"By far, the most important example of a new US approach to Latin America was its involvement in the Cuban struggle for independence. ...[C]ontacts with the United States helped spur ideas about an independent Cuba, which led to a series of wars between Cuban rebels and the Spanish. There was an initial conflict. the Ten Years War... A second short period of fighting called the Little War... and a final third war... the Cuban War for Independence. ...The third part of the wars for independence was extraordinarily brutal. The Spanish commander during most of 1896 and 1897, General , worried about Cubans in the countryside shielding and aiding rebel guerilla fighters. His solution was to forcibly relocate hundreds of thousands of Cuban peasants into internment camps. Conditions in the camps were horendous; the people lacked adequate food and effective sanitation facilities, and the policy backfired. The objective had been to limit the peasants' support for fighters, but displacing the rural population created more anger. The fighting itself was bloody... Spanish war atrocities fit neatly into ideas developing in the United States about expanding power. Newspaper publishers, led by William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer [reported] on the brutality of... Weyler, whom they nicknamed "the Butcher," [and] helped enflame popular opinion against the Spanish."