IRRATIONAL AS THE Granma landing may have seemed to outsiders, it had plenty of precedent for Cubans: Fidel and his comrades knew that they were part of a glorious tradition of near-suicidal revolts. Even the choice of landing spot was rich with tragic meaning. While the official center of Cuba was the capital city Havana, famed for its rococo mansions, raunchy nightclubs, and Mob-run casinos, the cradle of rebellion had always been the Oriente, at the opposite end of the slender, 780-mile-long island, whose shape has often been compared to a crocodile at rest. As remote in spirit from Havana as the Appalachians are from New York City, the East had always been Cuba’s wildest, poorest, and most racially diverse region. It was derided by rich habaneros as a provincial backwater, but it was here that the greatest dramas of Cuban history were played out. In the Oriente’s inaccessible mountains and beaches, the last Taíno Indians had been nearly exterminated by the conquistadors. Its vast sugar plantations were where bloody slave uprisings erupted and armed revolts against the Spanish began—and failed. It was in the Oriente that illustrious Cuban heroes were martyred, and here that the greatest humiliations during the War of Independence—referred to as the “Spanish–American War” in the US—were acted out.
It’s no accident that Fidel and his men had spent almost as much time in Mexico studying Cuban history as training for jungle warfare. Their “mad” landing was a frustrated response to problems that could be traced back over a century. A brisk history lesson also explains the bitterness Cubans often felt towards the United States. Only ninety miles from Havana across the Straits of Florida, the northern behemoth was for most of the nineteenth century an inspiration to Latin Americans as a beacon of freedom and democracy. But as the twentieth century approached, its actions became hypocritical at best, destructive at worst. Many Cubans could relate to a famous quote from another embattled neighbor: “Poor Mexico. So far from God, so close to the United States.”
CUBA WAS ALWAYS exceptional; almost nothing about its history fit the patterns of Latin America. Its singular status dated all the way back to the first visit by Columbus in 1492, who declared the island “the loveliest land that human eyes have ever seen.” With one foot still in the Middle Ages, the Spanish settlers who arrived soon after grappled to understand what they saw. They imagined the tracks of crocodiles were those of enchanted lions, and groups of distant cranes were monks in robes; the Taíno Indians carried mysterious “firebrands” of flaming leaves they inhaled and called tabaco. This magical island was soon the jewel in the Spanish crown. With its deep harbor and strategic location, Havana became the natural staging post for the conquest of the Americas: conquistadors sallied forth in search of El Dorado and the Fountain of Youth, and the wonders they did find proved more incredible than the fantasies. Soon galleons heavy with Aztec and Inca treasure gathered in Havana beneath a string of honey-stoned fortresses, built to protect against pirates like Sir Francis Drake, and twice a year, heavily guarded armadas would catch the Gulf Stream back to Seville on the “Indies route.” (The same current brought the marlin that would lure fishermen like Ernest Hemingway to Cuba centuries later, the fish traveling “like cars along a highway,” as he put it in Esquire magazine.)
In faraway Oriente, the port of Santiago, fringed by palm trees and nestled among verdant mountains, developed as Havana’s alter ego. It was funded not by pillaged treasure but “white gold”—sugar—which was farmed by African slaves in an inhuman system of plantations. By the eighteenth century, the impoverished, forgotten East was producing the wealth that kept the cosmopolitan capital humming. But Cuba’s dependence on the sugar economy meant that it ignored the calls for freedom that rippled through the rest of Latin America in the early 1800s. White planters presided over huge slave populations, and they lived in terror of the bloody race rebellion that had consumed neighboring Haiti after the French Revolution. By the 1820s an unbroken chain of liberated colonies ran the length of the New World; only the Caribbean islands of Cuba and nearby Puerto Rico were still tied to the apron strings of Spain.
On the surface, Cuba, “the Ever Faithful Isle” (as Spaniards fondly called it), continued to thrive. It became the most technologically advanced country in Latin America, the first to receive such marvels as railroads, electricity, and telephones. But its submissive role as a colony was humiliating to many Cubans, and two convulsive wars of independence eventually tore the island apart. The first spasm began in 1868, when machete-wielding armies surged around the island shouting “¡Viva Cuba Libre! ¡Independencia o Muerte!” (“Long live free Cuba! Independence or death!”). The revolt was crushed; but afterward the Spanish could only control the island by running it like a police state.
Towering over the crucial next bout for Cuba’s independence was the figure of José Martí, a brilliant poet and political thinker who tried to put his theories into action on the battlefield. His revered status in Cuba—busts of Martí, frail, balding, and dressed like an office clerk, stand in every town square—borders on the religious. (He is even known as “the Apostle.”) Fidel grew up regarding himself as the virtual reincarnation of Martí, who became the main inspiration for the guerrilla war. Even in comic books about the revolution given to Cuban school children today, the cover image of the 1956 Granma landing shows the disembodied visage of Martí looking down with approval from the heavens like the Great and Powerful Oz.
Martí’s path to deification began in 1869, at the tender age of sixteen, when the secret police found an incriminating letter he had written urging a friend not to join the Spanish colonial army. For this mild youthful transgression Martí was forced into years of exile in Europe and Latin America. He eventually came to rest in New York City, which was then the center for Cuban refugees. Martí was at first intoxicated with his new home. “One can breathe freely,” he raved of the US. “For here, freedom is the foundation, the shield, the essence of life.” The enthusiasm was short-lived. Martí soon sensed that the “turbulent and brutal North” had designs on his beloved Cuba. “I have lived within the monster and I know its entrails,” he warned.
Over his fourteen years living in Manhattan, the multitalented Martí plotted a Cuban uprising while cranking out reams of journalistic essays, scathing political tracts, and exquisite avant-garde love poetry. (His “Guantanamera” provided the lyrics for the most famous of all Cuban folk songs, with versions recorded by Celia Cruz, Pete Seeger, and the Gipsy Kings.) He hobnobbed with American bohemians, wrote the first major appreciation of Walt Whitman in Spanish, and made regular fund-raising trips to the Cuban cigar factories of Tampa, Florida, always in a heavy black suit and bow tie, his brush mustache tidily clipped. His conviction that no country could be truly free without economic, racial, and sexual equality added a potent—and, for its time, deeply radical—social element into the Cuban nationalist mix that Fidel and his generation would take to heart.
But Martí was never content to pontificate from the sidelines: He wanted to get his hands dirty in a revolution. In 1895, at the age of forty-two, he sent a message hidden in a cigar to Cuba to start the new rebellion. Martí landed on the coast of the Oriente one night with five companions, in a tiny boat that was nearly dashed to pieces by a storm, and was soon joined by thousands of supporters, many of them former slaves whose lives had hardly improved since the trade had been finally abolished seven years earlier. But military life was harsh for the waifish poet. Still clad in his heavy coat, Martí struggled to carry his pack and rifle, and he often slipped and fell on the rugged mountain trails. In the end the lasted only a few weeks. At noon on a fine spring day, he arrived at the front lines of combat while riding a white horse and carrying a picture of his daughter over his heart. When gunfire was heard in the distance, Martí eagerly galloped towards the fray. It was a trap. Spanish troops opened fire and caught Martí in the chest, killing him instantly.
Historians have argued that the day Martí fell was the turning point of Cuban history, a loss from which the island never recovered. Universally admired, he was the only one who might have guided fractious Cubans towards genuine independence—and avoided the devil’s bargain with the Americans that was offered instead.
WITHOUT MARTÍ, THE war he fought in dragged on for three years as the ragged irregular rebel troops known as mambises harassed the larger and better-equipped Spanish army, to the surprise of other European colonial powers. (The young Winston Churchill even came to Cuba to study the conflict, traveling on the Spanish side for several months as a war correspondent. He was recommended for “valorous conduct” after coming under fire, celebrated his twenty-first birthday in a Havana hotel—an experience he reported as “awfully jolly”—and left with ideas that would help him understand the hit-and-run tactics of the Boer War.) The death toll escalated, although more Spanish soldiers fell from the “black vomit,” as yellow fever was called, than bullets. The frustrated Spanish tried to weaken rebel support by herding rural civilians into prison camps. These reconcentrados, “reconcentrated ones,” died in appalling numbers: an estimated 10 percent of the Cuban population succumbed to disease and starvation, most of them women and children.
This callous behavior led to a groundswell of support for Cuba in the United States. Postcards of emaciated infants went on sale in the streets, and indignant newspaper editors began to call for military intervention. But the US’s motives were far from pure: as the world’s new industrial superpower, Americans of the Gilded Age were in the mood for some empire building of their own. The resulting “Spanish-American War” has receded into distant memory within the US and is rarely even taught today in schools. (In photographs, the conflict seems oddly remote in time: All those men with walrus mustaches! All those dusty flannel shirts and tight leggings!) But it was a monumental event for Cuba, laying the broken foundation for the troubled century to come.
From his office in New York, the flamboyant upstart newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, model for the Orson Welles character in Citizen Kane, set out to whip up American support for an overseas adventure. At the same time Cuban politicians were losing faith in the hardscrabble mambises, who appeared unable to drive out the Spanish alone. They began to make overtures to Washington for assistance—inviting the Monster into the boudoir.
The warmongers’ dream came true at 9:40 p.m. on the night of February 15, 1898, when a massive explosion lit up Havana Harbor. The visiting American warship USS Maine was engulfed in flames and sank within minutes, trapping over 260 sleeping sailors and officers belowdecks. An investigation proved that the explosion was almost certainly an accident, but the Hearst press blamed a Spanish mine and patriotic fervor surged across the US. The battle cry became: “Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!” When war was finally declared on April 21, a million men jammed the US Army volunteering offices the next day. Among them was the thirty-nine-year-old Teddy Roosevelt, who helped form a cavalry regiment dubbed the Rough Riders (after Buffalo Bill’s famous Western show) from a colorful mix of cowboys, ranch hands, and fellow gentlemen hunters from Yale and Harvard.
The reality of the campaign quickly dampened spirits, with a level of bumbling straight out of Catch-22. After months of pointless delays, the US Navy flotilla finally made it from Florida to the Oriente, where military bands played “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” while battleships randomly shelled the shore, even though the only troops to be seen were America’s Cuban allies. It was a poor omen for future relations. The Americans were shocked to discover that local soldiers were barefoot, poorly armed, and—most disturbingly of all—largely black. They even had black officers commanding white men. Roosevelt dismissed the mixed-race Cuban soldiers as “utter tatterdemalions.” Other US officers were harsher, especially those from the South. “Treacherous, lying, cowardly, thieving, worthless half-breed mongrels,” said one; “degenerates,” said another, “no more capable of self-government than the savages of Africa.”
Thus began what one American diplomat called (from the safety of London) “a splendid little war.” The result was never in doubt. On the steaming hot morning of July 1, Roosevelt rallied the Rough Riders and led the charge on San Juan Heights, his blue-and-white bandana trailing behind him. As the American Gatling guns raked the lines, Spanish resistance crumbled. It proved to be a bitter victory for the Cubans. When the Spanish formally surrendered in Santiago a few days later, the Americans did not invite local troops to the ceremony in case they ran amok. The Cuban commander, General Calixto García, made a dignified appeal to the Americans’ sense of history. “We are a poor, ragged Army,” he wrote to his US counterpart, “as ragged and poor as the Army of your forefathers in their noble War of Independence, and like the heroes of Saratoga and Yorktown, we believe in our cause too much to disgrace it.” His request was refused.
It was a snub that set the tone for the high-handed treatment to come. On New Year’s Day, 1899, the Americans hoisted the Stars and Stripes above the old conquistador fortress in Havana Harbor, starting a military occupation that would last for three years. Cubans discovered that they had traded one colonial master for another as American carpetbaggers descended on their island like ravening locusts. The US Army Corps of Engineers instituted public works projects that are still in use today, including highways, tunnels, and sewerage systems. But by the time the military finally packed up in 1902, a flood of yanqui investment had turned Cuba into a dependency, with power plants, railroads, sugar plantations, and telephone companies all in American hands. Congress even meddled in Cuba’s new constitution, adding the so-called Platt Amendment to give the US the right to intervene in the island’s politics, a power it exercised three times. For decades to come, Cuba would drift along in the feverish half-life of a stunted independence. The new pseudo-republic was a “monster,” Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, like a force-fed goose that is slowly poisoned by its over-rich diet.
This is not to say that the Americans did not make contributions to Cuban culture. Baseball became an obsession, replacing bullfighting as the most popular spectator sport. And then there were the cocktails. According to a Bacardi executive, a barman in Havana decided to amuse his US soldier customers one night by mixing rum with the new yanqui soft drink Coca-Cola and adding a twist of lime. When the barman toasted them with the traditional independence cry of “¡Cuba Libre!” the soldiers latched on to the phrase as the drink’s name. At around the same time in the Oriente, American mine workers near the town of Daiquirí began to mix rum with lime juice, raw sugar, and crushed ice, creating the second definitive Cuban tipple.
Alcohol helped make the US presence even more grating in the 1920s as Prohibition sent thousands of rich Americans on booze-addled tours of Cuba. Seaplanes called BlackTails would transport thirsty drinkers directly from New York’s Hudson River to the Havana waterfront, where they flocked to bars that served Mary Pickfords and Highballs around the clock. “‘Have one in Havana’ seems to have become the winter slogan of the wealthy,” chirped one travel writer, Basil Woon, author of the classic 1928 guidebook When It’s Cocktail Time in Cuba. The climactic chapter is called “Naughty-Naughty Nights,” a titillating guide to the pockets of vice flourishing around the city.
Cuban politics echoed the decadence. Presidents came and went, displaying ever more shameless levels of corruption. A sense of disillusion and helplessness settled over the island as every promise of change was betrayed. The extremes of this fractured political situation would eventually be distilled in two of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary opponents, nicknamed, like prize fighters, “the pretty mulatto” and “the crazy one.”