Back at the bar, the game was still on, and Santiago’s Avispas were winning, 3–1. Faribundo was feeling no pain, and he wanted to buy me a drink. “Come on,” he said. “How about a cold Hatuey?” Oriente’s favorite beer is named for the Taino cacique who refused to go to any heaven with Spaniards in it.
Gracias, no.
“Then you must want rum!” Faribundo slapped his hand on the bar and shouted. His pal the bartender poured a rocks glass of lambent gold. The bottle looked expensive in a way that few things in Cuba do.
I felt terrible. Lo siento, Faribundo, y muchas gracias, pero … no tomo alcohol. “I’m sorry, but I don’t drink.”
It’s true. The problem might be my Irish genes—some of them belonging to Papa O’Brien, who lost plenty of debates with John Barleycorn before pledging abstinence in return for the survival of the woman he hit while driving drunk. Or the problem could be my character defects: the literature of Alcoholics Anonymous cites studies describing the typical drunk’s psyche as grandiose and oversensitive. Some alcoholics seem to be trying to regulate all that excess emotion with an all-purpose elixir, an exhilarating depressant. Maybe that’s me … or maybe I just liked it too much. For whatever reason, it had become apparent that if I wanted to stay upright, I had to put the bottle down. I hadn’t touched the stuff for years, and this was no time to renew our acquaintance, unless I wanted to spend the rest of this trip in whatever facility Cuba reserves for stumble-drunk foreigners.
¡¿Que?! “What?” Faribundo couldn’t believe his ears. “You don’t what?”
“I don’t drink alcohol.”
“That’s okay,” he said, giving his friend a look that said he knew how to handle the loony. “This isn’t ‘alcohol,’” he explained. “It’s rum.”
Faribundo held the glass out to me.
“I’m sorry. I don’t even drink rum.”
“Yeah,” he said, puffing up like a father about to lecture a lazy child, “but this isn’t ‘rum.’ It’s Cuban rum.” He stared into my eyes. “Rum … from … Cuba. Guillermo, these are the tears of God!”
At that, he and his pal started cackling, slapping hands, and sharing God’s tears. I was dismissed, my failure forgiven.
Everyone went back to watching the game, and soon we were all roaring to celebrate a jonron by the great J. C. Linares. Santiago’s Wasps were stinging Havana’s pride. The stands were stamping to a conga beat. An announcer reminded us that the game was dedicated to the Nineteenth Congress of the national Workers’ Central Union and to los Cinco Héroes secuestrados por el imperio, “the Five Heroes imprisoned by the empire.”
The Five Heroes, known Stateside as the Cuban Five, are Cuban intelligence agents who spied on Florida-based Cuban exile groups. They’ve been held in U.S. prisons since 1998. Their cell was part of a larger operation code-named la Red Avispa, which means—of all things—the Wasp Network. Their job was to report on terrorist or terror-supporting groups such as the Cuban-American National Foundation, Alpha 66, and the F4 Commandos. Some of the cell’s spies got menial jobs at the Key West Naval Air Station and reported on the base’s layout, structure, personnel, and flights.
Los Cinco also infiltrated Brothers to the Rescue, an organization founded in 1991 with the nonviolent mission of helping Cuban rafters arrive safely in Florida. In 1995, when changes in U.S. immigration policy discouraged rafters, the Brothers gave themselves a new mission: flying small planes into Cuban airspace and dropping anti-Castro leaflets.
The founder of Brothers to the Rescue, Santiago native José Basulto, is a CIA-trained counterrevolutionary, spy, and terrorist who boasts of having fired a boat-mounted cannon at a Havana-area hotel. Critics of the Brothers’ new mission observed that the easing of the rafter crisis had caused a drastic drop in donations. What was the point of flying into Cuban airspace, other than garnering publicity for Basulto’s organization—and needlessly heightening tensions in the Straits of Florida?
Little point, unless you see a connection between the Brothers’ provocative actions and the passage of the Helms-Burton Act.
The collapse of the Soviet Union inspired Congress to reexamine the embargo on Cuba. In 1992, the embargo was thirty years old, but rather than take the anniversary as an opportunity to lift the trade ban, Congress decided to make it much more severe.
The decision seemed counterintuitive. The Iron Curtain had just fallen because millions of Eastern Bloc citizens demanded freedoms and consumer goods they’d known only through Western engagement and trade. Now that the Soviets weren’t subsidizing the Cuban economy, surely there was no force for change more likely to succeed in democratizing Cuba than a sudden flood of glad-handing contact and almighty dollars. But that’s not how Congress saw it. In Congress’s collective opinion, since thirty years of tough sanctions had failed completely, this was the time to get tougher.
In 1992, Congress approved the Torricelli Act, named for sponsor Robert Torricelli, a Democratic representative from New Jersey. The Torricelli Act—officially, the Cuban Democracy Act—tightened the old, near-total blockade to eliminate a pernicious loophole allowing limited, licensed sale of food and medicine. The loophole’s original purpose had been to spare the United States embarrassing comparison to the Soviet Union, which denied West Berliners food and medicine in the infamous blockade of 1948–49. We didn’t want to look like the bad guy, but now that there was no bad guy—no Soviet Union—the good guy could get tough.
The Torricelli Act outlawed all trade in food and medicine, except for the OFAC-licensed delivery of humanitarian aid. It was signed into law by George H. W. Bush, who was doing everything he could in that election year to please Miami’s Cuban exile community. Two years earlier, he had even ordered the release of Orlando Bosch, a CIA-trained terrorist who admits responsibility for numerous attacks, assassinations, and bombings, including the 1976 destruction of Flight 455, a Cuban passenger plane flying from Barbados to Jamaica. The plane carried seventy-three people, including kids on the Cuban national fencing team; all were killed, and Bosch had declared, “All of Castro’s planes are warplanes.” He also participated in bombing campaigns in Miami and other U.S. cities, and was in violation of his parole for firing a bazooka at a Polish freighter in Florida. Despite protests from the Justice Department, which noted that Bosch “repeatedly expressed and demonstrated a willingness to cause indiscriminate injury and death,” then-President Bush simply set Bosch free.
Proponents of the Torricelli Act predicted that it would bring about the collapse of the Castro government within weeks.
Republicans regained control of Congress in 1994, and conservatives were eager to reinforce Torricelli’s failure. Helms-Burton—officially, the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (Libertad) Act—was sponsored by two powerful Republicans, Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina and Representative Dan Burton of Indiana. The bill called for a variety of anti-Castro measures, such as beaming TV propaganda at Cuba and increased support for dissident groups. It declared the United States’ commitment to fostering “a peaceful transition to a representative democracy and market economy in Cuba,” and prohibited recognition of any transitional government that included Fidel Castro or his brother Raúl.
But none of this was hardball enough for Burton and Helms. Since Torricelli had closed the last loophole on U.S. citizens’ trade with Cuba, the only thing left to forbid was … foreigners’ trade with Cuba.
The Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (Libertad) Act threatened non-U.S. companies with punishment for “trafficking in confiscated property claimed by United States nationals.” Any foreign company doing serious business with the Cuban government—such as the Spanish Meliá hotel chain—may well be making deals involving commercial real estate, equipment, facilities, or services once owned by U.S. businesses or by people who were or are now U.S. citizens. Helms-Burton calls any such involvement “trafficking,” and puts the power of the U.S. government behind the former owners’ suits, not only against Cuba, but also against those foreign entities. Foreign companies that “traffic” with Cuba could find their officers barred from entering the United States. The bill also calls on the president to persuade the United Nations to adopt the U.S. embargo and implement sanctions that would cut Cuba off from the entire world.
Helms-Burton further specified that the United States would not recognize any new Cuban government that didn’t compensate U.S.-certified claims against property confiscated by the Revolution. Not all property; specifically, all nonresidential property valued at more than fifty thousand dollars in 1959.
In other words, corporate assets.
Even many hard-core Republicans in the Miami Cuban community objected to this abandonment of ordinary people’s grievances in favor of big business interests. Such protests were predictably weak, however, in comparison to the conservative exiles’ ferocious approval of any measure intended to strike at Fidel.
Most of the United States’ allies and the international community objected to the bill’s bizarre claim of extraterritorial authority over other nations’ governments, citizens, and businesses. These objections only encouraged House Republicans, who pushed Helms-Burton through with ease.
The Senate was less welcoming, however, and the bill was successfully filibustered by key Democratic senators—a sure sign that even some Republican senators had strong doubts. As of late 1995, the Senate version had been stripped of the sections attempting to assert U.S. control over other nations. Even that version was tabled and seemed likely to be defeated in hearings scheduled for March 1996.
Then Brothers to the Rescue stepped up its campaign of well-publicized flights into Cuban airspace.
On February 23, 1995, a member of the group appeared in Havana and accused the Brothers of planning attacks on military bases and other Cuban targets to provoke trouble between Cuba and the United States. The former Brother pilot claimed not to have been a Cuban spy, but it was obvious that Cuba might know all about the Brothers’ plans, equipment, and routes. More ominously, Cuban authorities might believe that any Brothers plane could be carrying bombs.
The Brothers flew the next day anyway. On February 24, Cuban fighter jets shot down two unarmed Brothers to the Rescue planes in international airspace, killing four volunteers.
Shortly after the killings, Helms-Burton was reintroduced to the Senate with its most ambitious and internationally offensive provisions restored. It also incorporated a new section praising Brothers to the Rescue and condemning the Cuban aerial attack. Helms-Burton passed Senate muster on March 5 and was signed into law by President Clinton on March 12.
The new law declared that the Brothers had only been searching for rafters on February 24, which is hardly true; at least one Brothers plane deliberately entered Cuban airspace, where it couldn’t have offered rafters any aid. It is true that those planes were pursued into international airspace, where they had every right to be. The Cuban Air Force clearly identified them as civilian aircraft and shot them down anyway, without offering a chance to surrender. However one balanced its rights and wrongs, the shoot-down was a heart-wrenching story with the power to influence public policy.
In 1739, England’s Parliament was persuaded to escalate a trade rivalry into a war by appeals to avenge the mutilation of mariner Robert Jenkins. Jenkins had apparently been smuggling, in violation of a treaty that Englishmen regularly flouted. Spanish officer Julio León Fandiño boarded his ship off Havana and delivered summary justice, robbing and torturing Jenkins before slicing off his ear. The bold Spaniard allegedly ordered Jenkins, “Go, and tell your King that I will do the same, if he dares to do the same.” Jenkins testified before the House of Commons, with his ear—according to some accounts—on display in a jar of spirits. Despite its origins in smuggling and treaty-cheating, the War of Jenkins’ Ear was sold to Parliament as a defense of national honor and rights at sea. Unfortunately for England, the war was a series of disasters, climaxing in Admiral Vernon’s hesitation before El Morro and General Wentworth’s defeat by guerrillas and mosquitoes in the forests east of Santiago.
Some emotional appeals prevail, while others don’t. Senator Jesse Helms was notably immune to the travails of Americans infected with HIV and the suffering of people with AIDS. His 1987 amendment to the Supplemental Appropriations Act directed Ronald Reagan to bar people infected with HIV from entering the country for any purpose. Though health officials opposed the ban and Congress reformed immigration law in 1990, giving presidents the power to take HIV off the mandatory exclusion list, Helms orchestrated a nationwide campaign to keep George H. W. Bush from doing so. Until Barack Obama lifted the ban in 2009, the United States was the world’s only industrialized nation demonizing foreigners infected with HIV.
While the Brothers to the Rescue shoot-down caused Congress to accept the tightened blockade favored by angry Miami exiles, it didn’t change the international community’s opinion of the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (Libertad) Act. Mexico, Great Britain, and the European Union passed laws or resolutions declaring their citizens free from Helms-Burton’s presumption of extraterritorial reach and outlawing compliance.
Canada’s Parliament even considered a parody bill, the American Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (Loyalty) Act, proposing “to permit descendants of United Empire Loyalists who fled the land that later became the United States of America after the 1776 American Revolution to establish a claim to the property they or their ancestors owned … that was confiscated without compensation.” Millions of Canadians are descended from Loyalist refugees; the Stateside land and property they lost to theft and seizure could easily be worth billions now. Following Helms-Burton’s logic, the bill empowered Canada to keep traffickers in pre-1776 Loyalist assets from entering the country. It barred their spouses and kids, too. Canadian law-makers let the Loyalty Act die, but passed a law protecting their own people from Helms-Burton.
While Helms-Burton made it even harder for U.S. citizens to visit or trade with Cuba, Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush found it necessary to sign waivers that suspended most of the law’s extraterritorial provisions. The presidents wanted to maintain good relations with U.S. allies and trading partners, and there was considerable uncertainty as to whether those provisions were enforceable under international law.
Whatever its effect on Congress and commerce, the Brothers to the Rescue incident demonstrates the complexity of all things Cuban-American. Far from being a straightforward tragedy—bold humanitarians’ nonviolent protest, totalitarian government’s savage overreaction—it’s a mystery crisscrossed with too many suspects, motives, and clues. The courage and idealism of Brothers pilots, Basulto’s CIA connections, the push for Helms-Burton, alleged FBI informers among the Brothers, reports that the Brothers were planning to smuggle arms into Cuba: it’s hard to know what to believe about the organization’s actions and aims. Maybe some Brothers were playing a more complex game than others.
It’s equally difficult to assess Cuba’s reaction. There’s no excuse for using deadly force on peaceful civilians, but did Cubans have reason to fear that the Brothers were no longer noncombatants?
In the mid-1970s, Senator Frank Church chaired the U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. The Church Committee uncovered a shameful history of CIA violations of civil rights in the United States and violent attacks on other nations, including an embarrassing litany of attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro using exploding cigars, poisoned pens, and Mafia snipers. The dark comedy of these fumbled murders overshadowed revelations of CIA operatives’ attacks on ordinary Cubans, a campaign of terror dating back to the beginning of Castro’s Revolution.
The CIA began arming saboteurs and counterrevolutionary guerrillas just months after Castro took power on January 1, 1959. Its depredations may have been intended as a stick motivating Cuba to take the carrot offered by the State Department, but sabotage and insurgency gave los barbudos little confidence in Washington’s promises of cooperation and compromise. By year’s end, CIA agents including future Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt were busily recruiting an invasion force composed of anti-Castro Cuban exiles. Based in the Miami area, the fifteen-hundred-man force was given infantry, tank, and air war training at military bases in the United States and Panama and at secret CIA facilities in Guatemala.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower formally approved the invasion plan in March 1960, and John. F. Kennedy ordered a modified version to be put into action in April 1961. In the run-up to the actual landing, Cuban exiles and other CIA agents intensified their bombing and arson campaign, and CIA-supplied aircraft attacked Cuban airfields. The invasion force sailed in CIA-chartered ships registered in Liberia, but were escorted by a U.S. Navy task force including aircraft carriers, destroyers, and submarines. On April 17, thirteen hundred Cuban exiles landed on a beach called Playa Girón in the Bahía de Cochinos on Cuba’s southern coast. Norteamericano accounts would refer to the bahía as the Bay of Pigs, mistranslating cochinos, which can mean “pig” but also is a common name for a fish, Sufflamen verres; a better translation for the invasion area is Triggerfish Bay.
The invasion was a spectacular failure. The exiles were defeated in the first twenty-four hours, but held out another couple of days before surrendering. Their airplanes inflicted heavy casualties on Cuban soldiers, militia, and civilians, and their obvious dependence on U.S. military support further discredited their cause. The unprovoked invasion by what was essentially a U.S. armada united most Cubans behind the Revolution, which Castro no longer shied away from describing as “Marxist-Leninist.” Cuba denounced the United States as a deceitful aggressor, and much of the international community sympathized.
Kennedy blamed the CIA, and heads rolled, including that of CIA director Allen Dulles. The U.S. military, the CIA, the Kennedy administration, and the surviving CIA-trained Cuban exiles began a complex exchange of recriminations, grudges, and shifts of allegiance that affected policy and politics throughout the Vietnam War, in the composition of the Nixon White House’s Watergate burglary team, and in the 2000 Florida vote recounts, and that still haunts JFK assassination theorists.
The only thing most of these Stateside groups could agree on was the need to get tougher with Cuba.
Public opinion ruled out a straightforward U.S. invasion. The Joint Chiefs of Staff would not accept this limitation, and in 1962 forwarded to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara a plan they called called Operation Northwoods, designed “to develop a Cuban ‘provocation’ as justification for positive U.S. military action.”
Hidden for decades, the declassified Northwoods documents are deeply disturbing. The proposals include a “series of well-coordinated incidents to take place in and around” the U.S. base at Guantánamo. “Friendly Cubans” could be dressed in Cuban uniforms and smuggled “‘over the fence’ to stage attacks on base.” The Navy could capture “Cuban (friendly) saboteurs inside the base,” or have friendlies start fake riots at the base’s main gate. From these bloodless scams, the Chiefs escalate to much more sinister ideas. “A ‘Remember the Maine’ incident could be arranged in several forms,” they suggest, starting with the simplest: “We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantánamo Bay and blame Cuba …
“We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities, and even in Washington …
“We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated) …
“A ‘Cuban-based, Castro-supported’ filibuster could be simulated against a neighboring Caribbean nation …
“It is possible to create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner en route from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama, or Venezuela.”
Kennedy and McNamara told the Joint Chiefs that direct, conventional military assault on Cuba was out of the question, so Operation Northwoods was shelved and the CIA was empowered to escalate its covert war. Over the next two decades, CIA operatives and CIA-supplied rebels and saboteurs strafed and bombed Cuban cities from the air, made war on Cuban troops and militia, torched crops and dynamited factories, attacked hotels, refineries, and coastal villages, and blew up civilian aircraft. The CIA even subcontracted assassination work to the Mafia but still never managed to kill Fidel Castro.
More important, the United States’ sustained campaign of terror failed to persuade Cuba to submit to yanqui dominion. In its earliest, most intense phase, during and just after the Triggerfish Bay invasion, the terror offensive convinced Castro that a full-scale military invasion could come at any time. Only a Soviet-supplied nuclear deterrent could prevent it. The secret war on Cuba helped bring on the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962—the closest mankind has come to nuclear war.
Amazingly, even that near-miss at Armageddon didn’t persuade the United States to stop attacking Cuba. Our agents, presently employed or ostensibly freelance, never stopped the harassment, the sabotage, the assassination attempts, and the killings. Our government has directed, sponsored, subsidized, or turned a blind eye to decades of mayhem. As of a 2001 report to the United Nations, Cuba blames the United States for nearly thirty-five hundred deaths due to terrorism.
Far from weakening the Castro regime, our fifty-plus years of war on the Revolution have given Cuba’s armed forces and police a compelling raison d’être. The terrorism we condone has persuaded even the most Castro-weary Cubans that the U.S. government knows only two ways to behave toward Cuba: control it or attack it.
Our long, low-intensity war against Cuba has been such a godsend to the regime, it’s enough to make one wonder. Either we’re too dumb or too crazy or too politically cowardly to notice that our actions aren’t achieving the desired results, or … maybe these are the desired results.
Maybe Fidel is useful to U.S. politicians in the same way that U.S. politicians are useful to Fidel.
There’s little hard evidence to support such fears.
But Cuba does spy on us.
And we catch Cuba’s spies. That’s why that day’s opening game was dedicated to los Cinco Héroes, “the Five Heroes” of the Wasp Network.
Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, and René González: los Cinco are almost as much a part of today’s official Cuban iconography as Che and Camilo. The typical los Cinco billboard frames each of the intelligence officers’ cheerful faces in a star, una estrella—not in a Hollywood sense, it seems, but as in, “Wishing on a …” Every cubano who reads, listens to the radio, or watches television is familiar with each of the prisoners’ life stories, family members, heartaches, and medical problems, as well as every detail of their trials, drastic sentences, and ongoing appeals.
The youngest of them was thirty-two when they were arrested in 1998, the oldest forty-two. Their current sentences range from fifteen years to two life terms plus fifteen years. The first of them to be released—assuming that the United States releases any of them—not a certainty, since 9/11—will be the oldest, René González, a pilot, flight instructor, and veteran of Cuba’s expeditionary force in Angola. He’ll be fifty-seven when he’s due to be released in 2013. Like two other estrellas, he has not been allowed visits from his wife or daughter. Two others of the five are Angola vets. A couple have diplomatic training. One’s an economist, another an airfield construction engineer who helped expand the runways at Santiago’s Antonio Maceo International Airport. The engineer, Antonio Guerrero, was born in Miami. He’s a painter and a poet; one of his books is titled Décimas for Antonio Maceo; another, Confidential Poems. He’s in for life plus ten.
These prisoners were never convicted of actual spying. In fact, the how and why of the Five’s crimes, capture, and trial are issues as divisive, internationally, as Helms-Burton.
Cuba maintains that los Cinco weren’t spying on the United States, but on the Cuban exile terrorists who freely stockpile arms and train and stage missions from the United States. Los Cinco were sent, Cuba says, in response to an escalating campaign of infiltrations and attacks made by Miami-based groups such as Alpha 66, which in 1993 held a press conference to announce that it considered any tourist visiting Cuba an enemy and a legitimate target in its ongoing war. Cuba says it shared intelligence gathered by los Cinco with the United States, hoping for cooperation against terrorism, but that the FBI only used the shared intel to crack down on the Wasp Network.
However it happened, there’s no question that the Wasp Network was rolled up, while numerous organizations and individuals in the Greater Miami area continue to boast of their past and projected terror attacks on Cuba.
The United States accused los Cinco of espionage, but only in the vaguest possible terms. At their trial, which began in November 2000, the only charges pressed on all five defendants were “general conspiracy” and “conspiracy to act as a nonregistered foreign agent.”
General conspiracy boils down to making an agreement to do something illegal. Not committing any acts, just conspiring. Three of the agents also were accused of conspiracy to commit espionage: an agreement to spy at some time in the future. Not actual spying. Three were charged with falsifying their identities.
There were no breaches of national security systems to steal nuclear secrets. No bombs planted in post office parking lots. There was no scouting of invasion beaches. To judge by the charges, there was no spying at all.
But their trial was conducted in a Miami courthouse besieged by the same angry exile community that had, just months before, made an emotional horror show out of returning little Elián González to his father. They demonstrated noisily outside the courthouse every day of the seven-month trial. The prosecution eliminated all jurors who failed to express hostility toward the Cuban government. Local TV cameras followed the jurors outside the courtroom, making sure their license plates were known to anyone who might care to discuss the case with them.
And the prosecution charged one of the five—Gerardo Hernández, the senior agent—with conspiracy to commit murder in the Brothers to the Rescue shoot-down.
Despite its crowd appeal, the murder-conspiracy charge seemed shaky. The Cuban government could have learned the Brothers’ plans from various sources, including that defecting Brothers pilot. The order to shoot was given by a Cuban Air Force commander. The planes were shot down in international airspace. As the judge instructed the jury, Hernández could only be convicted if “the killing occurred within the special maritime or territorial jurisdiction of the United States.” No jurisdiction, no crime—at least, none that the United States could prosecute.
Before the trial was over, the prosecution submitted an Emergency Petition for Writ of Prohibition to a higher court, asking that the trial judge be prohibited from instructing jurors on jurisdiction. Exposing the jury to such instructions would, in the prosecution’s words, present “an insurmountable hurdle … and will likely, result in the failure of the prosecution on this count.”
The petition was denied. The Miami jury heard the instructions—and ignored them.
Los Cinco were found guilty on every charge. The sentences—delivered after a months-long delay, in a new, post-9/11 political reality—were astonishingly harsh, unprecedented in relation to the vague espionage charges and minimal evidence. Three of the five received life sentences for conspiracy to commit espionage, the only life sentences in U.S. history for “spies” who had not been accused of handling any classified documents, trespassing on any restricted sites, or passing on any state secrets whatsoever.
The trial was such a mess that in 2005 a panel of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals tossed the whole thing out and ordered a new trial somewhere far from Miami. The government appealed and won a reversal of the new-trial, new-venue ruling, but in 2008 another Eleventh Circuit appeals panel called for new sentences in several of the verdicts, noting that no “top-secret information was gathered or transmitted” in the case. The appeals process went all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case. Some of their sentences were recently, slightly reduced, but most are in for a long time to come.
Nations we count among our best friends and allies have petitioned us to retry the case or reconsider the sentences. The Five have received awards in absentia from human rights organizations; a U.N. investigative panel has labeled their detention “arbitrary”; and a group of Nobel Prize winners, including Desmond Tutu, has asked the United States to let los Cinco go home.
Many far more serious espionage cases, including some tense Cold War and post–Soviet Union confrontations, have ended in prisoner swaps or no-strings deportations. No matter what precedents one considers, it’s clear that we’ve treated the Cuban Five with a severity unjustified by their alleged crimes, the evidence against them, or the alleged consequences of their acts. This case isn’t about justice or espionage; it’s about the George W. Bush administration’s indebtedness to Miami Cuban conservatives for their crucial aid in blocking the 2000 election.
Back on the bus, the women of the chorus and their supporters seemed more than satisfied with the day’s tour: El Cobre’s feminine mystique, lunch on the sun-dazzled cliffs, El Morro’s grim legends, their initiation into the cult of handmade tabacs. The afternoon was waning as we rolled back toward Santiago. Faribundo snoozed in the seat behind Luis, who hadn’t touched a drop and drove with don’t-wake-the-baby care. Indeed, even uptight Marina seemed about to drop off, and about half the passengers were slumped one way or another, cheeks resting on lovers’ shoulders or smushed into smoked window glass.
I was ready but unwilling to fade away. All that clambering and staring out to sea had helped me visualize Sampson’s cordon of ships, the Merrimac’s run, Reina Mercedes’s cover behind La Socapa, and Cervera’s predicament. Maneuvers and dilemmas I’d been reading about for years made real, solid sense now, leaving me with just one unanswerable question: How could Sampson have imagined that the Army could clamber up those cliffs and take El Morro by storm?
I’ve never been a soldier, but I’m always trying to imagine how soldiers read landscapes. It’s a mental game I started playing as a kid, when I began to share my father’s passion for military history. It was my father’s copy of The West Point Atlas of American Wars, Volume I, 1689–1900, that first set me to wondering about Papa O’Brien’s war. The old atlas wasn’t intended for a general audience. It was a textbook produced by the academy’s Department of Military Art and Engineering, designed—as President Eisenhower noted in a letter that served as the book’s foreword—to instruct and inspire “the minds of those whose profession it will be to defend the frontiers of the Free World against all enemies.”
Of the volume’s 158 maps, 138 are devoted to the Civil War, six to the Revolutionary War, four to the Mexican War, three to the War of 1812, and three to all the colonial conflicts up through the French and Indian War. The Spanish-American War claims the final four map pages. Four doesn’t seem quite enough for a war that sent ships scurrying through all four hemispheres, with land and sea battles on opposite sides of the globe. Yet it was, for all its world-circling scope, a tiny war.
In 1775, shortly after the Battle of Bunker Hill, George Washington took command of sixteen thousand militiamen besieging Boston—several hundred more soldiers than General William Shafter commanded in the 1898 invasion of Cuba. Civil War armies dwarfed Shafter’s command: Grant set off for the Wilderness on May 4, 1864, in the company of the Army of the Potomac’s 119,000 troops; as the Union’s super-general, he was in overall command of 550,000 men.
The Spanish-American War was war in miniature, but only because it didn’t last. The West Point Atlas frowns on the whole affair, declaring that the success of the hastily improvised, chaotic Santiago expedition “can only be regarded as fortuitous.” The Spanish had overwhelming forces available in Oriente, and if they’d only concentrated them at Santiago, “it is likely that Shafter’s V Corps—the better part of the Regular Army—would have been destroyed.” The United States would have had to start over again, training, arming, and sending off some of “the almost 275,000 men mobilized through public pressure.”
The West Point Atlas packs a lot of feeling into its highly compressed narratives. The authors rarely speak ill of the dead, but they make their preferences clear. The Atlas finds space to praise John Parker, a West Point lieutenant whose daring and skill saved the day at San Juan Hill. By contrast, the Atlas never once mentions a certain former assistant secretary of the Navy who commanded a famous volunteer cavalry regiment in that same battle.
The Atlas observes that the Navy “called for assistance from the Army,” which arrived off Santiago on June 20. In conference with Shafter, the authors note, “Sampson urged a landing on the eastern side of the harbor mouth and the storming of the fortifications—up a steep, 230-foot bluff.”
Now that I’d seen the cliff up close, I shared the Atlas authors’ understated amazement. How could Sampson imagine that the fort would fall to amphibious assault? His plan required open boats crammed with helpless riflemen to brave the shelling he believed would sink his battleships. The only landing points were narrow rock ledges swept by point-blank cannon fire; any survivors would climb a precipice that could be defended just by dropping stones on their heads. What was the admiral thinking?
Perhaps Sampson’s scheme indicated a lot less about the ostensible conflict—Sampson’s ships versus El Morro’s guns—than it did about much broader concerns.
In baseball, when a pitcher deliberately throws wide of the strike zone, it’s called a pitchout. The catcher steps way off to one side of the plate, and catches enough balls to walk the batter. The trick robs a formidable batter of the chance to hit. It’s a pretense of pitching, but it’s really about what has already happened: the runners on base, the score, the batter on deck. It doesn’t matter if the pitcher “loses” by giving up a walk. The real game is much bigger than this at-bat.
Sampson wanted the infantry to win his proposed assault of El Morro, but he must have known that a slaughterous defeat was far from unlikely. Some other concern must have justified the risk. Likewise, he was willing to risk Hobson and the Merrimac crew in a Rube Goldberg attempt to plug the channel; risk a passive naval strategy that might condemn thousands of soldiers to die of disease in a summer land campaign. Those lives didn’t matter enough to risk a single U.S. battleship or cruiser. The decision to blockade Santiago suggests that the war, the real war, was never about avenging the Maine or ending Cuba’s suffering or sinking Spain’s navy. Vengeance, chivalry, and fear were pitchout throws. The real game was about ambition.
To become a world power, the United States needed a world-class navy. To justify the expense of a world-class navy, expansionists and admirals needed a quick, guaranteed-winnable war. A war with Spain would win us island bases in two oceans, access to the China coast, and secure approaches to a future Central American canal. For such prizes, the empire boosters would gamble with taxpayer treasure and blood—but not with their few modern warships. The Navy’s construction program, invigorated by Assistant Secretary Roosevelt and fast-tracked by the Fifty-Million Bill, would eventually produce a surplus of big battleships, but in 1898, every one of the fleet’s few capital ships was precious.
It didn’t matter how long it took for Cervera to come out, how many Rough Riders or Cuban mambises died of bullets or fevers, how many civilians starved to death in reconcentración camps during the blockade. These considerations had nothing to do with the United States’ true war aim. Sampson was under orders not to take the slightest unnecessary risk with his major vessels. To leaders intent on directing the United States to a new destiny, time and money, soldiers and civilians were expendable. The battleships Texas, Oregon, Iowa, Indiana, and Massachusetts were irreplaceable.
The U.S. Navy would not lose a single ship of any size in the war—unless, of course, you count the Maine. But all of its big new ships would be needed to claim the United States’ postwar global empire.