El Norte

by Carrie Gibson

  The evening after his arrival, he spoke at the Liceo Cubano club, housed in a former cigar factory, and there he enshrined himself in Cuban history with a passionate speech declaring: “For suffering Cuba, the first word. Cuba must be considered an altar for the offering of our lives, not a pedestal for lifting us above it.”13 The audience embraced his words and he had clearly stoked the passion of this Florida community. He then drafted what were called the Tampa Resolutions, which aimed to unify the various patriotic societies, laying the foundation for what later became the Cuban Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Cubano) in 1892. By the end of his busy trip, which lasted only four days, he was escorted to the train station by most of the town: four thousand people saw him off to the Florida Keys with shouts of “¡Viva Martí!”14

  Martí’s desire to unite Cubans was significant because the groups of exiles around the country had different visions of what Cuba should do and be, fragmentations that had developed during the Ten Years’ War. Martí was not at first popular with everyone, but part of his genius was the ability to bring Cubans together. From there, this unified group would go on to establish societies and raise money to aid the cause of a free Cuba, Cuba libre, with the cigar workers themselves often making a regular contribution of a day’s pay.15

  At one point Florida had more than one hundred cigar factories, and in Tampa the population reached about sixteen thousand by the turn of the century.16 As Ybor City continued to expand, thousands of households in the United States became familiar with the cigar boxes produced in this town, decorated with lavish floral motifs, regal symbols, or romanticized scenes from literature or history—for instance those of the Treaty Bond brand were illustrated with a picture of Thomas Jefferson, Napoleon Bonaparte, and a scroll representing the Louisiana Purchase.

  Although hierarchies and discrimination had long existed in Cuba on the basis of skin color, with darker-skinned people on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder and lighter-skinned people among the elite, Cubans in the United States were often not prepared for the level of segregation they encountered in the Jim Crow South. Some Cubans discovered they had been classified as “black” and so were forced to endure the treatment that accompanied this. By the end of the century, the 1896 Supreme Court ruling in the case of Homer Plessy, a Louisiana creole who sat in a white railway car and was arrested because he was one-eighth black, established the legal precedent of “separate but equal.” Black Cubans were not exempt. In Florida, many of them found themselves living in places apart from lighter-skinned Cubans, and they were also forced to socialize in different worlds. By 1890, some sixteen hundred people in Tampa were deemed “black,” a number that included African-Americans. The whiter Cubans were considered “foreign-born” and grouped with the Italian and other Mediterranean immigrants in the city.17

  The question of color in Florida was complicated by the fact that the rebels during the Ten Years’ War had made clear slavery would have no part in a free Cuba. That war and the subsequent reorganization by exiles in Florida had united people from the island across class and color lines. The promise of independence and equality was extended to Afro-Cubans, as embodied by Antonio Maceo, a black general and hero of the Ten Years’ War who would return during the Cuban War of Independence in 1895. For Martí and others, the inclusion of Afro-Cubans was a crucial part of a free Cuba and vital for the future of the nation. In an 1891 article, “Our America,” Martí made his views on this clear: “there is no racial hatred, because there are no races. … Anyone who promotes and disseminates opposition or hatred among races sins against humanity.”18

  While Cubans were seeking better economic opportunities in Florida or New York, U.S. capital had been flowing into Cuban sugar—by this point for decades, with significant activity starting again after the end of the U.S. Civil War, spurred on in part by technological developments in sugar refining.19 Although the Ten Years’ War caused some disruption, it was clear that a free Cuba could be a very profitable one. The U.S. backers began to show their support for Cuba libre by joining the Cuban American League, set up by the New York businessman William O. McDowell in 1892.20 Spain’s finances had long been devastated by conflict, and the Spanish had little to spend on rebuilding Cuba after the war. Planters in Cuba thus took credit from U.S. banks, or investors bought plantations from planters who were unable to recover from the drop in sugar prices at the beginning of the 1880s.21 This was further aided by the 1890 McKinley Tariff, which removed the duty on raw sugar imported to the United States, giving Cuban producers extra impetus to rebuild their plantations, often with foreign help.22 Soon, family estates were being taken over by U.S. banks, though at the same time many planters were trying to obtain U.S. citizenship in order to protect their interests.23 The commercial ties between the United States and Cuba began to tighten.24

  The United States and Cuba were also becoming linked by something that aroused a bit more passion than talk of tariffs: baseball. The brothers Nemesio and Ernesto Guilló, who had studied in Alabama, are credited with being the first to bring the game to the island, establishing the Havana Baseball Club in 1868. The first game between two provincial teams took place in 1874, and by 1878 the Cuban League of Professional Baseball was up and running.25 The enthusiasm was based on more than just a love of playing or watching the sport. For Cubans, an important aspect of the game was the team itself, a symbol for building a new nation, as contrasted against the individual performance of Spanish bullfighting. Baseball also represented the progress and “modernity” of U.S. culture for a war-torn country still under colonial rule at the end of the nineteenth century.26 Indeed, the authorities even banned a team from calling itself Yara in 1876 because the name evoked the Grito de Yara that had started the war.27

  The sport boomed in popularity as clubs sprang up all over the island. Local teams also played games against people from the United States who were working or living on the island.28 In Havana, newspapers were dedicated to the sport, including the weekly Base-Ball, which was started in 1881 and printed scores, gossip, and even poems. Cuban players were quick to establish a reputation and travel to play in the United States; in 1871, Esteban “Steve” Bellán was considered to be the first Hispanic player in the United States. He played at Fordham University (then known as St. John’s College), and then as a member of the Troy Haymakers, and later on for the New York Mutuals, one of the founding teams of the National League. Cubans also helped spread the sport around Latin America, taking it to the Dominican Republic and to Puerto Rico.29 In 1903 the Puerto Rico Herald reported: “Four years ago Puerto Ricans had never heard of baseball: it is now becoming the insular game. A league has been established at San Juan, and the regular Wednesday and Saturday games between the four teams composing it attract large crowds. … Enthusiasm among the spectators runs high.”30

  Away from the island, Cubans developed a reputation as talented baseball players and, in the decades to come, would have a great impact on the game in the United States. In one odd—though perhaps not isolated—case, African-Americans were told to impersonate them. In 1885, the managers of the Argyle Hotel on Long Island wanted its black waiters to play baseball for the amusement of the white patrons, though they worried that it might make the guests uncomfortable to see black men outside their usual roles at the hotel. Instead, the men were to be called the “Cuban Giants” and were given instructions to “speak heavily accented gibberish that sounded like Spanish.” The ruse worked—the guests loved it and the team was so popular that it ended up touring and becoming semiprofessional.31

  IN 1894, THE United States introduced the Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act, imposing a 40 percent duty on imported sugar to help domestic production and wrecking any trade advantage Cuba enjoyed. Sugar exports collapsed, the cost of imports rose, and frustration with Spanish trade policies reached a boil.32 At the same time, Cubans in exile and on the island were now ready to try again for independence. In 1895, under the organization of Martí, the War of Indepen
dence started, and uprisings took place throughout the island. Martí had convinced two heroes of the previous war, Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo, to lead once more. Martí returned to Cuba, and he died in battle that May. Maceo was killed the following December. Despite losing two leaders, the rebellion continued, and now, unlike during the Ten Years’ War, the United States watched with great interest, with significant sections of public opinion supporting the Cubans in their struggle. The powerful newspaper proprietors William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer started competing campaigns backing the liberation of Cuba in their respective papers, the New York Journal and the New York World. Tales of violence at the hands of the unpopular and repressive Spanish governor of Cuba, Valeriano Weyler, helped arouse sympathy for Cubans. African-American newspapers covered events on the island, too, watching a war that not only involved black people but, in the case of Maceo, was being led by them.33 The position of black people on the island was also of great interest, with one journalist in the Colored American answering his question “Will Cuba be a Negro Republic?” in the affirmative, on the basis that “the greater portion of the insurgents are Negroes and they are politically ambitious.”34 Some politicians and officials in the United States might have thought this, too, watching the events unfold with wariness about the role of black people in the conflict.35

  More directly for the United States, the business interests of some of its citizens were being destroyed—one of the revolutionary tactics was to burn sugarcane fields.36 By 1898, after three years of war on the island, coupled with the change in sugar tariffs, New York merchants complained that they were losing $100 million a year in lost or disrupted trade with Cuba.37 Businesses in cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore began to lobby William McKinley, who became U.S. president in 1897, to find a way to end the costly conflict. In a letter that year, they pointed to their “large interests in Cuba, either as property holders or holders of mortgages,” before asking him—“in order to prevent further losses”—to find a way of brokering a peace deal.38

  Certain factions in Washington began to express a desire for much more than a deal. Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts—who would go on to be one of the leading advocates of war against Spain—had written in 1895 that “we desire no extension to the south,” yet proceeded to list the actions in that region that would benefit the United States, including building a canal across Nicaragua. His vision included having “among those islands at least one strong naval station, and when the Nicaragua canal is built, the island of Cuba, still sparsely settled and of almost unbounded fertility, will become to us a necessity.”39

  Other groups opposed involvement in Cuban affairs; their position was articulated by an antiwar press, citing practical concerns, including the perceived strength of the Spanish navy, the dangers posed to troops by tropical diseases, and the potential economic cost.40 Some antiwar newspapers were also concerned about the future of Cuba’s large black population. The New York Herald explained in one article that “Cuba libre means another Black Republic. … We don’t want one so near. Hayti [sic] is already too close.”41

  In a bid to avert a war but solve the crisis, President McKinley made one final attempt in January 1898 to buy Cuba for $300 million, which Spain refused.42 Around the same time rumors reached Washington that four German warships in the Caribbean might be there to take Cuba as part of a secret deal with Spain.43 Public and political opinion about how to proceed was still divided when President McKinley sent the battleship USS Maine from Key West to Havana on January 24, 1898, in what was presented as a peaceful visit, though Hearst’s New York Journal exclaimed, “Our Flag in Havana at Last” in the next day’s edition.44

  On February 15 an onboard explosion killed 266 of the ship’s officers and crew. The source of the blast was never identified, but Hearst’s Journal was quick to blame Spain, despite the lack of evidence, its headline shouting: “Destruction of the Warship Maine Was the Work of an Enemy.”45 A somewhat more circumspect New York Times reported, “Only Theory as to the Cause of the Disaster.”46 Some naval experts at the time explained that it was quite probably an accident, in part because the vessel’s coal bunker was near where the gunpowder was stored. However, in late March an official U.S. inquiry concluded that while an exact cause could not be found, it most likely was the fault of a Spanish mine outside the ship.47 Whatever the reason, the destruction of the Maine was now a useful casus belli. The United States gave Spain one last ultimatum to leave Cuba, which was refused.

  President McKinley explained to Congress a short time later that he was now willing to take action because of the “intimate connection of the Cuban question with the state of our own Union.”48 Part of his concern was the potential damage to U.S. citizens’ property and he said the “prospect of such a protraction and conclusion of the present strife is a contingency hardly to be contemplated with equanimity by the civilized world, and least of all by the United States.”49 There was no mention of a Cuba libre in his call to war, and this gave Cubans reason to fear the creeping hand of U.S. imperialism.50 On the contrary, President McKinley said he did not think it “would be wise or prudent for this government to recognize at the present time the independence of the so-called Cuban Republic. Such recognition is not necessary in order to enable the United States to intervene.”51

  By April 19, Congress had passed the joint resolution for war against Spain. However, before it was passed a crucial amendment had been added. This was proposed by the Republican senator Henry Moore Teller of Colorado, who wanted to ensure that the United States would only help Cuba free itself from Spain, and not try to acquire it; or, in the words of his amendment, that the United States would “leave the government and control of the island to its people.”52 Given that his state was a beet sugar producer, Teller may have had Colorado’s economic interests in mind as well.53 Cubans, for their part, had long been concerned about U.S. intervention. José Martí’s vision had rejected any annexation or alliance with the United States. As Martí asked in an 1889 letter, once the United States is in Cuba, who will drive them out?”54 The Teller amendment helped assuage this concern, but Cuban fears were not fully extinguished.

  The United States declared war on Spain on April 25, and its opening attack followed less than a week later, though not in Cuba but in the Philippines, which also had remained under Spanish rule. The United States attacked in the Battle of Manila Bay on May 1, using ships already in the Pacific, and sank the Spanish squadron. By early July, a joint resolution had passed Congress for the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands because of their strategic importance and use as a naval base.

  In Cuba, Theodore Roosevelt arrived with his “Rough Riders,” the 1st United States Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, scoring a key victory at the Battle of San Juan Hill on July 1. Spain surrendered to the United States before the end of the month, in a ceremony that took place in Santiago.55 Cubans were not allowed to attend or to celebrate their own victory, nor did any Cuban sign the Treaty of Paris that ended the war. All of this reignited the anxiety about the United States’ intentions.56 For the independence leader Calixto García, such actions had left Cuba “in a tremendous haze, with the bleakest of futures.”57 Each side now watched the other—the Cubans to see if the United States would keep its promise to leave the island free, and the United States to see if Cuba “behaved” well enough to deserve it.58

  Puerto Rico would also be swept up in the war: U.S. ships bombarded San Juan in May, but the army did not land until a couple of months later. In June, Philip Hanna, who had been the last U.S. consul to Spanish Puerto Rico, wrote to the assistant secretary of state, John Bassett Moore, to warn that “in case the United States takes possession of Puerto Rico,” it was crucial that the United States prove “Americans are better than Spaniards, that American government is far above Spanish, and that the United States is indeed their friend come to give them a taste of the benefits of liberty.”59

  Around three thousand
troops that had been fighting in Cuba were sent to Puerto Rico in July, landing near the southern town of Guánica on the twenty-fifth. They moved inland, stopping at the city of Ponce, where a proclamation declared that the purpose of their invasion was to bring a “banner of freedom.” Puerto Rico was soon under U.S. control. By August 12, the entire “splendid little war,” as Secretary of State John Hay was said to have called it, came to an end. The humiliation for Spain was complete. Its once vast empire whittled away by independence movements and now by war with the United States, it was left with only a few small protectorates in North and West Africa. A new era beckoned for everyone involved, not least the United States. Hearst’s New York Journal beamed: “War Officially Ended. Business Boom Begins.”60

  Despite growing national unease at this sort of imperial behavior, the arch-expansionist Indiana senator Albert Beveridge saw little problem in taking control of these territories, arguing in his “March of the Flag” speech in September 1898 that “the rule of liberty that all just government derives its authority from the consent of the governed, applies only to those who are capable of self-government. We govern the Indians without their consent, we govern our territories without their consent, we govern our children without their consent. How do they know that our government would be without their consent? … Do not the blazing fires of joy and the ringing bells of gladness in Porto Rico prove the welcome of our flag?”61

  By the end of the year, the Treaty of Paris was signed, under which the United States agreed to pay $20 million for the Philippines, and also gained Puerto Rico and the Micronesian island of Guam. Well before this was signed, Beveridge’s glee was already evident:

  Hawaii is ours; Porto Rico is to be ours; at the prayer of the people Cuba will finally be ours; in the islands of the east, even to the gates of Asia, coaling stations are to be ours; at the very least the flag of a liberal government is to float over the Philippines, and it will be the stars and stripes of glory.62