A 'Splendid' War’s Shameful Side

Thanks to Cuban insurgents, the Americans landed unopposed in Cuba and Spanish relief columns were pinned down and kept from the fight. But the Americans gave the Cubans little credit for the ultimate victory against the Spaniards. Incredibly, the American commanders barred the rebel army from attending the Spanish surrender ceremony in Santiago. Ostensibly the reason was to safeguard against reprisals, but the greater motivation, revealed by letters and diaries of the time, appears to have been the disdain with which the Americans regarded the Cubans as a mongrel army. The Spaniards (an all-white force) wanted to preserve their honor by surrendering to the Americans in Santiago. In the end most of the Spanish soldiers scattered elsewhere around Cuba, where there were no American forces, surrendered to the Cuban rebels without suffering recrimination. The vanquished Spanish soldiers were allowed to keep their arms and embark for Spain. But the Americans disbanded and disarmed the victorious Cuban army.

America refused to end its occupation of Cuba until 1902, not until the American commanders were satisfied that the Cubans were sufficiently "civilized" for self-rule. (But the republic's constitution allowed Washington to send in American troops at any time.) Black officers and leaders were purged as uneducated and uncultured. Slavery had been abolished only in 1886, and blacks had not attained the social standing of whites, despite the egalitarian philosophy of rebel heroes like José Martí, who preached that there was no such thing as race, only humanity. Eager to appease the Americans (and get them out of the country), many Cubans became embarrassed and confused and lost sight of their own progressive principles. Before long, the Cuban leaders were guilty of their own racial prejudice, violently suppressing a political party formed by discarded and disenfranchised black veterans in 1908.

Over the years the memory of the humiliation of 1898 rankled the Cubans. "Of course, we felt betrayed," Rafael Izquierdo, the president of the Cuban Historical Society, told me as we sat in his Havana office last Tuesday, discussing the Cuban point of view for a book I am writing about the Spanish-American War. (Modern Cuban officials, steeped in socialist ideology, suspect a plot by wealthy American businessmen to annex Cuba.) In the 1940s and '50s, among those nursing a grudge against "los Norte Americanos" was Fidel Castro. When his guerrilla force of rebels came out of the mountains and took Santiago from the corrupt Batista regime in January 1959, Fidel exulted, "This time the manbisas [rebels] are going to come into the city." He was recalling the day 60 years earlier when the Americans had blocked the Cubans from celebrating their own freedom. It is interesting to think how history might have been different if the Americans had been as racially tolerant as the Cuban Liberation Army in 1898, or if they had just had the common sense to show the Cuban freedom fighters some dignity.

© 2008