Yankee Come Home
Page 39
But their trial was conducted in a Miami courthouse besieged by the same angry exile community that had, just months before, made an emotional horror-show out of returning little Elián González to his father: There’s a lot wrong with Cuba, but life for most folks there is certainly no worse than life for most folks in Honduras or El Salvador or Colombia. And if a minor child from one of those countries were brought here illegally by a mother who died on the journey, would anyone in the United States try to prevent the child’s father—a respectable man with a better-than-average job—from bringing his son back home? Some Miami Cubans attempted to block the return of Elián González to his father to express their hatred for Fidel Castro and his regime.
Chapter 7: WARS OF THE SPIRIT
And the sugar-purchasing guarantee was, in actuality, a contract between the U.S. government and the cartel of U.S. corporations taking over and transforming the Cuban sugar industry: For an overview of this process see Louis A. Pérez Jr., Cuba Between Empires, 1878–1902 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983) and Oscar Zanetti and Alejandro García, Sugar and Railroads: A Cuban History, 1837–1959, trans. Franklin W. Knight and Mary Todd (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
Under País’s leadership, Revolutionary Action merged with the new M-26-7; País became the national movimiento’s director of urban operations: Yolanda Portuondo, La Clandestinidad Tuvo Un Nombre: David (Havana: Editora Política, 1988).
A biography by fellow resistance fighter Renán Ricardo Rodriguez, El Héroe del Silencio (“Hero of Silence”), describes Oscar as taciturno, tranquilo, y meditativo, “melancholy, calm, and thoughtful,” but fierce in his opposition to injustice: Renán Ricardo Rodriguez, El Héroe del Silencio (Havana: Editora Política, 1986).
One holguinera, the poet and clandestine warrior Lalita Curberlo Barberán, writes that “Omar” brought the network back to life with “something warm and human … with sweetness, with fondness, and we’d obey”: Lalita Curberlo Barberán, El Tiempo y el Recuerdo (Holguin, Cuba: Ediciones Holguin, 1994).
“It is my duty,” he wrote, “inasmuch as I realize it and have the spirit to fulfill it, to prevent, by the independence of Cuba, the United States from spreading over the West Indies and falling, with [Cuba’s] added weight, upon other lands of Our America”: “Our America,” Nuestra America, is the title of Martí’s seminal essay identifying Latin American countries’ common causes and concerns, especially in relation to the economic power of the United States.
Chapter 8: CHARGING (HALFWAY) UP SAN JUAN HILL
Until Philip S. Foner reprinted it in his iconoclastically titled two-volume 1972 work The Spanish-Cuban-American War and the Birth of American Imperialism, the letter had vanished from U.S. history: Philip Foner, The Spanish-Cuban-American War and the Birth of American Imperialism, 1895–1902 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972).
Chapter 9: HAVANA
The majority were policemen and soldiers who had taken an active part in the torture and murder of revolutionaries, dissidents, and innocents, but the trials were so swift and the sentences so harsh as to shock Stateside onlookers: Reports of these summary executions carry a faint echo of the Virginius killings. It becomes a shout when we read that Raúl Castro, whose forces occupied Santiago, ordered the execution of more than seventy government soldiers, machine-gunned into a bulldozed trench. The Virginius martyrs and Batista’s men were arguably fighting on different sides of Cuba’s long struggle for self-determination, but quick-and-dirty justice is never just.
In Cuba: A Global Studies Handbook, Ted Henken describes MININT as “a large, bureaucratic organization with a wide range of security-related responsibilities, not unlike the newly formed, controversial and quite unwieldy U.S. Department of Homeland Security”: Ted Henken, Cuba: A Global Studies Handbook (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 2008).
“Human bones were scattered about”: Peggy and Harold Samuels, Remembering the Maine (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995).
“Of course, I read about the USS Maine, and I recognized it immediately by the absence of a bow, which was cut away mechanically and not naturally broken away,” their crew chief, Russian-born Canadian marine engineer Paulina Zelitsky, told the Miami Herald: Elinor J. Brecher, “Scientists Stumble Upon Sunken Maine,” Miami Herald, December 10, 2000.
A maverick officer of the World War II generation who is generally regarded as the father of the nuclear Navy, Rickover reviewed Sigsbee’s career …: H.G. Rickover, How the Battleship Maine Was Destroyed (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Navy, 1976).
“A half-hour later, Newton was dead”: Charles Dwight Sigsbee’s “Personal Narrative of ‘Maine’” was serialized in Century Magazine (November and December 1898, January 1899).
Chapter 11: EL HOMBRE LLEGA—THE MAN IS HERE
As with the Maine, there’s no telling what really happened to La Coubre: If no other explanations emerge in the meantime, the next opportunity to solve the mystery of La Coubre won’t come until March 4, 2110. According to the Cuban government newspaper Granma, the company that owned the ship at the time of the explosion, Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, placed a file on the La Coubre investigation in an archive in Le Havre with the unusual restriction that its contents not be published for 150 years.
According to the U.S. War Department’s Report of the Census of Cuba, 1899, by 1862, of 1,396,530 Cubans, 56.8 percent were white and 43.2 percent black: Report on the Census of Cuba, 1899, (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1900).
Chapter 14: MOVING IN IMPERIAL CIRCLES
Nearly one in thirty-nine hundred died: For readers unfamiliar with the Angola War, Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), may be the best single-volume overview of the various sides’ strategic and economic concerns.
Footnotes
1 There are several “El Morro” castles in the Caribbean, the nickname referring to Moorish stylings most obvious in the shapes of turrets, arches, and windows. Most of these great forts were built with the labor of esclavos del rey, like the people of El Cobre. UNESCO ranks Santiago’s restored fort as the most complete and “remarkable embodiment of Spanish-American military architecture.”
2 The United States exercised its option to invade in 1906, 1912, 1917, and 1920. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor Policy” saw the U.S. relationship to Cuba renegotiated in 1934, erasing most of the Platt Amendment powers, but of course the Navy never gave up Guantánamo, and continually showed the flag in visits to other Cuban ports.
Suggested Reading
Without the scholarship and literary achievements of Philip Foner and Louis A. Pérez Jr., yanquis would know little and understand still less of their nation’s crucial and often shameful relations with Cuba. Foner’s The Spanish-Cuban-American War and the Birth of American Imperialism, 1895–1902 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), rescued the reality of U.S. invasion and colonization from seven decades of self-serving distortion and willful forgetting. Brilliant and prolific, Pérez offers readers numerous approaches to Cuban-American history, including Cuba and the United States: Ties of Singular Intimacy (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1990), Cuba Between Empires, 1878–1902 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh “Press,” 1983), and The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and Historiography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
Other fine introductions to U.S.-Cuban history include Jules R. Benjamin, The United States and the Origins of the Cuban Revolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990) and Thomas G. Paterson, Contesting Castro: The United States and the Triumph of the Cuban Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). The best read on the subject in years is Tom Gjelten’s original and moving study Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba: The Biography of a Cause (New York: Viking, 2008).
Concerning the United States’ intervention in Cub
a in 1898, one good starting place is Graham A. Cosmas, An Army for Empire (Shippensburg, Pa.: White Mane Press, 1994), which defines the war by examining the force that fought it.
Donald H. Dyal’s Historical Dictionary of the Spanish-American War (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998) is an indispensable source. George O’Toole, The Spanish War (New York: Norton, 1984) and David F. Trask, The War with Spain in 1898 (New York: Macmillan, 1981), are the best popular histories, and A. B. Feuer’s The Santiago Campaign of 1898: A Soldier’s View of the Spanish-American War (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1993) is an excellent relief from the general’s-eye view. Willard B. Gatewood, Black Americans and the White Man’s Burden, 1898–1903 (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1975) and Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998) consider the war’s racist and gender-addled ideologies.
Theodore Roosevelt’s self-contradictions are so many and so consequential it’s no wonder that Edmund Morris’s marvelous three-volume biography—The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Rex, and Colonel Roosevelt—sometimes fails to reconcile one T.R. to another. Deeply researched and tremendously readable, Morris’s trilogy lets Teddy be Teddy, an occupation that never had much to do with consistency and self-awareness.
Among Cuban overviews of 1898, no study is more fascinating than Felipe Martínez Arango’s sometimes hour-by-hour timeline of tragic and heroic events, Cronología crítica de la guerra hispanocubanoamericana (Santiago de Cuba: Universidad de Oriente, 1960).
Cuba writes more about its latest revolution, but Spain still turns out numerous studies of its Cuban wars. Standouts include José Calvo Poyato, El Desastre del 98 (Barcelona: Plaza & Janés, 1997), José Antonio Plaza, El Maldito Verano del 98 (Madrid: Ediciónes Themas de Hoy, 1997), Antonio Elorza and Elena Hernández Sandoica, La Guerra de Cuba (1895–1898) (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1998), and Juan Batista González, Santiago de Cuba: La batalla que pudo no haberse perdido (Madrid: Silex, 2005). Norteamericano scholar D. J. Walker has written an enlightening study of Spanish Women and the Colonial Wars of the 1890s (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008).
To learn about Cuba between 1898 and Batista’s fall, Americans might start with The Crime of Cuba by Carelton Beals, with photographs by Walker Evans (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1933), an unforgettable indictment of the U.S. sugar industry’s influence on neocolonial Cuba.
From the Cuban perspective, Santiago de Cuba en el Transito de la Colonia a la República, by Santiago historian Reynaldo Cruz Ruiz (Santiago de Cuba: Ediciónes Santiago, 2008), and Santiago de Cuba en la neocolonia, by Concepción Portuondo López (Santiago de Cuba: Ediciónes Santiago, 2008), are superb monographs on Oriente’s experience of neocolonialism.
Santiago Insurreccional 1953–56, edited by Reynaldo Cruz Ruiz and Rafael Borges Betancourt (Santiago de Cuba: Ediciónes Santiago, 2008), and Enrique Olutski, Gente del llano (La Habana: Ediciónes Imagen Contemporánea, 2000), are standouts among Cuban studies and memoirs of the revolt that toppled Batista. Readers seeking a single-volume introduction to the Cuban Revolution and its most charismatic figure should pick up Jon Lee Anderson’s magnificent biography Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Grove Press, 1997).
How has that Revolution turned out? What’s Cuba under Castro really like? Among sociological studies, Inside the Revolution: Everyday Life in Socialist Cuba by Mona Rosendahl (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997) and Fidel Castro and the Quest for a Revolutionary Culture in Cuba by Julie Marie Bunck (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994) follow ordinary cubanos’ experience of socialism into the Special Period. For Cuba before the Soviet collapse see Juan M. del Aguila, Cuba: Dilemmas of a Revolution (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1984) and Wilbur R. Chaffee and Gary Prevost, eds., Cuba: A Different America (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1988). For what’s coming, Daniel P. Erikson, The Cuba Wars: Fidel Castro, the United States, and the Next Revolution (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008) offers one intriguing U.S. perspective.
Among norteamericano journeys in Cuba, my two favorite reads are Tom Miller, Trading with the Enemy: A Yankee Travels through Castro’s Cuba (New York: Atheneum, 1992) and Ben Corbett, This Is Cuba: An Outlaw Culture Survives (Cambridge, Mass.: Westview Press, 2002), memoirs written with open hearts and wise eyes.
A Note on the Author
WILLIAM CRAIG, a journalist and professor at New Hampshire’s River Valley Community College, has written for the Boston Globe, the Hartford Courant, and the Boston Review. His fiction has appeared in StoryQuarterly and the New England Review. He lives in Thetford Center, Vermont.
Copyright © 2012 by William Craig
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First U.S. edition 2012
This electronic edition published in August 2012