Guantánamo Read online

  Yet all was not lost. Children were pliant, and Cubans “malleable to a surprising degree,” Williams observed. “Like children and unlike savages, almost anything can be made of them.” This only made a firm and consistent U.S. policy all the more imperative. “Under suitable government, education, treatment, and guidance,” Cubans might be “developed and uplifted to an extent amounting to transformation.” Indeed, so “extreme” was their “teachableness, and their quickness to adopt new habits of mind and action” that Williams thought it “not impossible” that Cubans might one day “be fit for citizenship.”

  But first, several Cuban characteristics would have to be expunged. One was Cubans’ “cheerful contentment,” one of their “worst traits.”

  Contented people, everybody knows, make bad capitalists and worse laborers. So contented were Cubans in their daily lives that they never ventured beyond “two or three leagues” (eight to twelve miles) from home, thus disqualifying themselves as a mobile workforce. Another salient characteristic of Cubans was their propensity to lie. “It is often hard to tell whether a Cuban lies to you from ignorance or from malice,” Williams observed. “Here the absence of a moral sense becomes apparent. With the Cuban, lying is a matter, not of right, but of policy, his shortsightedness preventing him from perceiving that today’s advantage may be tomorrow’s loss”—again, not the stuff of contracts.18

  If Cubans’ childlikeness, contentment, and shortsightedness made them dubious material for capitalism, hadn’t they at least earned the right of self-rule by fighting for it? “It is generally admitted,” wrote one critic of U.S. colonialism, “that a people who fight strenuously for liberty against powerful oppressors deserve to obtain it; and that such a people should be presumed, till the contrary is proved, to be fit to possess it.”19 This is perhaps so as a general principle, Williams argued, but not in the case of Cuba, where Cubans’ descriptions of their military feats and “the glorious victories of their somewhat mythical army,” while not “intentional, deliberate, cold-blooded lies,” were nonetheless “monstrous inventions.” Intolerably vain, Cubans were susceptible to the notion “that there was once a band of men worthy to be called a Cuban army, and that they fought battles.” In reality, “there were merely little companies of starving stragglers, who sometimes fired their two cartridges apiece from ambush at Spanish scouting parties, and then scattered.” Then again, Cubans’ refusal to confront the Spaniards in open battle was only to be expected in a people “to some degree like a race of slaves.”20

  Clinical in his dismantling of Cuban character, Williams attributed it to Spanish rule, thus leaving open Cuba’s future, at least a crack. Cubans would have to quit their misbehavior and banish their ingratitude, both of which frustrated the “disinterested” Americans. Above all, Cubans would have to get to work. Sounding much like the conquistadors who preceded him by four centuries, Williams couldn’t imagine why unemployed men would eschew jobs in the mines of the Guantánamo Basin, for example. “Left to themselves, the Cubans would never develop their country,—not in centuries.” It wasn’t so much that Cubans were “shiftless; every man of them can shift for himself so long as he stays in the country. The trouble is that it is so easy to get along and have plenty to eat without doing much work.” Such a people might make “good servants,” but they could not be expected “to be masters of themselves or of anybody else.”

  Good Cubans knew this. Indeed, Williams insisted, all Cubans “whose convictions deserve respect”—namely, merchants, shopkeepers, and men of property—earnestly advocated “permanent American control” of the country. Only the “half-barbarous rabble,” many of them “negroes,” still clung “to the old fetish of ‘Cuba Libre.’” If America sailed away, the latter would murder the former, just as García and his men had allegedly desired to do to the Spanish at the conclusion of the war. By contrast to the Cubans, the Spanish enemy in Cuba possessed all the capitalist virtues. Spaniards were “men of honesty, industry, and stamina, [who] kept the stores and owned most of the property.” Here was material Americans could work with. Cubans, on the other hand? “Cuba under a republic would be a very unsatisfactory place to Americans.”21

  It was the job of Major General Leonard Wood, military governor of Santiago province from 1899 to 1900, and of Cuba generally between 1900 and 1902, to make republican Cuba satisfactory to U.S. economic interests. Wood interpreted this challenge much the way his Spanish predecessors had: transforming Cubans into a disciplined and compliant workforce. In an essay published in the journal North American Review in May 1899, Wood described the steps he was taking in Santiago province to prepare the local population (30 percent of whom were black or “colored,” and whom Williams would describe as “scum, the refuse of the island”22) not so much for self-government as for contract labor. In transforming Cubans into a labor force, Wood was aided greatly by the widespread poverty that pervaded the region even before the Americans arrived. “The condition of the people in Cuba today is one of extreme poverty, and in many provinces great suffering for want of food,” Wood reported. He denied the charges of Williams and others that the Cubans were too lazy to work. On the contrary, he noted, Cubans “are not only willing but anxious to work. The problem has never been one of finding workers, but of giving work to those who wished it.” Throughout Santiago province, and indeed the entire country, every element of infrastructure needed rebuilding, from highways and railroads to bridges and telegraph lines, villages and towns, schools and municipal lines, water and sewer facilities. “Great sections” of the country had “been absolutely destroyed by war.”23

  Sympathetic to Cuba’s plight, Wood recognized an opportunity. Not a penny would he waste on food that had not been earned through labor or on projects unrelated to public infrastructure. Cuba was to be made safe for business. “We have been able to open up many of the main roads, put the towns in order, and, in fact, scatter the people over the country in honest labor on public works, in return for which they have received either a daily wage of seventy-five cents or fifty cents and a ration.” To regions of the province suffering, like Guantánamo, from “great destitution,” Wood dispatched his officials “with money and authority to start needed public works.” The net effect of these interventions was a people “gone back to work in one way or another.” Cubans remained “desperately poor,” but Wood’s staff reported “no starvation, and, generally speaking, a quiet, contented condition of the people.”24

  What accounted for Wood’s success? The trick, he explained, was to provide the Cubans with “only just enough to make it possible for the people to re-establish themselves upon the most economical basis.” Economy was everything to Wood and the Americans, both an end in itself and the means to the end. There was no incentive like scarcity. “Economy has been insisted on, and it has been impressed upon them that, no matter how limited their income may be, they must try to adapt themselves to it.” The lesson seemed to be having the desired effect. Rather than these policies being “narrowing, they have had a very beneficial effect on the people, who are beginning to realize that there is a certain satisfaction and independence to be gained by paying their own way.” Such policies could not help but produce “permanent good results.” Doubters had only to consult U.S. history to recall that “some of our best and ablest men have sprung from the very poorest families, and their development under conditions of the greatest hardships and adversity has tended to foster the very qualities which have made them successful in later life.” In postwar Cuba, putting food on the table constituted the strenuous life.25

  You want order in Cuba? Wood demanded. Create “an army of workmen.” Give men work, pay them leanly, steer them toward tasks of “public character,” and you will “open the country once more to commerce.” Of course, Cuba needed supporting institutions—education based on “our own system” (“intelligent and uniformly progressive methods of teaching”). Municipal government, too. Sounding much like the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville describing
American democracy in the 1830s, Wood praised local Cuban governments not so much for their efficiency as for the habits self-government instilled. “Of course, we cannot expect a people who have never had a hand in governing themselves, to take hold of the situation with the same grasp and clearness which we should expect [from ourselves].”26 But Cubans were doing quite nicely, given the recent war. Though they remained intemperate and emotional, the Cubans would succeed, Wood concluded, and America “would give up control of [Cuban] affairs.”27

  Compared with Williams’s denigration of the Cuban character, Wood’s report of stability and order in postwar Santiago province comes as a relief. But Cubans themselves scarcely recognized the country that Wood described. Most Cubans did not want to be “Americanized,” as Wood suggested in Century Magazine in August 1899. Nor did they see themselves as needy recipients of American “gifts” such as “honest government.” Nor did they think they lacked virtues conducive to “self-government and control.”28 Indeed, Horatio Rubens, American counsel to the Cuban Revolutionary Party, asked in April 1898 how, if Cubans were so bereft of virtue, intelligence, leadership, and discipline, had they managed to bring Spain to its knees just as the United States joined the war?

  Writing in the North American Review, Rubens aimed to familiarize American readers to the Cuban campaign for independence and to counter the assertions of Edwin Atkins and others that the movement was essentially an oversized race riot confined mostly to the east. Such was not at all the case, Rubens explained. “Professionals and businessmen, engineers, and men of leisure flocked from the cities to the insurgent standard, leaving their families behind them. The country people applied for admission to the ranks in great numbers, until the leaders decided to take no man unless he could be armed with a rifle.” 29 From the first, the revolutionary movement was characterized by professionalism and organization. During the first year of the war, provincial delegates adopted a constitution and elected officers of the revolutionary government for a term of two years. President and vice president met in council with secretaries of war, foreign affairs, treasury, and the interior. Undersecretaries and provincial governors were also appointed, and the island was divided into administrative districts of local self-government called prefectures.30

  A common argument in the United States against an independent Cuba was that it would inevitably become indebted to other (i.e., European) countries, thus inviting foreign intervention in Cuban affairs detrimental to U.S. interests. Rubens insisted that long before the United States joined the war, the Cuban revolutionary government had anticipated this danger, taking “the utmost care” to “avoid the creation of liabilities.” Another argument favored by opponents of Cuban independence was that Cuba, so long ground beneath the yoke of Spanish tyranny, could not comprehend the mechanisms of self-government. Again, not so, Rubens reported. In revolutionary Cuba, not only was the military “subordinate to the civil government,” but a carefully adjusted pay scale provided for “the speedy disbandment of the army when the war ends, by enabling its members to return immediately to their peaceful pursuits, and placing a considerable sum in circulation.” After the war, the revolutionary government expected to have to borrow money to disperse tools and agricultural implements among the population; it foresaw no difficulty in this regard, “as the credit of the island had been kept unpledged.”31

  The revolutionary government proved itself a government of laws, not men, in the autumn of 1897, electing a new executive and assembly as stipulated by the constitution. It also took steps to ensure a smooth transition to peacetime, mandating “an immediate general election of a new government” by universal male suffrage. To U.S. skeptics who doubted the stability of a government forced by exigency to move its capital during the war, Rubens countered with the reminder that “our own revolutionary government” similarly had been forced to move its headquarters during the American Revolution. Moreover, Cuba’s government moved not for safety reasons but for logistics: in order to expedite conferences between the military and political leadership. 32

  Cultural institutions—newspapers, schools, political societies—the revolutionary government boasted too, especially in the east, where revolutionary control was total but for a few cities and towns. On and on Rubens went: Was it the guerilla tactics that bothered skeptics? Those General Gómez had adopted out of necessity, facing an army outnumbering him five to one. Were Cuban leaders untutored? They had successfully employed tactics used by the German cavalry in the Franco-Prussian War.33 It was not Cubans who had demonstrated incompetence but Spain. By the time the United States joined the war, Spain’s army was demoralized, physically and psychologically; its “struggle to retain Cuba had been gigantic,” Rubens remarked, “but it has been badly directed.” By contrast, Cubans had demonstrated “good judgment in retaining and husbanding” scarce resources and in exploiting their enemy’s weaknesses. A “people capable of such organization, civil and military, and of fighting a European power to a standstill,” or better, “without a navy and at first utterly unarmed, have surely given sufficient promise of capability of self-government.”34

  In his diary entry of January 1899, Máximo Gómez lamented that the U.S. expropriation of Cuba’s victory over Spain had robbed Cubans and Spaniards alike of the opportunity to part respectfully. “I had dreamed of peace with Spain,” Gómez wrote; “I hoped to bid farewell with respect to the brave Spanish soldiers with whom we always met, face to face, on the field of battle. The words peace and freedom should inspire only love and fraternity on the morning of concord between those who were combatants the night before; but, with their guardianship imposed by force, the Americans have turned the Cubans’ victorious joy to bitterness and haven’t sweetened the grief of the vanquished.”35

  Graver still, the Americans’ treatment of the Cuban forces deprived them of a sense of closure. What should the Cubans make of an armistice concluded entirely without their consent? So long as it looked like Cubans had merely exchanged one set of rulers for another, in what sense could this war truly be declared over? In the Guantánamo region, the traditional bastion of Cuban radicalism, many Cuban soldiers concluded that the war was not over, and for months after the armistice that August something less than peace pervaded the region. In early October 1898, General Calixto García, commander of Cuban forces in the east, refused to recognize the legitimacy of the U.S. military government, thus leading hundreds of his former soldiers to refuse to surrender their arms.36 A week later, Máximo Gómez, García’s boss, resigned his commission as general in chief of Cuban forces in protest of the revolutionary authorities’ passive submission to U.S. military occupation of Santiago province. Only under pressure from colleagues in the revolutionary government did Gómez and García agree to urge their junior colleagues at Guantánamo Bay to disarm. Many of the Cuban soldiers hadn’t been paid, and there was talk among the Americans of exchanging guns for money.37

  Pedro Pérez was among the last Cuban generals to capitulate at Guantánamo. Through October and into November, he refused to disband his army, unsettling both U.S. military officials and local planters, who hoped to salvage what little they might of the year’s crops. Only the intervention of Leonard Wood defused a tense situation. Pérez wanted a concession from the Americans to allow his men to retain their weapons in exchange for service as a provincial police force. Wood denied the request but appointed Pérez mayor of Guantánamo City, while dispatching food to his hungry men.38 When Calixto García, the most irreconcilable of Cuba’s generals, died unexpectedly while on a trip to Washington, D.C., in early December, high-level resistance to the U.S. occupation came to an end.

  Yet disgruntlement smoldered in the Guantánamo region into the next year. By Christmas 1898, it had been given a name: Francisco Valiente, a colonel in García’s ranks. This Cuban Robin Hood was said to be leading a band of not-so-merry men on the outskirts of Guantánamo City, terrorizing local planters and bringing to a standstill what little cane grinding occurred. O
nly the arrival of U.S. troops led by Colonel Henry Ray allowed the grinding to resume. U.S. troops stayed around to guard some twenty-three plantations around Guantánamo alone as Ray remained perplexed by the Cubans’ motivations.39 Leonard Wood, then military governor of Santiago province, thought that Ray exaggerated both the number and the significance of the Cuban brigands.40 Still, the Americans had an answer to Valiente and his associates: “They will be followed by a force of cavalry and persistently pursued,” readers of the (Portland) Morning Oregonian were assured. “The same general method will be observed as has been followed in dealing with the Indians on the plains and mountains of the West.” Valiente and his followers would be “cured” of their recalcitrance; it was just a matter of time.41

  While the U.S. Army maintained a fragile peace in the interior, the U.S. Navy continued to use and enjoy Guantánamo Bay. Beginning in the spring of 1899 and continuing through the summer, the USS Eagle made Guantánamo Bay its home, charting the harbor and nearby Cuban waters without arousing local passions. In February 1902, Rear Admiral Francis Higginson led his Atlantic squadron into Guantánamo Bay, where he found fellow officer Robley Evans, captain of the USS Iowa, ensconced at the bay in the company of a band of U.S. cavalry and “some very fine horses.” Evidently, the Americans had the run of the place. “We were very well received at Guantánamo,” Higginson assured Leonard Wood. “We visited Guantánamo [City] also Soledad”—a large U.S. sugar estate—“and saw the sugar mills, and then to Mrs. Brooks’ orphan school where they sang for us. The next day we had all the children aboard the Kearsage [the commander’s headquarters at the bay] where the band played for them. They played games and sang, and had a most delightful time.”42