Captain General Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau, 1st Duke of Rubí, 1st Marquess of Tenerife (17September 183820October 1930) was a Spanish Army officer and colonial administrator who served as the Governor-General of the Philippines and the Governor-General of Cuba, and later as the Minister for War. He is infamous for the brutality with which he executed his assignment to suppress an 1897 rebellion in Cuba through a policy of mass-reconcentration, which is estimated to have killed between 170,000 and 400,000 Cubans. These policies influenced the United States towards declaring war on Spain.
Early life and career
Weyler was born in 1838 in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. His distant paternal ancestors were originally Prussians and served in the Spanish army for several generations. He was educated in his place of birth and in Granada. Weyler decided to enter the Spanish army, being influenced by his father, a military doctor.
He graduated from the Infantry School of Toledo at the age of 16. In 1863, he was transferred to Cuba, and his participation in the campaign of Santo Domingo earned him the Laureate Cross of Saint Ferdinand. During the Ten Years' War that was fought between 1868 and 1878, he served as a colonel and conducted an offensive against the Moros in Mindanao.
Spain
On his return to Spain in 1892, he was appointed to command the 6th Army Corps in the Basque Provinces and Navarre, where he soon quelled agitations. He was then made captain-general at Barcelona, where he remained until January 1896. In Catalonia, with a state of siege, he made himself the terror of the anarchists and communists. This wave of American anti-Spanish sentiment was used to legitimize the United States declaration of war on Spain in 1898 and their expansionism in the Atlantic and the Pacific. Cánovas's government supported Weyler's tactics, but the Liberal Party denounced them for their toll on the Cuban people. The term "reconcentration" is thought to have given rise to the term "concentration camp". Academic Andrea Pitzer considered Weyler's camps to be the world's first concentration camps. Weyler's strategy was successful only in completely alienating the Cuban population from the Spanish as well as galvanizing international opinion against Spain. After Cánovas was assassinated on 8 August 1897 by Michele Angiolillo Lombardi and a new Liberal Party government led by Práxedes Mateo Sagasta took over, Weyler was recalled from Cuba and replaced by the more conciliatory Ramón Blanco, 1st Marquess of Peña Plata.
Return to Spain
He served as Minister of War three separate times (1901–1902, 1905, 1906–1907)
He was charged and imprisoned for opposing the military dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera in the 1920s. He died in Madrid on 20 October 1930. He was buried the next day in a simple casket without a state ceremony, as he requested.