by Ray Suarez
From the safety of New York, Martí expressed his compassion for, and his solidarity with, his people back home. “By ‘adversary’ the free Cubans do not mean the Cuban who lives in agony under a regime he cannot shake, or the established foreigner who loves and desires freedom, or the timid Creole who will vindicate himself for today’s laxity with tomorrow’s patriotism.” Perhaps “expressed his compassion for some of his people back home” might be more accurate.
Florida, home to well-established Cuban communities from the nineteenth century to today, was an important center for organizing for Martí and the Revolutionary Party. Martí was a frequent visitor to Tampa’s Ybor City, speaking to cigar workers at their benches and writing to their local papers from the road. As the start of a new insurrection began to draw closer in 1894, Martí went to Cayo Hueso, or Key West, the American town closest to Cuba and home to an old émigré community. The purpose of the Revolutionary Party, he told a mixed Cuban and American audience, “is not to bring to the country a victorious group who considers the island its booty or domain, but to prepare abroad, by every means possible, the war that is necessary for the good of all Cubans.”
In a sadly prescient passage of the speech, he told his audience of his belief that one could “play with one’s own death, but not with the death of others.” His and the party’s aspiration, he said, was to minimize blood and sacrifice, and never unleash Cuba “into a premature revolution for which the nation is not prepared.”
He closed with a call to action: “May I continue to be confident in my people, whose patriotism reanimates me and whose voice encourages me to continue in the journey?” A reporter included an account of thunderous applause from the crowd, which “trembled” as Martí described Cuba’s victimhood at the hands of Spain.
During a deep economic recession in the 1890s, Martí told the Cubans of Key West, “It is not the loss of confidence for independence that the Cubans of Key West lament. Today they need it more than ever, today they feel in themselves the agony and the solitude of their people. Today with more spontaneity and tenderness than ever, with more generosity and unity, they will give their warm loyal souls to those that swear to live and die for them, or to die of humiliation and pain if there would be no other way to die!”
A share of the wages of thousands of Cubans in the United States was being used to buy guns in preparation for a reopening of war with Spain. In January 1895, U.S. authorities intercepted ships loaded with weapons headed from Florida to Cuba, thwarting the planned assault. Martí responded quickly, drafting an order for the people of Cuba to rise up against Spain, signed in January 1895. The revolution began in February of 1895; on April 1, Martí and a roster of political and military leaders of the revolt headed for the island.
Six weeks later, on May 19, Martí was dead, killed by Spanish troops in his first engagement, the Battle of Dos Ríos. He was just forty-two years old. In a letter, unfinished at the time of his death, to his friend Manuel Mercado, Martí revealed how far he had come in his thinking about the United States from that dazzled young exile looking for a place of refuge:
My dearest brother,
I am daily in danger of giving my life for my country and duty—the duty of preventing the United States from spreading through the Antilles as Cuba gains its independence, and from overpowering with that additional strength our lands of America. All I do and have done to this date is for that purpose.
He came tantalizingly close to seeing the day Spain would leave his homeland. It is tempting to imagine the ambivalence Martí would have felt when that day did not come by Cuban force of arms, but by American invasion.
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THE ANTI-SPANISH DRUMBEAT in the American press and American popular culture grew in volume through the 1890s. Martí might have found a tendency toward derision and condescension in Americans’ attitudes toward Hispanoamericans, but as the decade moved toward a close, concern for the Cuban people led him to depict them as noble victims. They were portrayed as brave patriots, oppressed and exploited.
In Washington, New York, and elsewhere, U.S. anticolonialists, neoimperialists, and human rights advocates made common cause. Anticolonialists had wanted Europeans out of the hemisphere since the Monroe Doctrine was defined in 1823. Neoimperialists looked at the other great powers of the world and wondered why a growing power like the United States should not have its own foreign territories and spheres of influence to teach and guide colonized people in a civilizing mission. The mistreatment of Cuban independence forces by the Spanish authorities genuinely worried people who read the lurid tales of injustice and cruelty by decadent colonial officials.
Normally, these types of Americans did not agree on much. But this much was clear to them all: Spain had to go. This convergence of interests stood on a foundation of steady speculation about Cuba in previous years, speculation that we saw earlier raised a heated response from Martí.
During the tumult of the Civil War years and the conflicts of Reconstruction that followed, Cuba was a less present object of American desire. The Ten Years’ War between Spain and Cuba, the weak or unfulfilled reforms promised in the treaty that ended the conflict, and the presence of a foreign army so close to America’s shores all inflamed different segments of American public opinion. Take your pick: The troubles in Cuba ratified the justification of the Monroe Doctrine and the need to keep Europe out of the Americas, or the corruption and incompetence of Spanish rule meant the United States must take steps to expel Spain.
As Cuba’s colonial master for four hundred years, Spain intended to hang on to its island. More than 150,000 Spanish soldiers sailed to Cuba in 1895, and in the coming two years tens of thousands were to die in action with the Cuban rebels and of disease. Valeriano Weyler, the newly appointed captain-general of Cuba, kept his well-equipped soldiers fighting against the ragtag Cuban army. Unable to fight back using conventional tactics, the Cubans resorted to guerrilla war, and Weyler clamped down even harder on the rebellious country.
However, things had changed in Spain too since the Ten Years’ War. Putting down the Cuban revolt put a severe strain on the Spanish treasury. There were protests, even draft riots, the challenge to the Spanish government rising as casualties climbed in the Caribbean. This time the Cuban irregulars were better led, and better equipped as well.
Significant American investment in the production of Cuban agricultural exports suffered as Spaniards moved farmers from the countryside into the urban areas. Weyler believed support for the guerrilla army would dry up without civilians in the countryside. The privations of life for civilians in what were called “reconcentration camps.”
There were also specifically American reasons for wanting the Spaniards out of Cuba. The United States was the single largest buyer of Cuban exports in the late Spanish period, and American interests suffered in the 1890s, with a 75 percent drop in value, from $60 million to $15 million.
The United States was actively searching for a place to build a canal in Central America to cut the long shipping times between Atlantic and Pacific ocean ports. A large European military presence in the Eastern Caribbean had the potential of threatening the sea-lanes leading to the site of a future canal. More and more influential Americans began to conclude that a friendlier government in Havana could be useful.
American officials urged Spain to grant Cuba independence and leave in a negotiated settlement, or at the very least arrange for autonomy—self-rule for the Cuban people. Goaded by dueling newspaper barons William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, U.S. public opinion built steadily on the Cuban side. All this happened at the same time a new American president, William McKinley, arrived at the White House in March of 1897. Spain issued a declaration of autonomy in 1897 that granted limited self-rule to Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines. The Carta Autonómica de 1897 was not far-reaching enough to satisfy the aspirations of any of the island nations at this advanced stage of the b
reach with Madrid. Nor, as much as it mattered, did it satisfy the publishers of the New York World and the New York Journal.
For all the lionizing of brave Cuban freedom fighters and scorn for decadent Spanish oppressors during the run-up to war, most Americans still knew little of Cuba, or Cubans. The idealistic portrayal of brave rebel soldiers and the oppressed people of the island did not last long once American occupation began.
U.S. Undersecretary of War J. C. Breckenridge did not think highly of the people his armies were fighting to free. He wrote in a memorandum, “This [the Cuban] population is made up of whites, blacks, Asians and people who are a mixture of these races. The inhabitants are generally indolent and apathetic. . . . Since they only possess a vague notion of what is right and wrong, the people tend to seek pleasure not through work, but through violence. . . . It is obvious that the immediate annexation of these disturbing elements into our own federation in such large numbers would be madness, so before we do that we must clean up the country. . . . We must destroy everything within our cannons’ range of fire. We must impose a harsh blockade so that hunger and its constant companion, disease, undermine the peaceful population and decimate the army. The allied army must be constantly engaged in reconnaissance and vanguard actions so that the Cuban army is irreparably caught between two fronts.”
By the beginning of 1898, Spain was assuring the United States it would make some concession to the rebels, but would not quit Cuba. The U.S. consul in Havana, Fitzhugh Lee, told the White House about riots in Havana, and McKinley sent the USS Maine to Cuba, it was claimed at the time, to protect American lives and property during the Cuban unrest. From the start, the Maine’s reception was friendly enough. Cuban civilians greeted the ship, and American sailors mingled ashore with Spanish sailors from the Viscaya, sent to Havana at the same time as the Maine.
The crew of the American battleship the USS Maine. Of the 355 men on board when the ship exploded in Havana Harbor in February, 1898, 261 were either killed by the blast or drowned. CREDIT: DETROIT PHOTOGRAPHIC CO.
The wreckage of the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor for viewing in a stereoscope, which made photographs appear three-dimensional. CREDIT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES
After the Maine was in Havana Harbor for just three weeks, on February 15, an explosion destroyed it and killed almost everyone on board. Most of the battleship’s crew was asleep belowdecks when the explosion occurred. The same newspapers urging the United States to free Cuba from Spanish rule now kicked their coverage into a higher, more hysterical gear. The New York Journal sent famed Western artist Frederic Remington to Cuba to provide illustrations for the paper, and Hearst, the Journal’s owner, offered a $50,000 reward (a fortune in 1898) for information that would lead to the conviction of whoever blew up the Maine. While his newspaper alleged almost daily that Spain destroyed the ship, the World’s Pulitzer privately heaped scorn on the idea, saying no one “outside a lunatic asylum” really believed the Spanish did it.
William Randolph Hearst pushes America toward war with Spain. Hearst’s chain of Examiner and Journal newspapers told lurid tales of Spanish decadence, and cruelty toward the brave and freedom-loving Cuban people. Here on the front page of the San Francisco, Examiner readers saw an angry Uncle Sam prepared for war and could read day after day about the newspaper’s own investigations into the explosion of the Maine. CREDIT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
The Maine tragedy did not cause the American war with Spain, but it may have made the growing pressure to declare war impossible for the McKinley White House to resist. A few weeks after the Maine disaster, dueling reports declared the U.S. ship had exploded after hitting a mine—and after not hitting a mine, when armaments stored belowdecks exploded (the latter finding was ratified by repeated studies in ensuing years). The pace of events rapidly accelerated. Little more than a month after the Maine explosion, the U.S. minister to Spain demanded an end to war in Cuba and Cuban independence. The next day Spain refused the American demand. Just over a week later, McKinley asked Congress for a declaration of war.
Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World also pushed for war with Spain. Another press baron, Hearst’s competitor Pulitzer, told his readers of a calm and confident American president, and a Spain with only two choices—give up, or fight. CREDIT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
On April 19, 1898, the U.S. Congress declared Cuba independent. Three days later, the U.S. Navy began to blockade Cuba. On April 23 the president called for 125,000 volunteers. The next day Congress declared war on Spain, but the House included a provision, the Teller Amendment, that forbade the United States from annexing Cuba.
Secretary of State John Hay might have called it a “splendid little war,” but the Spanish-American War of 1898 should have signaled to American leaders that for all its growth and potential, the country was hardly a world-class military power. The tiny U.S. Army was scattered across a continent-size country. Young American volunteers poured into recruiting stations to free Cuba, and found a War Department unable to properly uniform them for battle in the tropics, or arm them with the latest rifles.
“Suspended Judgment.” The United States, represented by Uncle Sam, is not sure Spain belongs in the company of civilized nations. In the pages of the World, Spain is a dark and weedy little man, in fancy knee stockings, with a traditional hat, a guitar slung over his back, and a sword dripping blood. CREDIT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Many soldiers were sent into action with Springfield rifles more than twenty years old, single-shot weapons using old-fashioned, smoky gunpowder. The more modern Norwegian Krag-Jørgensen rifle was carried by a minority of American soldiers and marines, but even that newer firearm was inferior to the Mauser with which Spanish soldiers were armed. Today we remember the Battle of San Juan Hill as a glorious victory that helped make the national reputation of Theodore Roosevelt, and forget that some 750 Spanish regulars held off an American force twenty times larger, helped in part by their superior arms.
In short, the United States scored quick victories over naval and land forces it outnumbered, outspent, and eventually overwhelmed. The new kid on the world block beat up on a power in twilight, centuries past its days of imperial glory. Historian Maria Cristina Garcia of Cornell University describes the war as little, but something less than splendid: “. . . the navy really won the war, destroying powerful Spanish fleets in Santiago harbor and across the Pacific in Manila. Cubans had been fighting for independence for decades. The Americans put the last nail in Spain’s coffin. But then the Americans made a blunder of their own.” The U.S. Army entered Santiago de Cuba after the Spanish garrison surrendered on July 17, 1898, and kept the Cuban forces camped outside the city. The U.S. forces managed to defeat Spain and insult Cuba in the same instant.
General Calixto García. A key leader of the Cuban forces in decades of struggle against Spain, he felt he was snubbed by the Americans once U.S. forces completed their victory. García died in Washington, D.C., while on a diplomatic mission, and he was temporarily buried in Arlington National Cemetery. An American warship, the USS Nashville, returned his body to Cuba for a hero’s burial. CREDIT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
With carefully controlled anger embedded in the courtesy, General Calixto García protested to the American commander General William Shafter, “I have been until now one of your most faithful subordinates, honoring myself in carrying out your orders as far as my powers have allowed me to do it.
“The city of Santiago surrendered to the American army, and news of that important event was given to me by persons entirely foreign to your staff. I have not been honored with a single word from yourself informing me about the negotiations for peace or the terms of the capitulation by the Spaniards. The important ceremony of the surrender of the Spanish army and the taking possession of the city by yourself took place later on, and I only knew of both events by public reports.
“I was neither honored, sir, with a kind word from you inviting me or
any officer of my staff to represent the Cuban army on that memorable occasion.”
Having dispensed with the critique of his high-handed treatment by American forces, García got to the heart of the matter: “Finally, I know that you have left in power in Santiago the same Spanish authorities that for three years I have fought as enemies of the independence of Cuba. I beg to say that these authorities have never been elected at Santiago by the residents of the city; but were appointed by royal decrees of the Queen of Spain.
“A rumor too absurd to be believed, General, describes the reason of your measures and of the orders forbidding my army to enter Santiago for fear of massacres and revenge against the Spaniards. Allow me, sir, to protest against even the shadow of such an idea. We are not savages ignoring the rules of civilized warfare. We are a poor, ragged army, as ragged and poor as was the army of your forefathers in their noble war for independence. But like the heroes of Saratoga and Yorktown, we respect our cause too deeply to disgrace it with barbarism and cowardice.”
The general closed his letter by resigning his command and informing his American counterpart his army would be moved elsewhere.
García knew Shafter’s attitudes were not rumors at all. The American general neatly reflected his country’s attitudes toward their Cuban comrades: “Those people are no more fit for self-government than gunpowder is for hell.”
You’ve Earned Your Independence. A cartoon in the World shows Uncle Sam looking across the Florida Strait to a plucky little Cuban revolutionary, flying the Cuba Libre (Free Cuba) banner. CREDIT: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS