexpected dashes into Spanish camps or moving columns, brief but sometimes bloody encounters from which the attacking force melted away after inflicting such damage as it could.  Guerrilla warfare is not perhaps a respectable method of fighting.  It involves much of what is commonly regarded as outlawry, of pillage and of plunder, of destruction and devastation.  These results become respectable only when attained through conventional processes, and are in some way supposed to be ennobled by those processes.  But they sometimes become the only means by which the weak can meet the strong.  Such they seemed to be in the Cuban revolt against the Spaniards, when Maximo Gomez and Antonio Maceo made guerrilla warfare almost a military science.  Gomez formulated his plan of campaign, but, with the means at his disposal, its successful execution was possible only by the methods adopted.  At all events, it succeeded.  The Cubans were not strong enough to drive Spain out of the island by force of arms, but they showed themselves unconquerable by the Spanish troops.  They had once carried on a war for ten years in a limited area; by the methods adopted, they could repeat that experience practically throughout the island.  They could at least keep insurrection alive until Spain should yield to their terms, or until the United States should be compelled to intervene.  No great movements, but constant irritation, and the suspension of all industry, was the policy adopted and pursued for the year 1897.