*The following is an article written by Jeff Atwater, Chief Financial Officer for the State of Florida.
The Three Friends and the Cuban War of Independence of 1895-1898
by Jeff Atwater
Chief Financial Officer
State of Florida
Recently, I was sifting through old photos and stories of my great-grandfather, Napoleon Broward, and the expeditions he made to Cuba on his 
tugboat the Three Friends. Along with these materials and stories from authors such as Horatio Rubens and Samuel Proctor, our family has preserved a pocket watch that was given to Napoleon Broward while he was still captain of the tugboat. The watch has a Cuban flag on the outside, and the inside reads: “General Enrique Collazo and friends to Captain Napoleon B. Broward, March 17, 1896.”
In 1895, Captain Napoleon Broward, along with his brother, Montcalm Broward, and Mr. George DeCottes built a tugboat which they named the Three Friends to transport cargo along the St. Johns River. Around the same time, Tomas Estrada Palma, head of the Cuban Junta, organized the 
Department of Expeditions, which would be supervised by General Emilio Nuñez and assisted by General Joaquin Castillo. The representative for the Department in Jacksonville was a Cuban patriot named Jose Alejandro Huau. Mr. Huau and his nephew, Alfonso Fritot, secured the cooperation of Florida railroad administrators and officials, merchants, and Captain Broward.
In February 1896, Captain Broward and several members of the Cuban Junta agreed that the Three Friends would take General Enrique Collazo and his soldiers to Cuba. Furthermore, it was agreed that the schooner Stephen R. Mallory would tow the arms and ammunition and later transfer them onto the Three Friends so as to not violate U.S. law. On March 11th, the Three Friends dashed out of the St. Johns River to pick up General Collazo, the Cuban soldiers and the weapons destined for Matanzas where they would be met by General Jose Francisco Lacret’s forces. The Three Friends traveled along the St Johns River with such speed that it threw the small boats along the river onto the platforms. It picked up the last of the Cuban patriots at Elliot Key. As the Three Friends went into the sea, Captain Broward gave three long blasts of her whistle and the men aboard all gave three loud cheers for “Cuba libre.”
There was a heavy rain as they approached the coast of Cuba. It was nighttime, and all that could be seen was the lights of the burning sugarcane fields. It wasn’t until several of the boats had gone ashore with men and crates of ammunition that they noticed that the pilot, Mr. Santos, had missed the landing point by two miles and the Three Friends had anchored only about 100 yards from a Spanish fort. Captain Broward and General Collazo agreed to land the men and the cargo that night and surprise the Spaniards. Captain Broward ordered his men to the boats, but they declined to do so out of fear that the Spaniards would discover them. Duke Estrada and the other Cuban soldiers pleaded with Captain Broward that it was too great a risk to give them the boats because the boats all bore the name the Three Friends and the Spaniards could use this as evidence against him when he returned to Jacksonville. Captain Broward, moved by these brave men, exclaimed, “I will row you ashore myself!” Suddenly, the captain’s crew began volunteering.
As the crew was rowing the last boat ashore, they were discovered by the lights of a Spanish gunboat. The gunboat began to shoot at the Cubans and at the Three Friends. Captain Broward ordered his crew to ready their axes in case the gunboat tried to board onto the Three Friends. He reminded his men that he promised to not leave any of his crew behind. “If capture is imminent, I will beach the boat and we will all fight together,” said Captain Broward. After the last boat returned, the Three Friends and its crew raced for their lives. They were immediately pursued by a large Spanish gunboat. As the gunboat approached, Captain Broward ordered his men to the boats. He saw no other alternative but to ram the Three Friends into the gunboat. “I will run into him and I believe both boats will be sunk by the collision. We will 
have the advantage of having our boats overboard and our men ready. We can beat them back to the Cubans we have just landed.” However, the Three Friends managed to outmaneuver the Spanish gunboat and made it back to Florida. General Lacret’s forces met up with the Cubans who had landed near Matanzas and successfully fought off the Spaniards who suffered many casualties. Horatio Rubens, the attorney for the Cuban Junta, later recalled that the Three Friends holds the record for having made the most voyages to Cuba during the running of the Spanish blockade.
Tragically, Cuba’s independence was later lost to another kind of tyrant. Now 105 years after the expeditions of the Three Friends I am committed to joining liberty-loving people to advocate for the freedom of Cuba’s people, for the sanctity of human rights and for an open, democratic form of government. There are few things that would please me more than to take a tugboat to a free Havana one day and spend time with a free people.
H/T Diana Arteaga
If my memory of my reading servers Emilio Collazo took the liberal side in the little war of the Chambelona in 1917/
And was involved in the frustrated 1931 Gibara landing, when the radical left betrayed the principals and stole the Menocal-Machado expedition, got rid of trained troops to take over the expedition under Emilio Laurent. Informants used the U.S. authorities to arrest the Menocal-Machado leadership of the expedition. Then took over the ship and rid it of veterans of WWI loyal to Menocal Mendieta. Communist infiltrators in the Cuban Navy frustrated and betrayed Menocal and Mendieta.
Then Laurent now in charge of the expedition, quoting Trotsky made and absolute mess of the very well equipped force causing it to be lost to Machado forces. He also denyied weaponry supplies to traditionalist waiting at Gibara. Thus diminishing the efforts of the more conservative forces against Machado, which in turn gave rise to Batista, who AFTER the overthrow of Machado made a left wing coup. This mess was one of the factors that led to the present Cuban horror.
As Larry Daley’s comment above makes clear, history cannot be viewed in a vacuum. However, Mr. Daley and Mr. Atwater (whose article was a lovely read) skip some salient facts. The tyrant to whom “Cuba’s independence was later lost” was FIRST the U.S. In fact, I would argue that Cuba has never been a free country – not ever. Keep in mind that after the rigged sinking of the Maine, U.S. soldiers invaded Cuba (taking it from the Spanish) and then refused to leave until the ratification of the Platt Amendment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platt_Amendment). The Cuban people, aware that they had been duped and were once again a colony, became frustrated, and the series of events described by Mr. Daley above unfolded.