Around the age of 18, taking after his grandfather, García joined with a Cuban uprising which became the first war of independence (Ten Years' War). García fought against Spanish colonial rule for five years until his capture. Far from his troops, protected only by a small detail who soon lay dead or dying around him, Garcia, in an attempt to avoid giving the Spanish the satisfaction of seizing him, shot himself under the chin with a .45 caliber pistol. Although the bullet went out of his forehead and knocked him unconscious, he survived; the wound left a great scar and gave him headaches for the rest of his life. When the Spanish authorities came to Holguín to inform Calixto's mother, Lucía Iñíguez, she said that he was not her son. When the officials explained to her Calixto tried to commit suicide, she replied that he was her son, "better dead than captured!" He was imprisoned until the Pact of Zanjón ending the Ten Years' War was signed in 1878. García travelled to Paris and New York between imprisonments. In keeping to his quest, García joined with Antonio Maceo Grajales in the Little War from 1879 to 1880 as well as the 1895 War for Independence. He, and at least three sons, separately escaped from Spain and arrived with a well-supplied expedition in 1896. In that last conflict he succeeded Maceo, once his subordinate in the Ten Years' War, as the second in command in the Cuban Army.