In response to this patriotic utterance, a convention was called, on April 10, 1869, at Guaimaro. The leaders of this first representative body of the Cuban people were the following: Miguel Gutierrez, Eduardo Machado, Antonio Lorda, Tranquilino Valdez and Arcadio Garcia, representing Villa Clara; Honorato Castillo, representing Sancti Spiritus; José Maria Izaguirre, representing Jugari; Antonio Alcada and Jesus Rodriguez, representing Holguin; and Salvador Cisneros, Francisco Sanchez, Ignacio Agramonte Loynaz, Miguel Betancourt Guerra and Antonio Zambrana, representing Camaguey. At this convention, Cespedes resigned his position as provisional head of the government and commander-in-chief of the army, in order that some one might be regularly elected in his place, and in doing so he addressed his colleagues in the following memorable terms: "Now that the House of Representatives, gathered from all parts of the Island, has been happily inaugurated in Guaimaro, it becomes from the moment of its organization the supreme and only authority for all Cubans, because it constitutes the depository of the people's will, sovereign of the present and controller of the future. All temporary power and authority ceases to have a rightful voice in Cuba from the very moment in which the wise democratic system, laying its solid foundations beneath the gigantic shadow of the tree of liberty, has come to endow us--after suffering the most iniquitous rule--with the most beautiful and magnificent of human institutions--a republican government. "Unfeigned gratitude I owe to the destiny which afforded me the glory of being the first in Yara to raise the standard of independence, and the still greater though less merited satisfaction, to see crowded around me my fellow-citizens in demand of liberty, thus sustaining my weak arm and stimulating my poor efforts by their confidence. But another glory was reserved for me, far more grateful by my sentiments and democratic convictions--that of also being the first to render homage to the popular sovereignty. "This duty fulfilled, having given an account to the fatherland of its most genuine representation of the work which with the assistance of its own heroic sons I had the good fortune to have commenced, it still behooves me, fellow-citizens, to fulfill another, not less imperious to my heart, of addressing my gratitude to you--to you, without whom my humble, isolated efforts would not have produced other fruit than that of adding one patriot more to the number of preceding martyrs for independence--to you, who, recognizing in me the principle rather than the man, came to stimulate me by your recognition of myself as chief of the provisional government and the liberating army.