There are a terrible lot of lies going around the world,
and the worst of it is that half of them are true.
Churchill was to become a man of such importance that there grew up around the trip, to some extent in Great Britain and the United States, but, unsurprisingly, mostly in Cuba, a series of stories about his presence on the island that are still recounted but are far from always true. It is worth thinking about some of them, especially those that are likely to have some truth to them and can therefore tell us something of value about the story, and finally jettisoning others that are clearly untrue.
The most firmly anchored and most widespread of these myths is that Churchill began to smoke Havana cigars during his trip to Cuba in 1895. Doubtless because of how it figures in his mysticism and image, this myth is powerful and generalised as fact to an amazing degree. That cigar, constantly in his hand or his mouth, even in the most dangerous moments, taken with him when he visited troops at the front or discussed the future of the planet with the great, became closely linked to the image of eventual victory in the Second World War, of continuity when things looked their bleakest. Barry Singer argues convincingly that, by then, ‘He had long understood the image it could project, the sense of authority and of calm, the sense of confidence. He employed it as a tool.’1 If Britain had to face the U-boat challenge, then all very well, but Churchill had his cigars, a statement of the most obvious kind that Britain still ruled the waves and that imports would get through. And it all started, so the myth has it, with that trip to Cuba when he was 20.
The reality, however, is much more mundane. Many young and not so young gentlemen had by the 1890s in a prosperous Great Britain, and in many other countries, begun to smoke Cuban cigars. Their cost, and their distant and rather mysterious source of origin, contributed to a sense that they were what an aristocrat should smoke. The expression used by the hostess at the end of the seated portion of a proper dinner, to the effect that it was time to have a chat among the ladies and another, quite different one, among the men, made this clear. It was of course the celebrated ‘Shall we leave the gentlemen to their cigars?’ The gentlemen would then remain at the dinner table talking politics, economics and other subjects of the day, and the ladies would retire to the drawing room to talk about other things. This tradition was well in fashion long before 1895.
Most young officers, and especially aristocratic cavalry officers, would have known this tradition from a quite youthful age. Cigarette smoking was of course also de rigueur among them but cigars almost as much. At a regimental dinner, as continued to be the practice until the very recent anti-smoking days, after ‘The Queen’, that is, the moment when officers drink the ‘Loyal Toast’ to the sovereign, cigars (and/or snuff) were passed and normally a good number of officers would smoke them. Indeed, for some, the quality of the cigars was part of the reputation for hospitality of a regiment and, as we have seen in Churchill’s own words, that quality, in order to be high, meant Cuban cigars, the famed ‘Havanas’, would have to be on offer.
Certainly, Churchill smoked cigarettes heavily at Sandhurst and even towards the end of his time at Harrow, and continued to do so in the 4th Hussars. He most certainly already knew and appreciated cigars long before he saw the shores of Cuba or a cigar factory in Havana. Such was his pleasure obtained from smoking them that his father opened an account for him at J.J. Fox Cigar Shop in St James’s, still a neighbourhood associated with fine cigars and where Lord Randolph already had an account. This did not mean that Lord Randolph approved. He and Winston’s mother tried to get him to stop smoking or at least cut down his consumption of cigars and cigarettes.2 But his father still accepted that it was Winston’s choice and so opened the account. Since Lord Randolph died in January 1895, and had been inactive for some time before his death, this must have occurred at the latest the previous year. According to the best study of Churchill at dinner tables, Churchill ‘fell in love with cigars in 1895’, and it is likely that the love affair blossomed in Cuba, although he never says so, but he had already come to like them before his trip. Larry Arnn suggests that it all began at Sandhurst. In any case, he was smitten by them and the affection was life-long. Manchester states:
His chief playthings were his seven-inch cigars, of the Romeo y Julieta and La Aroma de Cuba brands. Most of the time they were unlit; he liked to chew and suck them anyway, and when an end grew soggy, he would fashion mouthpieces – ‘bellybandos’ he called them – from paper and glue.3
In any case he knew Cuban cigars well before his visit to Cuba in 1895 and while doubtless he smoked some of the best there, and at much more interesting prices than in London, the habit of smoking them was already in place. He could have certainly visited some cigar factories during his time in Cuba, but essentially only in Havana where the time was his, and perhaps he did so in those last two days in the city before the start of his trip home. The famous Partagas cigar, whose factory was only a couple of hundred metres from the hotel, may well have received a visit from him, enjoying as it did immense prestige among the cognoscenti of the cigar world, even though it did not become his favourite. Thus the myth of the young Churchill in some sense discovering cigars on the island must be discarded, although the role of the trip in the development of his affection for them is virtually certain.
But the place of the cigar in Churchill mythology most certainly may not. He started his time in Cuba on that first morning of the stay, 20 November 1895, smoking cigars with Barnes at the Hotel Inglaterra. And he finished his stay carting off plenty of cigars for the new home at 35a. Cigars were part of his time in Cuba, though far from the most important one. Yet who could deny that Cuban cigars became afterwards part of his trademark, his image, his public persona.
Especially in wartime, and perhaps mostly as prime minister, his face, almost always portrayed with a Havana cigar, expressed both zeal and determination. Perhaps it was just the originality of the stance and posture he adopted. For whatever reason, the Cuban cigar was and has remained part and parcel of the public image of Winston Churchill throughout the world, and Cuba, capitalist or otherwise, has always revelled in taking a prominent part in that image of a great man.4
Among the most far-fetched of myths about Churchill’s activities on the island in 1895 is that he had lunch with Máximo Gómez, the Cuban insurgent generalissimo, during his time with the Suárez Valdés column in late November and early December 1895. In its various versions the myth is irresistible to some. The greatest commander in Cuban history only a few hundred metres or a couple of kilometres away from the greatest man of the twentieth century, over several days in that period. Why indeed would they not have met?
The assertion is so preposterous that it is stupefying to see how the myth continues to have any credence at all. A virtually unknown second-lieutenant, in a foreign army but accompanying the Spanish Army only by courtesy and because it is in Spanish national interests that he do so, would not have been much of a priority for a commander of a Cuban invasion force finally breaking through to the rich western provinces, and concerned that his forces be able to continue their movements towards Havana.
Churchill, on the other hand, while doubtless he would have been interested, if only as a budding war correspondent, to speak to the commander of the insurgency, could not have known how to begin to bring such an encounter about. He was with a Spanish Army column whose job was to intercept and if possible throw back the invasion force, not to arrange conversations for its accompanying journalist with the enemy commander. There was no possible way the two men could have corresponded. And there is no evidence at all that Gómez knew Churchill was with the column or even, had he known, that he would have understood who he was and what significance his being there had at the moment or would have later on.
The story goes that General Gómez visited the village of Arroyo Blanco, and while there had lunch with the young Churchill and was even interviewed by him for his newspaper. The place where this amazing event took place is sometimes said to have been the manse of the local priest, which, as it happens, abuts onto the main building of the Spanish garrison. The latter structure is today certainly the most impressive one in the village, while the former manse currently houses the village museum. The priest, a Catalan who had taken holy orders in Havana in 1853, was Father Benito Juan Mariano Viladevall y Vilaseca, always referred to as ‘Father Benito’ in Arroyo Blanco. He had never had a parish other than that of Arroyo Blanco, a situation probably assisted by his having fathered children in the village for well over half a century. It should be said that the clergyman did act as a go-between for pro-insurgents and government forces on more than one occasion, but not on this one; it was simply an impossibility.
There is not the slightest evidence of any kind that any such meeting ever took place or that anyone would have been mad enough to try to bring it off. But other, almost as wild, rumours were flying at the time including that Churchill had in fact decided to go over to the rebels, who now had his sympathies, and that, when he tried to do so, Suárez Valdés caught him and prevented it. Laborantes, people living in Spanish-controlled towns and cities but pro-independence in attitude, and working quietly for that end in supply and information collecting roles, were apparently spreading such word around in order to suggest that the Spanish were manipulating what Churchill was seeing, feeling and writing. As a friend he had met in Havana wrote to him on 10 December from that city:
The Cuban propaganda promptly started the story that you had cut your visit short on account of a row with Suarez Valdes. They gave out that your sympathies went over to the rebels – that you wished to leave the Spanish Army and join Gomez, that Valdes would not allow you to do so, and, in consequence, you returned to England. When it was known that you had received the Rioja Cruz [sic], and that in your interviews the rebels received no aid or comfort, great was the wrath of the laborantes.5
There could be some link between this equally far-fetched story and that of the meeting with Gómez. In any case, as we have seen, Churchill remained if anything rather pro-Spanish throughout although he nuanced this a year later. It is also true that, given the origin and nature of the priest in question, the central place of the manse in village life and its location right next to headquarters, Churchill may well have crossed its threshold during the nearly two days, according to his column commander that, from the afternoon of 28 November until the early morning of 30 November, he spent in the village. The Spanish would certainly not have wanted him or Barnes about the place all the time, especially when they were analysing the rapidly deteriorating strategic situation, or when they were giving orders in an attempt to salvage things. The priest would have known very well that the British officers were there and, as a relatively cultured individual in a backwater town, he may have thought of meeting and befriending this aristocrat and his interesting companion while they were there. Such company was not common in Arroyo Blanco although there were of course Spanish figures of note, given the village’s important role in the colony’s defence as a result of its heliograph and being the main base closest to the Trocha on the western side.
Churchill, like Drummond Wolff, retained a soft spot for Spain for the rest of his life. He was particularly fond of King Alfonso XIII, the king who would be deposed when the monarchy fell in 1921. He had many occasions to play polo with the King over the years and indeed was in Madrid to do just that in 1914, the spring before war broke out, when he was awarded his second medal for his Cuban experience, some nineteen years after the event, receiving the Cuba campaign medal 1895–98 directly from the hands of the King.
Churchill included the King in his book Great Contemporaries, written in 1929 but not published until 1937, and thought the monarch had been shabbily treated not only by his country but by observers of Spanish events elsewhere. An interesting footnote is that when Suárez Valdés, still in the fight in Cuba, was wounded in June 1896, Churchill wrote with his best wishes and complimenting him for his soldierly qualities. There is no record of a reply but it is telling that, even at that late date, Suárez Valdés promptly handed over the letter to the government-controlled press in Havana who published a front-page article on it, implying strongly the support Churchill felt due to Spain in the Cuban war.6
This brings other myths to mind, and perhaps these are easier to imagine. One is the suggestion, dear to some villagers, that Churchill might have dined, stayed the night or bathed in the manse during his stay, and even perhaps on the eve of his birthday. There is a move afoot to name the museum after the village’s most famous visitor and a recent book launch there has focused village attention on the Churchill visit more than has been usual.7
Cuban weather, topography and vegetation have always had an impact on military uniforms. The country can be dry, rainy, hot, dusty and humid and it can change from one state to another with surprising speed. Rain showers come up in very little time for much of the year and winds can pick up quickly from calm to near hurricane force. In addition, those fierce tropical storms dominate thinking about the weather for almost six months a year.
In addition to the climate, but related to it, is the vegetation. The infamous marabú and other cutting weeds abound and make transiting open country a much more complicated process than meets the eye on many occasions.8 Dense woods are common and in Churchill’s time, before much of the huge clearing of woods was done to make way for the great sugar estates, they were much more common still. Winston constantly makes reference to these forests and copses in his account of his travels.
These are not conditions where formal uniforms thrive. Spain, in common with most European countries, had placed its army in relatively bright uniforms since the institution of modern armies at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries. In general, as is well known, the Austrians were dressed in white, the French in white or later in blue, the Prussians in another shade of blue and the Russians in green. Known everywhere were the British regulars, dressed in their own famous scarlet tunics. But this is a simplification. Artillery in the Austrian Army, for example, wore brown, its cavalry wore any of a number of colours, rifle regiments wore green, and so on. The armies of Europe therefore went to war with a bewildering mix of coloured uniforms often leading to considerable confusion on the battlefield.
While Madrid initially put its regulars in full dress uniforms for duty in the Americas, it allowed many changes to slip into dress regulations over the years and especially as the nineteenth century drew on. In the Caribbean Basin in particular, there was a need to find sensible clothing for fighting and campaigning, and even just for garrisoning posts in the conditions prevailing in the area. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Spanish had come up with a rayadillo combination of cotton and drill which dressed the army from then on in its many conflicts locally. While working in combination with the French in Mexico, the Spanish retained European dress overall, but this was not the case in Cuba or Santo Domingo.
Full dress uniforms did exist for some units called upon to do public duties in the big cities, and for senior officers at headquarters. But in general the uniform in which Spanish troops garrisoned, campaigned, fought, paraded, and lived was light blue with white stripes, though it appeared to be a light grey of the rayadillo (a variant was developed for the mambí troops who fought them). Headdress, though it varied in some cavalry and artillery regiments, was in general a wide-brimmed floppy hat with the essential purpose of keeping off the sun’s ferocious rays. Mostly the rebels were dressed in whatever they could find, and often in very little more than to cover themselves with decency, and, as Churchill noted soon after arrival, used only a removable badge as a designation in lieu of a proper uniform.9
Thus the Cuban scene was not linked to a tradition of grand uniforms. There was a general knowledge, however, of the fact that when the British took Havana in 1762, and occupied it for some eleven months, they had been splendidly dressed in scarlet. In Cuba, even to this day, one can refer to the British occupation as ‘el tiempo del mamey’(the time of the mamey), after the fruit that is bright red inside and so characteristic of the island. In a way similar to the rebellion of the thirteen American colonies of 1775, where the British troops were called ‘lobster-backs’, so in Cuba they were called ‘mameyes’. The British Army was then and now associated with this bright scarlet tunic even though formal uniforms other than the line infantry can be of a wide variety of colours.
It is perhaps not surprising then that many accounts of Churchill in Cuba have him dressed in the grand uniform of a nineteenth-century hussar, which would have included plumes, sabretache, pelouse and all the rest.10 The fact is that units of the British Army of the late nineteenth century posted to tropical zones were already issued an appropriate uniform based on the khaki colour that served so well in the field in India. The heat and harsh conditions of that colony made such a uniform essential even though the British, and the French and Portuguese, had been there in less practical wear for many years before. The infantry and the cavalry were all in khaki, though units could have very small regimental ‘quiffs’ without posing any difficulties over all. For example, hussar regiments carried on with the tradition of wearing chain mail on their shoulders, a practice dating back centuries protecting that part of the body from sword cuts.
With the 4th Hussars having been told off for India in August 1895, they would have been in the process of acquiring uniforms for some three months before sailing; Churchill indeed had bought all his uniforms by the time of his Cuban adventure. He was no fool and would have had good advice on conditions of soldiering in hot climates. He may have carried full dress uniform with him in case he had to make any formal calls, or had to take part in a parade at some time. In fact, in the drawing of him done in Cuba for the publication Crónicas de la Guerra he is in formal uniform. That may be because he was posing in such dress or the drawing may have been done from a photo of him. But he most certainly would not have planned to go on campaign in such uncomfortable, impractical and hot garb. He would have given a very different description of his travails on the road if he had been dressed in a uniform designed for war in northern Europe. The heavy cloth, relatively high fur busby headdress, entirely impractical dolman and furred pelisse worn over the left shoulder and the rest of the hussar uniform would have ended his opportunities for mobility and comfort and surely attracted even more mambí fire.11
The officer’s uniform depicted in the centre of the 1895 print of an officer and other ranks of the 4th Hussars is certainly the one he would have worn in Cuba. It was designed for such conditions of weather and terrain, and was the one Churchill would in any case have had for service in India. And, despite its distinctive pith helmet, it was not likely to attract enemy fire in anything like the way his own European full dress would have done. But the reality does not make for as romantic a story as having him riding around the Cuban countryside in the full dress of a British hussar. That is, however, what happened and the more striking version of the story remains again, alas, only attractive myth.
At least one of the myths coming out of the visit, it must be said, came from the young Winston’s own pen. Even before he arrived in the war zone, he wrote in one of the most curious passages of his journalistic writing home about the tea or attacks by incendiaries on the sugar cane fields in order to make the harvest and milling of the cane virtually impossible:
The cane is ripe, fit for cutting, and very combustible. It was explained to me that a piece of phosphorus, coated with wax, would be the probable instrument of the incendiaries. This little pill is fastened to the tail of the Cuban grass snake, a common and inoffensive creature, which is then set loose. The sun melts the wax and ignites the phosphorus, and the result is conflagration, without any possible clue to its authorship. No amount of military protection or patrolling can guard against this form of outrage, and the general impression is that the planters will not grind.12
There is simply no basis at all for such a yarn. The snake in question, the inoffensive and common small serpent, as Churchill says, is doubtless the jubo, a grass snake, sometimes called the jubito, in the diminutive form, because it is so innocuous. It is easily frightened, although it has shaken more than one city dweller with its viper-like expanded head when alarmed. There are many studies of the incendiary campaign in both major wars, and an enormous amount on the guerrilla war and the ways in which it was conducted. And there is simply no mention, in even the most detailed account, of any such means of waging war, or even of consideration being given to such an option.
The obstacles to such a weapon being used are so numerous, and the lack of the slightest evidence of this idea ever being put forward much less employed, that we can simply discount entirely the story.13 Churchill was still in Cienfuegos, after a relatively easy trip by rail down from Havana to that safe and secure base of Spain on the south coast of the island. It seems highly likely that some Cuban, perhaps an old Cuban hand at the Hotel Inglaterra or in one of the trains, was having Churchill on. Winston was of course very young and inexperienced on such matters and had seen nothing really yet of the war. The temptation for someone to spin him a yarn, rather in the playful way of locals to any visitor, may have been too strong to resist. Cubans in particular were and are prone to inventing stories as a joke to tease one another and especially newly arrived foreigners. In any case, there was no such use made of the snake in question and he could not have been further from the mark. The tea was conducted overwhelmingly by horsemen, mounted or temporarily dismounted, carrying the tea (torch) that gave this tactic its name. It was not conducted by anyone else nor need it have been, for the rebels only attacked when their numbers and the element of surprise made sure that defence was impossible by the small garrisons left about the place to deter them.
His wider analysis of the impact of the torching campaign was of course bang on. He was right in assessing it as the main weapon the rebels had and one against which the Spanish were almost entirely powerless. And this plays strongly into this story. The measures which the Spanish military authorities were obliged to take, in particular the dispersal of their forces in penny packets around the whole of the rich areas at risk, improved the chances for insurgent successes.
1. See Barry Singer, Churchill Style: The Art of Being Winston Churchill, New York, Abrams, 2012, p. 167.
2. Ibid., p. 30.
3. For the quote of Churchill scholar Larry Arnn, see Manchester, The Last Lion, p. 36. See Cita Stelzer, Dinner with Churchill: Policy-Making at the Dinner Table, London, Short Books, 2011. pp. 206–8.
4. See Celia Sandys’ description of her meeting with Fidel Castro in Chasing Churchill, pp. 43–4.
5. CHAR 1/14/9 Letter Mr M. Shaw Bowers to WSC, 10 December 1895. See also Sarmiento Ramírez, El Ingenio del mambí, p. 116.
6. Diario de la Marina, 17 June 1896, p. 1., column 2.
7. The main myth, and the surrounding elements, are discussed in Méndez Vargas, Arroyo Blanco, especially pp. 34–5, 96–8, the book launched in the village in 2014.
8. Even today the marabú plant, a hefty bush of a dense wood that defies any clearance except the most tedious and labour intensive, is a problem on the island. Shortly after taking formal office in 2008, President Raúl Castro actually called the scourge Cuba’s ‘Number One Enemy’, such is its effect on agricultural development.
9. See Sarmiento Ramírez, El Ingenio del mambí, especially p. 29.
10. See, for example, D’Este, Warlord, p. 43.
11. Richard Holmes, Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket, London, HarperCollins, 2002, especially p. 226.
12. BRDW, Churchill, ‘Letters from the Front’, 1 The Daily Graphic, 13 December 1895.
13. Jiménez González, in his full treatment of the phenomenon of the tea, does not even mention the snake in question nor does any other source consulted on this subject including innumerable Cuban peasants who laughed at the idea. See Jiménez González, Historia militar de Cuba, pp. 270–5, and Jiménez González, Ángel et al., Historia militar de Cuba, Vol. 5, Havana, Editorial Verde Olivo, 2011, pp. 270–75, in its full discussion of the incendiary campaign, mentions no such means although it does address many other ways of conducting the incendiary warfare of the day.