In this paper we will focus on the linguistic-discursive analysis of a corpus that has not yet been sufficiently addressed by linguistics: the Cuban war diaries, written by rebel soldiers during the Spanish-Cuban independence war. In the study, the main characteristics of this textual type will be discussed, and there will be an analysis of scriptural conventions of the code and the military register in a context of communicative immediacy. This study will be concluded with the presentation of the speech features that can be seen in these texts in order to contribute to the study of the variation of nineteenth-century American/Cuban Spanish.