We prefer to see our Cuba converted into a mound of ashes, and the cadavers of its sons reduced to charred remains, before consenting to the continued rule over this unhappy land by Spanish domination.
[After 1868] everything was rubble, smoke, pain; and at every step a tomb was erected. In that revolution . . . [we] learned to die and kill; patriotism and self-esteem were defined along precise lines. And a sentiment of dignity took hold within the heart of the country.
On January 1, 1899, the true Cuban people [el verdadero pueblo cubano] had no worries. . . . Everything was joy and brotherhood. If it had been possible for human beings to show their heart it would have revealed a people who yearned to see their idolized Cuba free and independent.
The war ended in the summer of 1898. Only then was it possible to begin to take in the magnitude of the devastation wrought by Cuban determination to achieve independence: the culmination of nearly fifty years of protracted warfare and intermittent insurrection, marked by recurring cycles of destruction and disruption, decades of political repression alternating with economic depression interspersed with years of destitution and dispersal.
Peace found a people prostrate. The war had been especially cruel in its conduct and frightful in its consequences. Spaniards were ruthless in their defense of colonial rule, and Cubans were relentless in their demand for national sovereignty. Contending forces laid siege to the largesse of the land, preying upon the bounty of its resources, consuming cultivation and confiscating livestock as a matter of need and destroying the rest as a method of war. The wartime abundance of displacement and destruction found its inevitable consequences in the peacetime prevalence of impoverishment and indigence.
It had been total war, a campaign in which the practice of pillage and plunder was adopted as a cost-effective method of warfare, in which the systematic destruction of property and production became an acceptable if not the preferable means each side used in the effort to defeat the other. What the Cubans spared, the Spanish destroyed—and vice versa. Total, too, in that the war produced havoc in almost all the 1,000 towns and villages across the island, where the distinction between civilians and combatants lost any useful meaning, where neutrality was suspect and security was often obtained only behind one or the other battle line, rarely ever outside them, and never between them.
The losses were incalculable, the suffering was unimaginable. Powerfully destructive forces were let loose upon the land, sometimes as a matter of policy, planned and deliberate; at other times as a matter of happenstance, improvised and random. These were perhaps differences without distinction, for the results were almost always the same: chaos in the lives of the affected men, women, and children, lives shattered and forever changed.
Few Cubans in 1898 found home as they remembered it—if they found home at all. Many of the things that they had previously used as reference points in their lives had disappeared, or no longer worked. Objects of memories no longer existed, familiar landmarks had vanished, old boundaries had disappeared: not dissimilar to the experience of Iznaga in Luis Felipe Rodríguez’s short story “El despojo” (1928), who returns home after the war to discover that he was “a stranger in his own land.”1
The cause of Cuba Libre had been sustained with the support of Cubans of all classes, men and women, black and white. Many had abandoned their businesses, shops, and farms; others had discontinued their educations and disrupted their careers. Vast numbers of Cubans lost their principal sources of income and their only means of livelihood. Many succumbed to indebtedness from which they never recovered. They willingly had sacrificed personal assets and family fortunes, great and small, in pursuit of sovereign nationhood. Thousands of families lost the savings of a lifetime and property accumulated over several lifetimes: businesses, professional offices, retail shops, farms, and homes—almost everything of worth and anything of value—possessions and property lost to tax collectors or creditors, or to punitive confiscations or the ravages of war. They were without homes, without money, without jobs, without influence.2
Cubans of means plunged into vertiginous downward mobility afterward. Pawnshops flourished as families liquidated what remained of their personal property and household possessions in one last desperate effort to stave off indigence. “There are many families in Santiago who 18 months ago were in comfortable circumstances,” the U.S. consul wrote from Santiago de Cuba in 1897, “and who to-day are paupers, selling the remaining pieces of furniture in their homes in order to buy bread, with no future before them but starvation, or a bare subsistence on charity.”3 Horacio Ferrer returned home to Unión de Reyes after the war to find his family in conditions of utter destitution. “Some members of the family had died,” he recalled years later; “others had sought refuges abroad. My aging mother and invalid sister had suffered the vicissitudes of nearly four years of war. In the process of diminishing resources, they had to sell what little they had. First, living room and dining room furniture; later jewelry, lamps, bedroom furniture, clothing, and all kinds of utensils.”4
Want and need extended fully across the island, with neither relief nor remedy in sight. Life assumed a nightmarish quality as a war-weary people went about the task of reconstituting their households and resuming their lives in the midst of desolation and disarray. Cubans contemplated the landscape of postwar Cuba with numb incredulity, unable to perceive order in the world. Everything seemed to have disintegrated into unrecognizable fragments. They returned to ruin, to incalculable material losses and irreplaceable human ones. Hundreds of thousands of men and women faced the prospect of permanent displacement and destitution, with no place to return to and nowhere to depart for. “Entire towns and villages remain destroyed,” Avelino Sanjenís wrote at the time, “and vast numbers of families have disappeared.”5
Some of the most prominent military and political leaders of the insurrection had come from families of means, often with property and professions, with plans and prospects. After the war, they had nothing. Captain Carlos Muecke despaired over the condition of his comrades, whose “property whether in town or in the country has been destroyed and they must begin anew. . . . [They] have sacrificed all—[their] houses, even their clothes are gone. . . . Without money they cannot rebuild their houses, restock their farms, refit their offices, or go to work.”6 Many officers and soldiers of the Liberation Army found themselves in various conditions of indigence, without resources, without representation, often far from home, and no way to get back and often nothing to go back to. “I left the army like everyone else,” recalled José Isabel Herrera. “We were mustered out of service with $75 to return to our homes, most of which had disappeared. We were not even given passage back home from one part of the island to the other, for there were men from Oriente in Pinar del Río, and vice versa. Many men, upon returning to their towns, found that their families had disappeared.”7
It was not at all clear how things would get right again, or how Cubans would find the ways and means to reclaim what had been formerly theirs and make a place for themselves in the nation for which they had sacrificed so much to claim as their own. The war had shattered life as it was previously known, and never again would conditions return to the way they used to be. No one was quite certain how, or where, or with what, to begin anew. Few could see a way ahead, and those who did look ahead did so with fear and foreboding. In Sombras eternas (1919), novelist Raimundo Cabrera portrayed the conditions of his protagonist in poignant terms: “Without the old home in which he had established his household and managed to put aside modest savings after twenty years of work, his farm destroyed and in debt, he was now obliged at forty-five years of age to start all over again with the difficult task of making a living, and feeling very old.”8
Households had been shattered and families scattered, communities had dispersed and towns had disappeared. Where towns and villages once stood, there remained only scattered piles of rubble stone and charred wood. The countryside remained all but totally despoiled of its productive capabilities. What previously had been vistas of lush farming zones were now scenes of scorched earth and singed brush. The farms were untended, the fields unworked, the villages uninhabited. The pastures were vacant and the orchards barren. Abandoned houses in the interior were roofless and in ruins. “Our countryside had been transformed into sites of melancholia and sadness,” recalled Santiago Rey. “The fields of cultivation were devastated; homes were reduced to charred remains. . . . Where once existed tranquil hamlets and peaceful households only desolation and ruin remained.”9 Farmers had few incentives to return to the land. For many, it was easier to move on than it was to go back. Many had no choice. Across the island, men, women, and children, the uprooted and downtrodden, often as entire households and extended families, foraged for a living, picking through rubble in the countryside and begging for alms in the cities. Novelist Pedro Pablo Martín gave first-person narration to the circumstances of his times: “The destruction of the sugar industry ruined the principal means of subsistence of many families and hunger reared its ugly face in our fertile fields. . . . We saw entire towns and villages, once filled with life and commerce, succumb to the ferocity of the war. Those towns and villages that in other times were the well-spring of wealth were reduced to mounds of rubble. . . . What horrible scenes! What a painful scene the countryside of Cuba presented.”10
Travelers to the island that first autumn of peace were uniformly appalled by the magnitude of devastation. “I saw neither a house, nor a cow, calf, sheep or goat, and only two chickens,” one journalist reported from Camagüey. “The country is wilderness,” a “desert,” wrote another traveler from Las Villas.11 One rail passenger in 1897 reported frightful scenes en route to Matanzas from Havana: “The country outside the military posts was practically depopulated. Every house had been burned, banana trees cut down, cane fields swept with fire, and everything in the shape of food destroyed. It was as fair a landscape as mortal eyes ever looked upon, but I did not see a sign of life, except an occasional vulture or buzzard sailing through the air. The country was wrapped in the stillness of death and the silence of desolation.”12
Conditions were desperate at both ends of the island. In Pinar del Río, General Fitzhugh Lee described conditions in late 1898 in the western province in bleak terms:
Business of all sorts was suspended. Agricultural operations had ceased; large sugar estates with their enormous and expensive machinery were destroyed; houses burned; stock driven off for consumption by the Spanish troops, or killed. There was scarcely an ox left to pull a plow, had there been a plow left. Not a pig had been left in the pen, or a hen to lay an egg for the poor destitute people who still held on to life, most of them sick, weary, and weak. Miles and miles of country uninhabited by either the human race or domestic animals were visible to the eye on every side. The great fertile island of Cuba in some places resembled an ash pile, in others the dreary desert.13
Inspector General James McLeary toured the eastern province at about the same time and reported equally desperate conditions in Oriente:
Many of the people appear to be almost destitute of clothing. . . . Taken as a whole, the people who came under my observation cannot be regarded as prosperous; commerce in the towns being entirely dead, and agriculture in the country being in a state of suspended animation. There does not appear ever to have been any such thing as manufacturers. . . . There are scarcely any work animals to be found along the route, a very few horses and still fewer mules and oxen, none of which can be obtained at any price. . . . Houses and fences are burned, fields abandoned and suffered to grow up in guinea grass, and the orchards which formerly covered it, are entirely gone. All the fruit tress in this section have been destroyed.14
“There does not exist a single place on the island of Cuba,” Fermín Valdés-Domínguez recorded in his field diary, “not even in the most remote recesses of its forests, that does not possess a holy memory [un recuerdo sagrado] of the long and cruel struggle for independence.”15
Property damage could be assessed and in many instances verified and validated. But material losses were only part of the havoc wrought by the war. What could never be fully ascertained, and certainly never fully comprehended, was the suffering, the despair, the heartache. “Anyone who lived in those times,” historian Ramiro Guerra y Sánchez wrote years later—and he did indeed live through those times—“lived through a period of chaos and tragedy.” He remembered vividly: “We were a people in ruin; a little country, in misery, starving. Our only source of strength was our hope, combined with a firm and energetic determination to endure and live on.”16 Traveler Robert Porter described a people “left enfeebled by deprivation and too weak to take up their occupations,” inhabitants “huddled half starved in miserable huts near the towns and cities,” a “hungry and discouraged native population [standing] listlessly on the streets and in the public places,” where at “each station the railroad trains were boarded by half-starving women or children begging for bread or coppers.”17
That many survived in sound body did not always mean they were of sound mind. Vast numbers bore their pain in their memories, in sadness and sorrow, haunted by the loss of persons and places that had once given meaning to their lives, learning to reconcile themselves to the persistence of life with the permanence of loss. They carried on with broken hearts and inconsolable grief: the many tens of thousands of widows and orphans, parents who lost children, children who lost parents, the countless numbers who lost entire families, the maimed, the infirmed, the aged, penniless, homeless, and jobless—all who could not even remotely begin to imagine how to put their lives together again. “Starving children are on the streets and how it made my heart ache,” wrote Mrs. W. A. Candler from Havana in December 1898. “There are thousands left wandering about the streets begging for bread. They are [so] emaciated that their hands as they stretch them out to you look like bird claws and their nakedness is embarrassing. There are tiny little ones whose parents are all dead and they are left to fight life’s battle alone and unprotected.”18 Julián Sánchez remembered his hometown of San José de los Ramos at war’s end, where “there was not one household that did not mourn the loss of a loved one.”19 Clara Barton wrote of early relief efforts: “The crowds of gaunt hunger that clustered about the door—the streets far back filled with half-clad, eager masses of humanity, waiting, watching, for the little packages, for the morsels of food that was to interpose between them and the death that threatened them. The gatherings were orderly, patient, respectful, but pitiful beyond description.”20 Few indeed were the numbers of Cubans who had not suffered in direct and very personal ways.
Only when the war ended, in the summer of 1898, could survivors begin to comprehend that they had lived through a population disaster of frightful proportions. The total number of Cubans to have perished in the course of the nineteenth-century wars for independence is largely a matter of estimates, but the estimates are staggering. Some 200,000 men, women, and children are believed to have perished during the Ten Years War (1868–78). Perhaps as many as 400,000 Cubans lost their lives during the War for Independence (1895–98). Tens of thousands of combatants died in the course of the campaigns: instant death in battle, the slow death of injuries and illness. Hundreds of thousands of noncombatants perished as a result of the conditions of war, especially in the Spanish reconcentration camps of 1896–97; men, women, and children died of disease, illness, and malnutrition. Soldiers and civilians, as active participants or suspected sympathizers, were killed in action or executed by firing squads; they perished in prisons on the island and in penal colonies in Africa. A population of nearly 1.8 million before 1895 was reduced to less than 1.5 million by 1899, a net loss of nearly 20 percent of the population.21
The postwar demographics confirmed the population calamity in other ways. An estimated 150,000 orphans remained to be cared for. Female heads of households were the salient demographic condition of the postwar years. Cuba had the highest proportion of widowed-to-married persons in the Western Hemisphere: 34.6 per 100. There was one widow or widower for every three married persons. The proportion of widowed women was higher: 51.2 per 100: one widow for every two wives.
It was not only that hundreds of thousands died. Tens of thousands of babies were never born. Fertility rates plunged during the war years by nearly 50 percent. The combined wartime effects of high infant mortality rates and low fertility levels resulted in an appalling disruption of the population structure of postwar Cuba. The census of 1899 revealed that children under five years of age made up only 8 percent of the total population. In no other country in the world for which data existed in 1899 was the proportion of children under the age of five as low as in Cuba.
Vast numbers of Cubans had sacrificed family and fortune in the pursuit of a nation of their own. The experience shaped the people they became. Much of the destruction—not all, to be sure—was purposeful, self-inflicted, the method Cubans chose to wage war to secure their independence. The liberation project produced in its own time the legend and logic with which intransigence was sustained. Too many had sacrificed too much for too long to fail. The only acceptable alternative to independence was death, and indeed independencia o muerte served as a commandment of the Cuban cause. “They want independence even though the land is left razed and sterile,” Spanish captain general Arsenio Martínez Campos reported tersely to authorities in Madrid.22 Cubans burned their own cities and destroyed their own properties. “The patria before everything,” exhorted Antonio Maceo; “forward, for the homeland and the glory of sacrificing everything!”23 These were the sentiments of Fermín Valdés-Domínguez. “Everything, absolutely everything, has to be offered to the Patria,” he insisted. And at another point: “I should offer everything to the patria, and I offered everything to the Patria with the valor of a Cuban.”24
The logic of sacrifice was carried to its inexorable conclusion. The moral of the “everything-for-Cuba” exhortation extended to and included Cuba itself: Cuba would be free or it would perish. “We are committed to the ruin of this beautiful country before humbling ourselves to the despotic Spanish government,” proclaimed Agustín Ruiz in 1870, adding: “Cuba Libre even if it is in ashes is the ideal of all Cubans.”25 Provisional President Salvador Cisneros Betancourt reiterated the Cuban intent to “purify the atmosphere with fire and leave nothing left standing from San Antonio to Maisí [that is, from one end of the island to the other]. All this we prefer rather than to be ruled by Spain.”26 Cubans demanded independence, Manuel Sanguily proclaimed, and were prepared “to see our land transformed into an immense tomb, covered in ashes, bespattered with stains of blood.” He continued:
We have one unshakeable purpose: to fight [for independence], to fight without rest, to fight without pause, . . . to fight until there are no more Cubans capable of clutching a rifle or until the last Cuban is buried under the rubble of the fires set by our indignation and ire. [To fight against] the adventurers who have the temerity to cross the ocean to oppose the indomitable will of a people whose martyrs and heroes have risen unanimously to cry: no more, Spain! No more pillage! No more outrages! . . . We accept everything, we have accepted everything, we will [continue] to accept everything—death in battle, death on the gallows, death due to hunger and disease, exile, prison, assassination, ruin of our wealth, the devastation of our land—all the misery, all the torment: but all those calamities heaped on us are nothing in comparison with the affliction, the atrocity, and the shame of remaining a wretched vassal of the Spanish crown.27
“In the end,” predicted Fermín Valdés-Domínguez, “[Spain] will not be able to defeat us—even if in the hour of our victory there is nothing left but a pile of rubble upon which to raise our avenging combat flag.”28
The cause of Cuba Libre was borne over the course of five decades, over the life span of three generations of men and women, with the expectation of a better life for all Cubans, to bring into existence a sovereign nation entrusted with the defense of Cuban well-being as the principal reason for its creation. The Cuban goal was to constitute a sovereign nation united in a republic exercising authority over an independent island. Successive generations of Cubans through the course of the nineteenth century had sacrificed much to make Cuba free, to make Cuba for Cubans. They had paid dearly for the promise of a new nation that was to have fulfilled their aspirations and realized their expectations. They accepted the necessity of self-abnegation as the means of self-government with equanimity, and with equal serenity they contemplated the prospects of self-immolation as the necessary price of self-determination. Cuba for Cubans was the expectation that lifted Cuban spirits amid the ruin and desolation when the war ended in the summer of 1898.