“Filibustering was constant and scarcely discouraged by the people of the United States”: Trumbull White, Our War with Spain for Cuba’s Freedom (Chicago: Monarch, 1898). Among the few great books on filibusterismo, Rodrigo Lazo’s Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), takes a literary approach that brings adventurers and controversies to life.
In the cosmology of West African people enslaved in colonial Cuba, “the dead ones” are spirits, “people no longer living in a physical body”: Jualynne E. Dodson, Sacred Spaces and Religious Traditions in Oriente Cuba (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008). This superb book approaches Oriente’s supernatural reality with respect and historic insight.
… eastern Cuba is a living folk tradition, a constant revival of songs first sung by grandfathers and great-great grandfathers: Ned Sublette, Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2007). Sublette helps even nonmusicians understand what makes Oriente’s music move and sing like no other.
“Stringy, sweetly smiling, in a blue shirt and black pants, he watches over each and every one of his soldiers”: José Martí, Selected Writings, trans. Esther Allen (New York: Penguin, 2002).
The archetypal Cuban war story may be “The Murdered Puppy” … by the Argentina-born Cuban soldier, Che Guevara: Ernesto Che Guevara, Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War (Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2006).
The Spanish started the New World’s first Euro-style mining operation here within sixteen years of Santiago’s founding, in 1515: The city celebrates its anniversaries in reference to a July 25, 1515, ceremony by which the conquistador Diego Velasquez formally named and founded Santiago, the second settlement in Cuba. However, numerous histories insist the town got its start in 1514, before the official ceremony.
The miracle marked the holy spot, and Our Lady of Charity and Remedies of Cobre have been working miracles in her shrine there ever since: María Elena Díaz, The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves of El Cobre: Negotiating Freedom in Colonial Cuba, 1670–1780 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000). This is history at its finest, doing the work of reclaiming lost worlds. Reconstructing the history of El Cobre, Díaz shows us how the poor and powerless managed to reclaim dignity and self-determination in the holocaust of early colonial Cuba.
In any case, from historical and cultural points of view, it’s probably most important to understand that, one way or another, the cobreros created a purely Cuban saint, a patron saint of Africans and Indians: Sources for this discussion of Our Lady of Cobre’s identity include Díaz, above, Father Bartolome de las Casas’s Apologetic History of the Indies, and Irene A. Wright, “Our Lady of Charity,” Hispanic American Historical Review 5 (1922).
The development of santería and other traditions enabled Africans to weave their sustaining beliefs through the traumatic experience of slavery as integral elements of the blended black and white and Indian cultures that became Cuba: It’s hard to find books on syncretistic religions that are neither arid academic studies nor credulous devotionals. In addition to Dodson, above, readers may enjoy the overview provided by Migene González-Wippler, Santería: The Religion (St. Paul, Minn.: Llewellyn Publications, 1999).
The fact that so many of the poor were swarthy, red, yellow or black just underscored the scientific basis of white superiority: Julius W. Pratt, Expansionists of 1898: The Acquisition of Hawaii and the Spanish Islands (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1936).
We sold much of the fleet, barely maintaining an eccentric assortment of decrepit steam-sail vessels and rust-scabbed ironclads: Japan’s first ironclad was the steam-and-wind-powered ram Kotetsu, which had started its seagoing life as the Confederate States ship Stonewall. Built on commission in France and launched too late to affect the Civil War, Stonewall was in Havana Bay when her captain got word of the Confederate surrender. He sold her to the Spanish, who sold her to the Union, which sold her to the modernizing Meiji government in 1869.
Nations would go on believing in the decisive potency of battleships long after they’d been rendered obsolete by submarines, aircraft carriers, and planes: Having wasted anxious decades and irreplaceable billions in the race for naval superiority that culminated in World War I, Great Britain and Germany finally discovered the same paradoxical truth that led to stalemate at Santiago. Neither side dared use its supposedly decisive dreadnought battleships to decide anything. Submarines, mines, torpedoes, and nascent airpower made them too vulnerable. The two navies’ sole fleet action, the Battle of Jutland (May 31–June 1, 1916), was brought on in part by the difficulty of explaining why their nations had paid so much for so long for weapons so useless. The fleets sallied, met, inflicted proportionally minor but terrifying losses, and parted as fast as honor would allow. The dreadnoughts went back to their bases and were irrelevant to the rest of the war.
“In winter we sometimes varied these walks by kicking a foot-ball in an empty lot, or, on the rare occasions when there was enough snow, by trying a couple of sets of skis or snow-skates, which had been sent me from Canada”: Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1900).
Their cell was part of a larger operation code-named la Red Avispa, which means—of all things—the Wasp Network: It’s hard not to wonder at the significance of this code name. Does it imply that Santiago fans have more clout in Cuban intelligence than Havana rooters? Or could it mean that, as so often in Cuban history, people from Oriente are doing the dirty work while the capital calls the shots?
Their job was to report on terrorist or terror-supporting groups such as the Cuban-American National Foundation, Alpha 66, and the F4 Commandos: It’s easy to sympathize with Cubans who chose not to participate in the Revolution’s turn to the left and took refuge in the United States. Still, no matter how legitimate their grievances, we call folks who declare their own private wars on other countries or systems and conspire in violent attacks “terrorists.” Alpha 66, for example, states publicly that its purpose is to make commando raids on Cuba. It has been illegal to conduct such activities in the United States for more than two hundred years. That these terrorist groups are allowed to collect arms, raise funds, and train in post-9/11 America is remarkable.
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: Coming from Jesse Helms, the senator who blocked the United States’ payment of its U.N. dues, this hopeless proposal must be appreciated as a ploy to make the United Nations look still worse to angry conservatives. Or perhaps it was an example of Helms’s sense of humor: In 1993 he amused himself by whistling “Dixie” to Carol Moseley-Braun, the first black woman senator.
Until Barack Obama lifted the ban in 2009, the United States was the world’s only industrialized nation demonizing foreigners infected with HIV: Helms also was a vehement opponent of the 1990 Ryan White Care Act, a program to provide health care and support for people living with HIV/AIDS, despite the bill’s association with White, a hemophiliac diagnosed with AIDS at age thirteen. Though White contracted HIV from blood transfusions, Helms persisted in opposing any intervention in the nation’s HIV/AIDS epidemic on the grounds that people with AIDS were suffering as punishment for their “deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct.”
Presidents and senators and representatives can always point across the Straits of Florida and earn cheap strong-on-defense points by accusing Cuba of drug smuggling, terrorism, and plotting invasion: While it’s impossible to prove a negative, common sense makes it hard to believe perennial allegations that Cuba is smuggling drugs, sponsoring terrorist attacks on America, or plotting attacks against South Florida.
Cuba looks nothing like the hemisphere’s big drug-smuggling nations. Drug-dealing nations are everything Cuba is not: fractured, violent, unstable, easily penetrable by any thug or foreign agency with a big bribery budget. If Cuba were an important player in the narco game, there’d be no keeping it a secret. (Do we have to guess whether Mexico or Colombia have drug problems?) And why would any drug cartel partner with Cuba? If you want to get drugs to the world’s biggest market—that’s us—would you transship through the only nation on the planet under U.S. embargo? Finally, Fidel’s no Manuel Noriega. He’s not dumb enough to give the United States a convenient excuse for invasion.
It’s amazing that U.S. leaders can still scare voters with talk of Cuban-sponsored terrorism or Cuban military attacks on U.S. territory. The United States didn’t hesitate to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. Even if Cuba were the least bit inclined to hurt the United States, it would be suicidal to do so. Why do we worry about Cuba attacking the United States? A guilty conscience is never at peace.
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: There’s a lot wrong with Cuba, but life for most folks there is certainly no worse than life for most folks in Honduras or El Salvador or Colombia. And if a minor child from one of those countries were brought here illegally by a mother who died on the journey, would anyone in the United States try to prevent the child’s father—a respectable man with a better-than-average job—from bringing his son back home? Some Miami Cubans attempted to block the return of Elián González to his father to express their hatred for Fidel Castro and his regime.
And the sugar-purchasing guarantee was, in actuality, a contract between the U.S. government and the cartel of U.S. corporations taking over and transforming the Cuban sugar industry: For an overview of this process see Louis A. Pérez Jr., Cuba Between Empires, 1878–1902 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983) and Oscar Zanetti and Alejandro García, Sugar and Railroads: A Cuban History, 1837–1959, trans. Franklin W. Knight and Mary Todd (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
Under País’s leadership, Revolutionary Action merged with the new M-26-7; País became the national movimiento’s director of urban operations: Yolanda Portuondo, La Clandestinidad Tuvo Un Nombre: David (Havana: Editora Política, 1988).
A biography by fellow resistance fighter Renán Ricardo Rodriguez, El Héroe del Silencio (“Hero of Silence”), describes Oscar as taciturno, tranquilo, y meditativo, “melancholy, calm, and thoughtful,” but fierce in his opposition to injustice: Renán Ricardo Rodriguez, El Héroe del Silencio (Havana: Editora Política, 1986).
One holguinera, the poet and clandestine warrior Lalita Curberlo Barberán, writes that “Omar” brought the network back to life with “something warm and human … with sweetness, with fondness, and we’d obey”: Lalita Curberlo Barberán, El Tiempo y el Recuerdo (Holguin, Cuba: Ediciones Holguin, 1994).
“It is my duty,” he wrote, “inasmuch as I realize it and have the spirit to fulfill it, to prevent, by the independence of Cuba, the United States from spreading over the West Indies and falling, with [Cuba’s] added weight, upon other lands of Our America”: “Our America,” Nuestra America, is the title of Martí’s seminal essay identifying Latin American countries’ common causes and concerns, especially in relation to the economic power of the United States.
Until Philip S. Foner reprinted it in his iconoclastically titled two-volume 1972 work The Spanish-Cuban-American War and the Birth of American Imperialism, the letter had vanished from U.S. history: Philip Foner, The Spanish-Cuban-American War and the Birth of American Imperialism, 1895–1902 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972).
The majority were policemen and soldiers who had taken an active part in the torture and murder of revolutionaries, dissidents, and innocents, but the trials were so swift and the sentences so harsh as to shock Stateside onlookers: Reports of these summary executions carry a faint echo of the Virginius killings. It becomes a shout when we read that Raúl Castro, whose forces occupied Santiago, ordered the execution of more than seventy government soldiers, machine-gunned into a bulldozed trench. The Virginius martyrs and Batista’s men were arguably fighting on different sides of Cuba’s long struggle for self-determination, but quick-and-dirty justice is never just.
In Cuba: A Global Studies Handbook, Ted Henken describes MININT as “a large, bureaucratic organization with a wide range of security-related responsibilities, not unlike the newly formed, controversial and quite unwieldy U.S. Department of Homeland Security”: Ted Henken, Cuba: A Global Studies Handbook (Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 2008).
“Human bones were scattered about”: Peggy and Harold Samuels, Remembering the Maine (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995).
“Of course, I read about the USS Maine, and I recognized it immediately by the absence of a bow, which was cut away mechanically and not naturally broken away,” their crew chief, Russian-born Canadian marine engineer Paulina Zelitsky, told the Miami Herald: Elinor J. Brecher, “Scientists Stumble Upon Sunken Maine,” Miami Herald, December 10, 2000.
A maverick officer of the World War II generation who is generally regarded as the father of the nuclear Navy, Rickover reviewed Sigsbee’s career …: H.G. Rickover, How the Battleship Maine Was Destroyed (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Navy, 1976).
“A half-hour later, Newton was dead”: Charles Dwight Sigsbee’s “Personal Narrative of ‘Maine’” was serialized in Century Magazine (November and December 1898, January 1899).
As with the Maine, there’s no telling what really happened to La Coubre: If no other explanations emerge in the meantime, the next opportunity to solve the mystery of La Coubre won’t come until March 4, 2110. According to the Cuban government newspaper Granma, the company that owned the ship at the time of the explosion, Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, placed a file on the La Coubre investigation in an archive in Le Havre with the unusual restriction that its contents not be published for 150 years.
According to the U.S. War Department’s Report of the Census of Cuba, 1899, by 1862, of 1,396,530 Cubans, 56.8 percent were white and 43.2 percent black: Report on the Census of Cuba, 1899, (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1900).
Nearly one in thirty-nine hundred died: For readers unfamiliar with the Angola War, Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), may be the best single-volume overview of the various sides’ strategic and economic concerns.