Shafter’s Indian-fighting army had decades of experience fighting wars similar to the war Spain had been fighting in Cuba: a colonial counterinsurgency. Of course, there were differences. Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Geronimo were Maceo, Gómez, and Garcia without international sympathy, clandestine resupply, and light artillery. Western tribes had to live off a much less giving land, and faced an enemy as confident and assertive as the Spanish Empire was sick with decay and doubt. Nevertheless, the U.S. Army of 1898 had far more in common with the dons than with the mambises. By its nature and history, the U.S. Army was an instrument of suppression and occupation, not of liberation.
The two armies fought in very different styles. When Cuban soldiers faded off trails and into the jungle—cutting cross-country to threaten a dug-in Spanish force’s flank, or to set up an ambush in its rear—they were, as far as U.S. troops were concerned, running away. If mambises showed little aptitude for the trench warfare that ensued after the taking of San Juan Hill, norteamericanos didn’t reflect that trench warfare had played no part in the three-year, nonstop offensive by which the Cubans had penned the Spanish in Santiago and other shaky strongholds. As the allies completed their investment of Santiago, U.S. officers provoked increasingly frequent confrontations with Cuban counterparts, sometimes demanding that Cubans yield hard-won positions, and systematically discounting their role in the fighting.
Inevitably, U.S. troops judged the guerrilla tactics of the mambises with the prejudices of regular troops throughout the ages. From redcoats being sniped at by minutemen hiding behind trees all down the long road from Concord back to Boston, to Operation Iraqi Freedom grunts running a gauntlet of improvised explosive devices in the streets of Baghdad, regular troops can hardly help feeling that the means resorted to by inferior forces trying to even the odds are cowardly, sneaky, uncivilized, and so on. The regulars often can’t interpret the insurgents’ efforts as combat: To roadbound, occupation-tasked troops, ambush and hit-and-run tactics seem not merely dishonorable but also criminal.
Shafter may have known better, but he never said a word in the Cubans’ defense. On the contrary: “The Cuban forces,” he cabled to Washington, “are not to be depended upon for severe fighting … [General] Lawton says he cannot compel Gen. Garcia to obey my instructions and if we intend to reduce Santiago we will have to depend alone on our own troops and that we will require twice the number we have.”
His policy of keeping Cuban forces on the flanks or out of sight only amplified his troops’ disdain for their allies. Perhaps he had formed a sincere, if misinformed, low opinion of Cuban fighting prowess, and felt that his own troops’ safety required American power solo, front and center. But that policy was also, at least in part, a direct expression of the McKinley administration’s increasingly obvious desire to control the island once the shooting stopped. In barring the Cuban army from entering Santiago, he may have felt an honest concern for the city’s safety; he may have been grabbing civil power on his government’s behalf; or he may simply have been the kind of career soldier who was not going to share the glory of his last shooting war with another army and another general, let alone a general representing a government his own commander in chief refused to recognize.
Whatever Shafter’s motives, the Cubans were excluded from the city on his order. Although Shafter made no effort to inform his allies of either the decision or his reasons, both were soon made known to Garcia.
In the Peace Park, where the peace was signed without him, the bronze “pages” of Calixto Garcia’s letter excerpt a protest famous for its reasonable requests and unimpeachable dignity.
“I would agree, sir,” Garcia writes, “that the army under your command should have taken possession of the city, the garrison and the forts.
“I would give my warm cooperation to any measure you may have deemed best under American military law to hold the city for your army and to preserve public order until the time comes to fulfill the solemn pledge of the people of the United States to establish in Cuba a free and independent government.” Garcia doesn’t want control, but he objects to the de facto continuation of Spanish governance.
Concerning the exclusion of the Cuban people’s own army from any part in the peace, he wrote, “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.”
Saratoga was the 1777 victory that won French support for the American insurrectionists’ cause. It was only with the help of a French expeditionary force that Washington could finish off a British detachment trapped at Yorktown in 1781.
What would have happened if Washington had not been invited to the surrender at Yorktown? If the French commander, the Comte de Rochambeau, had left the Americans out of all negotiations, and then declared devastated Tidewater Virginia “a part of France” until Louis XVI said otherwise? What if he had sent a message after the boat carrying fleeing Tory officials to Canada, inviting them to return to their former posts?
When Garcia’s letter was finally published in the United States in 1992, many Americans asked these questions and others implicit in the Cuban’s rhetoric. Foner’s survey of U.S. public opinion found the majority to be on Garcia’s side, and many voices in harmony with the editorial writer for the Louisville Dispatch who praised the Cuban’s riposte to charges of barbarism: “On that point Gen. Garcia fires a shaft at Shafter which must have penetrated even his 315 pounds of flesh to the heart.”
If it did, no scar showed. Shafter never answered Garcia, but he did respond to American criticism by insisting, despite Garcia’s letter, that the Cuban general “expected to be placed in command at this place.” And regardless of public opinion, Shafter obeyed orders from the Secretary of War, Russel A. Alger, to maintain tight and sole control over Santiago de Cuba.
Garcia’s message to Shafter ends with two statements ceding that control. Being “unable to fulfill any longer the orders of my government,” he informed Shafter that he had tendered his resignation to Máximo Gómez. And as a last act of command, he pulled his troops some forty miles to the northeast, away from the possibility of confrontation or provocation.
That was almost the end of Calixto Garcia’s story. In its sad coda, he headed a Cuban Commission in Washington, D.C., to press for the promised independence. He was rebuffed even by many former Cuban supporters in Congress, and the commission collapsed when he died of a sudden, vehement pneumonia in Washington’s opulent Raleigh Hotel on December 11, 1898, an old man at fifty-nine.
The War Department brought Shafter home from Cuba with his V Corps in September 1898. He served superbly in the much calmer job of organizing West Coast logistical supply for the burgeoning war in the Philippines, and this later success has been taken by some as proof that he probably did as well as anyone could managing the panicky, unplanned Cuban expedition. He retired in 1900 and died a quiet sort of old Army hero in 1906. His memory was honored with names, from streets around the nation to Fort Shafter in Honolulu, headquarters of the U.S. Pacific Command, and including—in the Southwest, where he had labored most of his life in martial obscurity—some dry, dusty municipalities, one each in California, Arizona, and Texas, two of which are now ghost towns.
In the forlorn Peace Park on the shoulder of San Juan Hill, I noticed that Garcia’s great bronze head frowns at some shrubbery across the park’s little drive. On the other side, half obscured by palms, are a group of recumbent bronze tablets exhaustively listing the commanding officers—Shafter at their head—the major units and ships participating, and all of America’s dead in the Santiago campaign of
1898.
Some few are labeled, “Killed”—destroyed by Spanish bullets or bombs. But the appallingly long lists are headed, “Died.” These fell by the hundreds to malaria, yellow fever, dysentery. If my great-grandfather Papa O’Brien had counted in either tally, I would never have been born.
The great bronze lists lean together like a pyramid of sarcophagus lids. If you park in just the right place, you can see them through the unruly shrubbery. While I was there, a big, smoke-windowed, air-conditioned tour bus swung by and paused in that spot, puffing black soot. The tourists, no doubt on their way to beating me uphill to the battlefield’s views, looked northern European. I could see the Cubatur guide pointing over toward Garcia’s letter and speaking at some length. Then she pointed quickly into the shrubbery at the listed American dead and the few cannon splayed around them, where I had spotted crumpled cigarette packs and fallen condoms. All told, the bus didn’t stay more than a minute, and no one got out for a closer look.
Chapter 9
HAVANA: DISMEMBERING THE MAINE
I’m not saying that tourists should avoid la Ciudad de la Habana, Cuba’s capital, the city once known as the Paris of the Americas.
Havana is an endlessly explorable wonder, a five-hundred-year-old New World cultural treasury. But it’s no more or less representative of Cuba than Manhattan is of the United States of America. Its interests are its own. The Cuban quintessences it emits are composed of raw materials—silver and sugarcane, sacred rhythms and revolutionary sacrifices, countless lives—drawn from all the island’s provinces, from Spain and West Africa, from Mexico and Morocco, and, yes, from Miami and Manhattan. Havana has imported aspects of itself from Shanghai and London, Hollywood and Moscow, and—despite its long demi-seclusion—still exports itself to the world, still markets a potent civic brand composed of optimism, vice, and valor: of antique cars rolling through florid decay, of music jazz-elegant and mambo-hot, of Che’s deathless guerrilla glamour. Havana is ruinous, fabulous, a monster angel with an outsize soul and a hard, hard heart.
So, yes, Havana is a must-see … but not if seeing it means you’re going to miss the rest of Cuba. If I had to choose between spending a week in Havana, touring the dusty Museum of the Revolution, drinking to Hemingway’s memory, and taking the obligatory stroll along the Malecón’s seawall promenade … and spending a week in the lush, hoodoo-haunted farmland of Pinar del Rio, in Camaguey’s sugarcane flatlands, or the mountain villages of the Escambray, I’d take any of those alternatives, knowing I’d experience more that is uniquely Cuban. And I’ve always stuck by Santiago, once the island’s capital and forever, in many ways, Cuba’s true hometown.
This time, because I was traveling as a freelance journalist, I was required to appear at Havana’s Centro de Prensa Internacional, the international press center, to register in person and obtain a special photo identity card. The card—expensive at sixty convertible pesos, almost eighty U.S. dollars—will supposedly help a journalist gain recognition and access, but in fact achieves exactly the opposite.
Cuba is a thoroughly totalitarian state, the kind of place where pointing your camera at a recognized tourist attraction—a statue or a street band—is permissible, but pointing your camera at, say, a watertank tower or a police station can get you hauled off for serious hassling or much worse. (It used to be impossible for Yanks and Brits to relate to this kind of experience, but not since 9/11.) Where paranoia is policy, going to extremes is the prudent approach. In a society like Cuba’s, identifying yourself as a journalist gets you informally but effectively barred, on a better-safe-than-sorry basis, from schools, factories, businesses, libraries, even museums. If I’d been foolish enough to wear my “pass” around my neck on my way into a restaurant, I’m guessing the odds are fifty-fifty I’d have gone hungry.
I’d traveled to Santiago before, as a newspaper reporter on a journalist’s visa, without having to make the Havana trek. But this time, as the CPI bureaucrats knew, I was staying longer, making a pilgrimage possible. And this time I was freelancing, a status perhaps more alarming—or more vulnerable—than snooping on salary.
Maricel, Walter Gomez, and I traveled across the island to Havana by bus. The chorus had come and gone without ever seeing the Reverend Esau Onyegoro again, and the three of us headed off without the promised extensions to our OFAC licenses. From that point on, we were in violation of the embargo. I’d sent the CPI’s fax number to Overwater Missions, but none of us believed that Esau would come through.
The bus ride was seventeen hours of sensory deprivation. Cross-country Viazul buses are newish, clean, comfortable, utterly generic. The windows are smoked so dark there’s no point trying to see the countryside; Hollywood movies played on drop-down screens. No one wanted to talk; the steel cocoon shut us off from the intensity of everyday in Cuba, and everyone collapsed inward. Besides, the air conditioning was set for suspended animation. I reached deep in my pack for a thermal underwear top and a knit ski cap. Nine hundred and ten kilometers, seventeen hours, swaddled on the back bench seat like a refrigerated pupa: not traveling, merely transported.
We were welcomed by Maricel’s aunt Yolanda, sister to Oscar and Lilia. If Lilia is a quick, bright sparrow, Yolanda is a duck, a sweet, calm old lady with eiderdown cheeks for kissing. She lives in the eastern suburb of Alamar, which is forested with countless apartment blocks in a style I can only call Soviet Tropical. Yolanda shares her apartment with her daughter, Yoli, and granddaughter Gisele, a colegio student who is rarely parted from her boyfriend, Roberto. Maricel bunked in with Gisele, and the family lent me a bedroom of my own. Yoli’s sister, Mari, and her son David came by almost every day, and the household was as good-humored as it was gracious.
With the family’s help, I commuted into the city every weekday, besieging the CPI office on Twenty-third Street, a rising boulevard of mid-twentieth-century modernist offices, hotels, and apartment houses known as “La Rampa,” the ramp. Amazingly, the officials who had insisted I travel 530 miles to present myself at their Havana desks seemed never to be seated behind same. Three days in, I still lacked a nifty laminated CPI photo ID warning the island that I was “Prensa Extranjera.”
The waiting could have been worse. The CPI lobby doubles as an art gallery, and its glass front wall offers a fine view of the street. Ever since Fidel’s rebels came to town and set up temporary headquarters in the nearby Havana Hilton—now the Havana Libre—La Rampa has been one of Cuban officialdom’s main drags. It is kitty-corner from the Universidad de la Habana, and intersects with the grand Paseo leading to the Plaza de la Revolución, where the Presidential Palace is centerpiece for a setting of Cuba’s most important ministries, including the Party’s Central Committee building, the Ministry of Sugar, the Revolutionary Armed Forces, and the fierce, omnivorous state-security bureau, the Ministry of the Interior. La Rampa hosts lesser bureaucracies, including health organizations and the CPI.
One thing I noticed about Havana was that, hard as times were, schoolkids and their parents weren’t begging strangers for pencils and other school supplies, as they were doing in Santiago. Havana was that much better off, it seemed, and La Rampa is one of its swankier neighborhoods. But in all the time I’d spent in hardscrabble Santiago, I’d never seen a chain-snatching. A lady from Australia lost her gold necklace in the first half hour I spent watching La Rampa from the Centro de Prensa Internacional.
The CPI itself offered a slo-mo mystery. The young receptionist, too tall for her desk and not tremendously bright, looked a little like an ostrich raising its sleepy head from the sand. Profoundly underemployed, she was conducting a sluggish flirtation with the two-man crew waxing the broad-tiled floor, who never seemed to progress more than a few giant steps from her desk. I didn’t see any fellow foreign journalists. Bureaucrats from upstairs offices flowed slowly across the lobby, as if time were syrup. I got the sense that anyone in the building who had any actual work to do was stretching it out like a pat of butter spread over a month’s dail
y bread. Those without any work at all were just keeping it on the down low.
And then there was the CPI gallery’s art to ponder.
That month, an exhibition of paintings offered abstract but hardly mistakable representations of female erogenous zones. The predictable floral forms, of course, as well as melons and other fruit in several stages of seeding and peeling undress, but also some pretty straightforward torsos, tipped to inviting angles, all fleshed out in warm-to-torrid hues that smiled and never blushed.
It’s no wonder that some outsiders—especially from our sensually repressed culture—get confused about Cuban political tyranny.
The U.S. government is many things, good and bad, but one thing it definitely is not is sexy. The only va-va-va-voom! you’ll ever see acknowledged in U.S. government art is deployed to signal Danger!, as in those World War II anti-VD cartoons that showed a harlot’s bodacious form dissolving to reveal a skeleton. Attorney General John Ashcroft even felt the need to clothe an antique statue of Justice, reaffirming that the U.S. politicians most intent on punishing sexual expression, diversity, and education are often the ones most inclined to open mail and tap phones, suspend habeas corpus, and condone torture. (They’re also, apparently, the ones most likely to get caught sexting congressional pages and soliciting fellatio in airport men’s rooms. Go figure.)
In contrast, Cuba’s government is undeniably sexy.
For one thing, it still owns a shimmer of that old Che Guevara glow, the glamour of amor revolucionario. By now, of course, that halo is more of a comb-over, but Cuban newlyweds still observe the ritual of having their picture taken in front of a photo of Che. The wedding backdrop photo is usually the iconic one, that Korda image of Che impassioned, of empathy aroused: the revolutionary as erotic avenging angel, faced framed in sweaty curls, fiercely striving for love. Standing before his image, the newlyweds associate his passion with their own, and thereby, however unconsciously or unwillingly, continue to imbue the state he helped found with some reflection of sweet, sanctioned desire.
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