Cuban officers were no better than the rank and file. “The entire function of the lieutenant who commanded them in action was to stand back of the line, frenziedly beat his machete through the air, and with incredible rapidity howl: âFuego! fuego! fuego! fuego!' He could not possibly have taken time to breathe during the action. His men were meanwhile screaming the most horrible language in a babble.”
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As
for daring, that's another matter. Like savages, the Cubans “paid no heed whatever to the Spaniards' volleys, but simply lashed themselves into a delirium that disdained everything.”
Crane had counterparts at other papers. One pool reporter described the Cubans' behavior after the allied victory at Cuzco well. “The easy victory put the command in high spirits. The Little Black Cuban warriors waved their machetes and howled curses at the Spaniards in savage fashion. Their firing had been wild throughout, but they all displayed the utmost contempt for the Spanish bullets, apparently being absolutely without fear.”
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Unable and unwilling to secure their own independence, in American eyes, these Cubans were unfit for self-governmentâjust as Gómez had feared.
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Discounting the Cubans' contributions to the defeat of Spain, the United States could write Cuba out of the picture. On July 4, 1898, America's Independence Day, Frank Keeler lay at picket duty on a hillside overlooking the outer harbor. Below him, spread out across the water, was arguably the largest collection of U.S. warships ever convened in a single place. “Fifty-five vessels of every description” sat at anchor in the bay, Keeler recalled in his war diary, most of them “fighting ships of the latest type.”
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The fleet had come to Guantánamo for fuel, repair, and, on this day, celebration. The previous day, the U.S. fleet smashed its Spanish adversary off Santiago Harbor, ending a six-week blockade, demonstrating the primacy of U.S. naval power in the region, and virtually ensuring a U.S. victory over Spain.
A mix of motivations had compelled the United States to intervene in the Cuban War of Independence that spring. Some Americans regarded intervention as an opportunity finally to rid the New World of Spanish rule. Some viewed intervention as a means of protecting and promoting U.S. business interests in Cuba. Some saw it as a way to expand U.S. military and commercial influence in the Western Hemisphere. Some, as the only course of action befitting a liberty-loving people in the face of Spain's trampling of Cuban rights. Many Americans held to several or all of these convictions in combination.
Yet, on a day that suggested that Cuba's century-long dream of independence might at long last come true, it was American independence
that the navy celebrated at Guantánamo Bay, as if it were the Monroe Doctrine that had been ratified off Santiago Harbor. The display the U.S. fleet put on this Fourth of July “was one of the grandest sights ⦠that had ever been witnessed in Cuban waters,” Keeler remembered. Just yesterday, these fifty-five warships “had been fighting dogs and had won a victory. Today they were dressed in gala attire, decorated with every bit of bunting on the ship.” Begun at noon, the celebration would last throughout the night. At nightfall, “the beautiful sight of the day was surpassed by the electrical display. The big marine battle was over, the celebration was allowable. The thousands of lights on the ships gave them the appearance of a wonderful city that had sprung up from the unknown depths.” Only the enthusiastic ribbing by a fellow picket detracted from what Keeler remembered as one of the great pleasures of his life.
But his reverie “didn't or couldn't last.” The rising sun revealed the city sunk beneath the waves. In its place, warships: the United States had come to Guantánamo to stay.
A CRUEL AND AWFUL TRUTH
“I have no doubt,” Calixto GarcÃa wrote to the exiled head of the Cuban Revolutionary Party, “that before the campaign ends, all the people of the United States will be convinced that we do not lack the conditions to govern ourselves.”
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This proved wishful thinking. On July 17, Spain surrendered Santiago to the Americans. On what might have been a day of joyous celebration among victorious allies, Shafter refused to let the Cubans take part in the surrender. When the Cubans complained, the Associated Press ridiculed their disappointment at not having had Santiago “turned over to them to loot and plunder, as they had in succession sacked Daiquiri, Siboney, and El Caney”ânone of which was true.
GarcÃa's son, Brigadier General Carlos GarcÃa Vélez, remembered a deep sense of foreboding suffusing the Cuban ranks upon learning of Shafter's snubbing of their boss. Just three days before, “the news of the capitulation of Santiago spread about the camps with shouts of joy.” Now joy yielded to bewilderment as Cubans “were absolutely excluded from all participation in the surrender of the city.” After an “imposing” conversation with Shafter, GarcÃa spent the night in solitude, so overcome by “apprehensions of the future” that he dared not appear before his men. How could he disclose “the cruel and awful truth ⦠that our allies of yesterday with whom we had so willingly and nobly cooperated to overthrow the enemy, not needing our services
further, had pushed us aside?” As disbelief gave way to “excitement,” only GarcÃa's “extraordinary diplomacy” defused a “dangerous situation.”
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GarcÃa's diplomacy was on full display in a letter to General Shafter protesting his mistreatment just as the American flag rose over Santiago. Ordered the preceding May to assist the Americans, GarcÃa had done his level best. “Until now,” he wrote Shafter, “I have been ⦠one of your most faithful subordinates, honoring myself in carrying out your orders as far as my powers have allowed.” Yet, when Santiago fell, GarcÃa received news of the event from “persons entirely foreign” to Shafter's staff. Shafter did not so much as honor GarcÃa with a “kind word,” inviting him “to represent the Cuban army on that memorable occasion.” Worse, Shafter had left in charge of Santiago the very Spanish officials whom GarcÃa had been fighting for three years as “enemies of the independence of Cuba”âofficials, GarcÃa noted, originally appointed by “the Queen of Spain.”
GarcÃa had fully expected the Americans to have “taken possession of the city, the garrison and forts”; he expected to cooperate with Shafter to preserve order until the time came for the United States to fulfill its pledge to “establish in Cuba a free and independent government.” What could explain this turn of events? “A rumor too absurd to be believed,” GarcÃa wrote, “describes the reason of your measures and of the orders forbidding my army to enter Santiago for fear of massacres and revenge against the Spanish. 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 of independence, but like the heroes of Saratoga and Yorktown, we respect our cause too deeply to disgrace it with barbarism and cowardice.”
Referring to Saratoga and Yorktown, GarcÃa challenged Shafter to imagine how American patriots would have felt had the French, having intervened in the American Revolution, refused to allow the Americans to attend the British surrender. Rather than submit to the indignity, GarcÃa resigned his commission as commander of Cuban forces at Santiago and rode off over the mountains to continue the fight at JiguanÃ.
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Shafter's treatment of GarcÃa was only the first in a long series of
humiliations that the United States visited on Cuba in the aftermath of the Cuban War of Independence as it tried to reconcile its pledge, as stated in the Teller Amendment, “to leave the government and control of the island to its people” with the centuries-old conviction that Cuba was essential to the security and prosperity of the United States. More than the fate of Cuba was at stake here. The defeat of Spain compelled the United States to confront the tension between its liberal, universal principles and its self-interest. Whether and how it resolved this dilemma would determine not only U.S.-Cuban relations but also U.S. relations with independent (often weaker) nation-states throughout the hemisphere and, indeed, the world. Guantánamo Bay figured crucially in these negotiations. Despite the strong objection of Cuba, the Americans retained Guantánamo Bay in the aftermath of the war both as an instrument of control over a nominally independent Cuba and as a base of U.S. influence in Latin America.
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In the autumn of 1898, the United States recapitulated Shafter's snubbing of GarcÃa on a grand scale. As American and Spanish officials descended on Paris in early October to work out the details of the transfer of Spanish sovereignty over Cuba and its other colonial possessions to the United States, not a single Cuban representative could be spotted in their midst. Like Shafter before it, the U.S. government simply assumed that Cuba had no role to play in negotiations with Spain. The next year, as if acknowledging the appearance of unfairness, U.S. secretary of war Elihu B. Root justified Cuba's exclusion from the peace talks by appealing to the conventions of international law. “I assume,” Root wrote in his annual report, “that all acquisition of territory under this treaty was the exercise of a power which belonged to the United States, because it was a nation, and for that reason was endowed with the powers essential to national life.”
In the face of international law, GarcÃa's faith in American support for Cuban independence appears, in retrospect, quaint. Spain's former colonies were “subject to the complete sovereignty” of the United States, Root continued; the United States was “controlled by no legal limitations except those which may be found in the treaty of cession” between the United States and Spain. America's new possessions
had “no right to [be] treated as states, or to [be] treated as the territories previously held by the United States have been treated.” Cubans possessed certain “moral rights,” Root acknowledged, among them, the right to be treated “in accordance with the underlying principles of justice and freedom which we have declared in our Constitution.”
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In justifying the U.S. treatment of Cuba, Root reached back to arguments developed over the course of the preceding century regarding Native Americans. As early as 1834, U.S. Supreme Court chief justice John Marshall referred to American Indians, once considered independent nations with whom the United States negotiated treaties, as “pupils” and “wards” of the state. A succession of Supreme Court cases throughout the second half of the nineteenth century confirmed Indians' dependent status, ultimately re-creating tribes as colonial subjects beneath the sovereignty of the United States.
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Like Native American nations before them, Cubans found it difficult to square the U.S. commitment to justice and freedom with the fact of American domination. “There is so much natural anger and grief throughout the island,” Máximo Gómez noted in his diary in January 1899, “that the people haven't really been able to celebrate the triumph of the end of their former rulers' power.” Gómez thought the U.S. military occupation “too high a price to pay for [America's] spontaneous intervention in the war we waged against Spain for freedom and independence.” The occupation was “dangerous for the country, mortifying the public spirit and hindering organization in all the branches that, from the outset, should provide solid foundations of the future republic, when everything was entirely the work of all the inhabitants of the island, without distinction of nationality.”
American officials dismissed Cuban calls for immediate independence as irrational. Gómez wondered what could be “more rational and fair” than that the owner of a house “be the one to live in it with his family and be the one who furnishes and decorates it as he likes and that he not be forced against his will and inclination to follow the norms and dictates imposed by his neighbor?” Cuba could never have true “moral peace” under a transitional government dominated by the Americans. Imposed by force, such peace was plainly “illegitimate and incompatible with the principles that the entire country has been upholding
for so long and in the defense of which half of its sons have given their lives and all of its wealth had been consumed.” U.S. bullying of Cuba was sure to extinguish “the last spark of goodwill” between the two peoples.
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Cuba's grief contrasted markedly with the triumphalism suffusing the United States as the war drew to a close. The defeat of Spain, the occupation of Cuba, and the annexation of Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines transformed the United States into a global power seemingly overnight. In the public response to these developments, familiar themes of commercial expansion, Manifest Destiny, and empire for liberty took on global dimensions.
“We have just emerged from a short, but momentous war,” the educator, editor, and now U.S. postmaster general Charles Emory Smith told an audience at the Chicago Peace Jubilee in October 1898. The war's “transcendent events have spanned the whole wide horizon of this world, and have unveiled a new destiny for this country.”
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The United States had “taken a new position in the great family of nations,” had “stepped out upon the broad stage of the world's action,” becoming one of its undeniable powers. Not only had the rest of the world learned something new about the young republic, but Americans were coming to appreciate themselves in a new way. War had united North and South, prairie and brownstone, in common cause to uphold the flag and promote a renewed sense of “our national possibilities and national greatness.”
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To Walter Hines Page, editor of the
Atlantic Monthly
, the U.S. victory over Spain promised to transform a century's talk about liberty and empire into a world historical project. Americans stood “face to face with the sort of problems that have grown up in the management of world-empires,” Page marveled. The only question was how Americans would react. Would they “be content with peaceful industry” and their increasingly “indoor life”? Or did there yet “lurk in us the adventurous spirit of our Anglo-Saxon forefathers?” With “no more great enterprises awaiting us at home,” it was only natural that Americans should “seek them abroad”ânot in wars of conquest, Page cautioned,
but in redeeming Anglo-American civilization from European decadence. American would open the Orient to Western principles and commerce, thus effecting “one of the greatest changes in human history.”
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Like Page, John Henry Barrows, president of Oberlin College, regarded the nation's new colonies as stepping-stones, which, by transporting American institutions to Asia, would thereby “unitize” the world. To be sure, U.S. interests would be served by the conquest of Asia; but so, too, would Asian and above all
human
interests. Commerce and liberty were but two sides of a coin whose universal allure would speed the U.S. “penetration” and “control” of West and East Indies alike. The twentieth century would be an American century, Barrows predicted, with U.S. scholars, missionaries, teachers, books, and businesses overrunning the world. But these were but the means to the next millennium and a still greater end: “an empire of peace” with “representatives of brotherly nations” cooperating in “the new parliament of man.”
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More than merely compatible, civil liberty, commerce, and American empire were ultimately indistinguishable, according to Chicago lawyer and businessman Franklin MacVeagh. In America, MacVeagh insisted, empire found its ideal vehicle: a free and restless workforce combined with unprecedented natural abundance; here, finally, were the sources of “universal relations between our nation and the whole of mankind.” The new century would see “no seas without American ships, and no ports without American goods carried there under our own flag.” Thoughts of America isolating itself had become outdated. The nation would be great, MacVeagh announced, and “greatness is interested in all related great things; greatness has relationships, responsibilities, duties, which are on the scale of its own proportions.” Greatness implied involvement “in the activities of all the world together.” Like Barrows, MacVeagh viewed America's new empire as the means to a universal end. The choice Americans confronted was not between colonies or no colonies; it was between peace or war, cooperation or conquest, civilization or chaos. The world need not fear. The nation would remain “the exemplar of free government, the hope of social progress, and the powerful friend of the oppressed.”
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All that was missing was God. John Ireland, archbishop of St. Paul, Minnesota, differed from his compatriots only in emphasis by describing the U.S. victory over Spain as “a momentous dispensation from the Master of Men.” According to Ireland, the war heralded the arrival of the universal nation to which “no world-interest” was “alien.” Our “spirit travels across the seas and mountain ranges to most distant continents and islands.” Territories, shipping, conquestâthese were but the instruments of democracy, liberty, and self-government. Where these ideals ruled, there America ruled; where they were “not held supreme, America has not reached.” Ireland confessed awe, even a certain trepidation, in contemplating the nation's new responsibility “to God and to humanity.” America, he warned, “thou failing, democracy and liberty will fail.”
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