Cuba's national day is 10 October because on that date in 1868 Carlos Manuel de Céspedes freed the 30 slaves on his small sugar plantation at La Demajagua, just outside Manzanillo, in the heart of Oriente, beginning the movement for Cuban independence from Spain which came to fruition in 1898. That night Céspedes and his supporters advanced on the town of Yara, some thirty miles away, which they attacked on the morning of 11 October. They were repulsed, but this first military action of the campaign which would become the Ten Years' War was called by the Spanish the ‘Grito de Yara’ [the cry of Yara], through analogy with the Grito de Lares proclaimed a few months earlier in Puerto Rico—and which had quickly come to nothing. Though the Cuban rebels proceeded to capture the city of Bayamo, Céspedes's birthplace, the uprising was unsuccessful in the short term: Bayamo had to be burned and abandoned, and the insurgency was limited to parts of Oriente before its eventual defeat in 1878.