Cuba in the nineteenth century was marked by continual uprisings against Spanish rule. In 1823, an ex-soldier, José Francisco Lemus, organized an island-wide rebellion with the help of Masonic lodges. The plan was to establish an independent nation with the Taino name Cubanacán. But like the Aponte slave conspiracy of 1812, this rebellion was infiltrated by spies and failed.
After the uprising, Spain sent forty thousand troops to be permanently posted in Cuba. And those troops were on alert or at war for most of the rest of the century. Peninsulares, or people from Spain, as opposed to Cuban-born Spaniards, became increasingly disliked, except by the wealthy landowners, who believed that the troops would protect them from slaves, free blacks, and abolitionists, all of whom favored independence.
In 1851, Narciso López invaded Cuba. Born in Venezuela, he had fought against Simón Bolívar, the Venezuelan who tried to free South America from Spain and create a single united Latin American state. Though López had served as a local official for Spain in Cuba, he became enamored of the idea of having Cuba annexed by the United States. The Americans had long flirted with this idea. In 1808, Jefferson had sent an envoy to Havana to look into the possibility of buying the island, as he had done with the Louisiana Purchase. Nothing came of it, but by the 1840s, with rising tensions in the United States between slave and free states, there was some interest in the South in acquiring what would be an additional slave state. This of course meant that there was resistance to the idea among free blacks and abolitionists.
The greatest support for Narciso López in the United States came from proponents of Manifest Destiny, the much-contested belief that the white race should fulfill its destiny by taking over the North American continent. Some, such as John Quincy Adams, saw the belief as a conspiracy to spread slavery. Abraham Lincoln was one of its opponents. Manifest Destiny was the argument behind the 1846 U.S. invasion of Mexico and the seizure of almost half its territory.
López recruited American soldiers from the Mexican war and tried to get General Robert E. Lee or Colonel Jefferson Davis, both West Point Army officers, to lead them, but both declined. In 1850, López took command himself, invaded, and took the port of Cárdenas, east of Havana. But when the Spanish moved in troops, López and his army retreated by boat back to the United States.
The following year, López invaded again, with 435 volunteers, this time to the west of Havana. The Spanish captured or killed them all. In what seems a forerunner of the 1961 CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion, many were shot by firing squad; others were imprisoned and ransomed back to the United States. López was publicly garroted at La Punta fort, near Habana Vieja. Not far from where he was executed, what is possibly the shortest street in Habana Vieja was named Calle López in his honor. It runs into Calle Enna, named after the Spanish general who defeated him. López’s flag had red and white stripes and a single star, based on the American flag. Strangely, that flag of annexation became the flag of Cuban independence and has remained, even today, the flag of Cuba.
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New York, the home of the exiled Havana intelligentsia, was the headquarters of the Cuban independence struggle, which began in 1868 with the bitter Ten Years’ War. That war was unsuccessful, but after it ended, the intelligentsia started planning their next war, thus beginning a process that never stopped.
In New York, José Martí became both Cuba’s “Apostle of Independence” and its most respected writer; he is still regarded as an important figure in Spanish-language literature. The most famous Habanero in history, he wrote most of his work in New York.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante, while himself living in exile from the Castro regime in London, wrote, perhaps not without envy, that no Cuban ever flourished more in exile than Martí, as he rose “from an obscure apprentice pamphleteer”—his status when he was deported at the age of nineteen—“into one of the greatest writers in the Spanish language and without any doubt into our prime prosist.” Martí was prolific in exile. Today the Cuban government publishes his complete works in twenty-six volumes.
Cabrera Infante talks about the “denseness” of Martí’s prose, comparing it to “solid metals like platinum.” Martí wrote about politics and literature, about what he longed for and missed in Cuba, and about Cuban independence and the abolition of slavery. He also wrote about Emerson and Whitman, Ulysses Grant, Jesse James, Coney Island, and New York in the snow. The rare charm of his writing can be seen in the simple opening sentence of his essay on Charles Darwin: “Darwin was a grave old man who glowed with the pride of having seen.”
Martí’s poetry is thick with imagery and suggests a melancholy. As one of the first modernist poets of the Spanish language, he had a great influence on Spanish poetry. To read any of his writing—poetry or prose—is to revel in the sensuousness of someone who truly loved words. Those words are constantly quoted in the Spanish-speaking world, none more than the opening line of his collection Simple Verses:
Yo soy un hombre sincero,
de donde crece la palma.
I am an honest man,
from where the palm tree grows.
These are also the first words of one of the most popular Cuban songs ever written, “Guántanamera.” The song’s popularity is surprising, given that no one is exactly sure what it is about, though it clearly has nothing to do with José Martí. It seems to be about unrequited love for a woman from Guantánamo. It was written by a popular songwriter, Joseíto Fernández Diaz, probably around 1929. In the 1940s, he had a radio program called La Guántanama, in which he used the song to introduce each segment. He gave various explanations for who the peasant woman from Guantánamo was. “Guajira Guántanamera,” the chorus refrain, means a folk song from Guantánamo, but Fernández never explained what José Martí or his poem had to do with this. Many believe that Fernández could not explain the lyrics well because he didn’t actually write them, that they were written instead by noted Spanish-born Cuban classical composer Julían Orbón. It was Orbón who gave the song to Pete Seeger in a version that included even more Martí verses, and that is the version Seeger popularized in America in the 1960s.
In time, the song faded away, as songs do, except among Miami’s Cuban exiles, the ones Castro called gusanos (worms), whose cubanidad has been frozen in the Havana of the 1950s. “They’re still singing Guántanamera” was a common Havana criticism of exiles. Today, however, as tourists return to Havana in large numbers, the musicians in bars, restaurants, and hotels are playing “Guántanamera” again.
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In 1892, Martí, still in New York, joined the Cuban Revolutionary Party, which began plotting another attempt to overthrow Spain. He argued for a Cuban government that represented all classes and races, and urged that it be established quickly, before the United States had time to intervene. If the Americans were to become involved, Martí predicted, they would seize control and never relinquish it.
Martí, who probably invented the term latino, or was certainly one of the first to use it, wrote an essay in 1891 called “Our America,” by which he meant Latin America as opposed to that other America to the north. In that essay, he said that Latin America had to unite into one front and resist the United States. “Our America will be confronted by an enterprising and energetic nation seeking close relations, but with indifference and scorn for us and our ways,” he wrote. He went on to say, “The scorn of our formidable neighbor, who does not know us, is the greatest danger for our America.”
Martí helped raise money for an army to take Cuba, and in 1895 he returned to the island to join up with General Máximo Gómez. And so it was that this frail and balding forty-two-year-old Habanero turned New York poet, who neither rode horses well nor knew how to handle firearms, went off to war. He was thrilled to be out in the countryside, the way city people often are, fascinated by every leaf and bird chirp, and kept a diary that many consider his greatest writing.
General Gómez, a Dominican, was a battle-scarred professional soldier, trained in the Sp
anish army and a veteran of the Cuban independence fight. He had a bullet hole in his neck from the Ten Years’ War that he still plugged up with cotton. During that struggle, he had earned a reputation as a warrior of extraordinary physical courage and tactical savvy. His troops had been mostly black and mulato volunteers, and the Spanish had called them “mambises,” belittling them for their African heritage with a pejorative they had previously used for slaves in Santo Domingo. But their mockery backfired, and the name became popular among the independence troops.
Gómez combined a shortage of ammunition—only an estimated quarter of his troops had firearms—with what he knew to be a latent fear of black people among Spanish soldiers, to invent a tactic he called “the machete attack.” Confronted with a line of Spanish infantry, his troops would fire once and then charge them on foot, Gómez in the lead, wielding machetes. Such charges terrified the Spanish soldiers.
Soon after Martí joined Gómez in eastern Cuba, there occurred a minor engagement with the enemy. Gómez ordered Martí to the rear. Instead the poet charged forward on horseback, carrying a handgun. Or was it that he had lost control of his horse?
In any event, he was shot in the neck, as Gómez had been in the Ten Years’ War, done in by a sniper in the tall grass with a Remington rifle. In some versions, Martí died instantly; in another, a Spanish soldier on foot recognized him and finished him with a second bullet. And so the independence movement went to war without its spiritual leader, its “Apostle.” In fact, his role as apostle was greatly aided by his martyrdom.
In the eastern hills of Cuba the day before Martí died, he started but never finished what would be his last letter. He was writing it to his friend Manuel Mercado, an undersecretary of the interior in the Mexican government. In his youth, in exile in Mexico with his parents, Martí had lived next door to Mercado, and the two had remained friends. In his letter, Martí wrote about his fears of a U.S. takeover of Cuba once the Spanish were gone. He knew that was likely, he said, because he had lived in the belly of the monster.
And indeed, the monster was itching to take Cuba. With its new imperialist might and the last of the Spanish empire crumbling, the United States dreamed of annexing Hawaii, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and—the best prize of all, in their view—Cuba, the paradise right off their coast. This new round of Manifest Destiny enthralled an overwhelming majority of Americans, and President William McKinley, a true politician more than a true imperialist, could not resist the popular will. And so in 1898, the United States went to war with Spain in the Caribbean. They did exactly what Martí had feared: they drove out the Spaniards and took over. The poorly armed Cubans had fought Spain for nearly a century; they succumbed to the well-armed Americans in a four-month engagement.
On January 1, 1899, Spain withdrew from Cuba. That same day, a U.S. military government under General John R. Brooke took control.
The year before the takeover, an excited writer named Trumbull White had published a book called Our New Possessions, with sections on Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippines. The section on Cuba, titled “The Pearl of the Antilles,” began:
The greatest island and the greatest city of all of the West Indies, discovered by Columbus on his first voyage, are now for the first time looking toward intimate commercial and social relations with the United States of America.
But “the greatest island” turned out to be somewhat of a disappointment. The Americans had not realized how run-down it was after generations of war. Health services, roads and bridges, schools and hospitals were in urgent need of improvements. The population, 1.5 million, had actually declined by two hundred thousand since the Cuban Revolutionary Party’s war for independence began in 1895. According to an 1887 survey, only one in three white Cubans could write, and among people of color, only 11 percent were literate.
In December 1899, another general, Leonard Wood, took charge. This began phase two of the U.S. occupation. Wood had many plans. As a former U.S. surgeon general, he was interested in the research of a Cuban doctor, Carlos Juan Finlay, who had discovered that yellow fever is transmitted to humans by mosquitoes. Wood brought in U.S. Army doctor Walter Reed, whose work on parasites and tropical diseases, especially yellow fever, changed the history of medicine. The Americans also improved roads and bridges and built schools.
But the United States soon lost its enthusiasm for annexing this troubled island and decided that it only wanted to be able to control it from a distance. So in 1901, the United States nurtured a new constitution for Cuba: it was to be a democratic republic with universal suffrage, the separation of church and state, and a directly elected president. But there was a catch, in the form of a series of restrictions drafted by then–U.S. Secretary of War Elihu Root. These restrictions barred Cuba from signing treaties that impaired its sovereignty or contracted unpayable debt, and stipulated that the U.S. military had the right to intervene in Cuban affairs anytime it saw fit. Cuba’s Constitutional Assembly tried to revise these terms, but the United States informed them that there was to be no revision and that the terms, known as the Platt Amendment, were to be a permanent part of the Cuban constitution. Otherwise, the U.S. military would not leave. Furthermore, the United States had the right to maintain a naval station in Guantánamo for the next eighty years.
The Cubans finally got the Platt Amendment repealed in 1934, but they are still trying to negotiate the withdrawal of the U.S. Navy from Guantánamo.
In the decades that followed, Cuba struggled with democratic elections, which sometimes led to dictatorships, popular uprisings, and even armed rebellion—constant new beginnings. The United States did not see fit to foster the democratic ideals it had professed. When Cuba’s struggling experiments with democracy ended with a coup d’état by Fulgencio Batista in 1952, the Americans supported him and even sent him weapons and equipment. They reasoned that at least this was a man with whom they could do business, even though most of Batista’s business involved enriching himself, mainly by means of his connections with American organized crime.
Cubans love symbolism. When Fidel Castro and his revolutionaries overthrew Batista, they consciously took Havana on January 1, 1959, sixty years to the day after the United States had taken over.
SEVEN
The Death It Has Given Us
Quieren que esa muerte que nos han regalado
sea la fuente de nuestro nacimiento.
They want that death they have given us as a gift
to be the source of our birth.
— JOSÉ LEZAMA LIMA, “Pensamientos en La Habana” (1944)
When the United States took over Cuba in 1898, it was essentially extending a relationship that was already in place. American commercial interests had played an important role in the Cuban economy even when the island was a Spanish colony, as Trollope observed on his 1859 visit:
The trade of the country is falling into the hands of foreigners—into those principally of Americans from the States. Havana will soon become as much American as New Orleans.
The connection had begun after the American Revolution, when the British cut off the United States from trade with British colonies, and Cuba replaced Jamaica as a source of tropical products. Soon Americans became heavily invested in sugar, a mainstay of the Cuban economy, and began owning and operating sugar plantations, as well as tobacco plantations, cattle ranches, and mines. This meant that Americans—and not only the Southerners—were also deeply involved in Cuban slavery.
It was American sugar interests that developed the island. Americans built the first railroad in Cuba, in 1837, to connect the sugar producers in the countryside to the port of Havana. Cuba was only the third country in the world to have train service.
Americans also brought steamship service, not only between Havana and the United States but also between Havana and Matanzas and other cities on Cuba’s north coast. Americans ran and operated both the steamships and the railroads.
In 1851, the telegraph was introduced by Samuel
Kennedy, a New Yorker; it had been introduced in the United States only five years earlier. And it may have been in Cuba that the telephone was actually invented. Antonio Meucci, an Italian living in Havana, devised one in 1871, three years ahead of Alexander Graham Bell.
By the mid-nineteenth century, American tourists were visiting Cuba, and they tried to own this burgeoning business as well, establishing American-owned hotels with names such as the American Hotel and the Havana House. But it was not until the U.S. military occupation of 1898 that Havana became, in the words of the New York Times, “over-run with Americans of all ages” wanting to see what Trumbull White had called “our new possession.”
A U.S. citizen did not even need a passport to go to Cuba. Some stayed a few weeks, some a few days, and some, known as patos de la Florida (after the wood duck, which travels from Florida to Cuba to nest in palm trees), only a few hours before they got back on their boats.
Havana had always enjoyed a high level of sophistication and standard of living compared with other Latin American cities, and was certainly always far ahead of other Caribbean ones. Its streets had lighting beginning in 1768, and it was one of the first Caribbean cities to publish a newspaper, the Gazeta de La Havana, in 1782.
But by the late 1800s, after a century of political upheavals, the city had fallen into poor repair, and the new American tourists saw it as a backward place where bargains were to be had. Land was cheap, and American real estate companies began buying it up to sell it off at what was to the Cubans an alarming rate. Vedado, the area past central Havana that had only recently been developed, with luxurious gardened homes for the rich, became inundated with Americans snatching up lots and houses at prices they found astoundingly low.
Martí had been right in his prediction that the Americans to the north would exhibit “scorn for us and our ways.” The Americans viewed Havana as a decaying slum that U.S. know-how could fix up. Cubans could be fixed up, too, and taught how to look like their northern neighbors. As Terry’s Guide to Cuba in 1927 observed:
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