thumb|Depiction of Cuban insurgents in the tropical forest (manigua), ca. 1879-1880 The mambises were the guerrilla independence soldiers who fought for the independence from Spain of the Dominican Republic in the Dominican Restoration War (1863–1865), and of Cuba in the Ten Years' War (1868–1878), Little War (1879–1880), and Cuban War of Independence (1895–1898).
thumb|Depiction of Cuban insurgents in the tropical forest (manigua), ca. 1879-1880 The mambises were the guerrilla independence soldiers who fought for the independence from Spain of the Dominican Republic in the Dominican Restoration War (1863–1865), and of Cuba in the Ten Years' War (1868–1878), Little War (1879–1880), and Cuban War of Independence (1895–1898).
==Origin== The word mambí is of Afro-Antillean origin but the exact etymology is unknown. It is first recorded early in the annexation of the Dominican Republic to Spain (1861-1865), when it was a deferential title given by friends and neighbors to Manuel de Frías, a septuagenarian Afro-Dominican farmer arrested by the Spanish for inciting disobedience against the colonizers. Frías, who was in his thirties when Haitian president Jean-Pierre Boyer conquered the Republic of Spanish Haiti in 1822 and abolished slavery, was convinced that the Spanish were going to reintroduce it, despite their reassurances to the contrary. After Frías escaped from prison, rumors of the reinstatement of slavery extended to the central and northern part of the island, where the Dominican Restoration War began on August 1863. The Dominican insurgents were called mambises.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).