Yankee Come Home

by William Craig

  Yankee Come Home

  On the Road from San Juan Hill to Guantánamo

  William Craig

  A Note to the Reader

  Friends in Cuba assure me that, while traveling there, I have been under constant government surveillance. It’s hard to believe I’d be of much interest to the Cuban government, but I must defer to my friends. They should know. They live in a society suffused with informants, under a regime so intolerant of dissent that it harasses even its most innocuous critics.

  I am also aware that, since 9/11, my own government has been spying on its citizens, albeit on a budget that supports subtler methods of violating civil rights. Legal challenges and a change of administration have apparently altered the public style of electronic surveillance programs, but neither their scope nor their substance.

  For these reasons, in this account of my travels, I have disguised some locales and changed several friends’ names and circumstances. It may be foolish to hope I can protect anyone’s privacy, but friends certainly deserve the attempt.

  The Spaniards, we are told, are to go by December 1, or soon after. Then is to come an American “army of occupation,” some saying that it is to be 50,000 strong. It is but natural that we should ask, “Why is this great army sent to Cuba? When the Spaniards are gone, who is it going to fight?”

  CUBAN ARMY GENERAL BARTOLOMÉ MASÓ,

  NOVEMBER 1898

  History does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.

  JAMES BALDWIN, THE FIRE NEXT TIME

  Here, take this gift,

  I was reserving it for some hero, speaker, or General,

  One who should serve the good old cause, the great Idea, the progress and freedom of the race;

  Some brave confronter of despots—some daring rebel;—

  But I see that what I was reserving belongs to you just as much as to any.

  WALT WHITMAN, TO A CERTAIN CANTATRICE

  Contents

  A Note to the Reader

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: False Flags

  Chapter 2: Santiago de Cuba: A Rebel Yesterday

  Chapter 3: The Revolutionary Virgin

  Chapter 4: El Morro I: Tossing Out the First Ball

  Chapter 5: El Morro II: El Squeeze Play

  Chapter 6: El Morro III: The Pitchout

  Chapter 7: Wars of the Spirit

  Chapter 8: Charging (Halfway) up San Juan Hill

  Chapter 9: Havana: Dismembering the Maine

  Chapter 10: David Swims to Gitmo

  Chapter 11: El Hombre Llega—The Man Is Here

  Chapter 12: Unknown Soldiers

  Chapter 13: Getting Guantánamo

  Chapter 14: Moving in Imperial Circles

  Plate Section

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Footnotes

  Suggested Reading

  A Note on the Author

  For Kathleen

  Siempre contigo

  Prologue

  San Juan Hill is a steep ridge, with a crest so narrow that in many places the difference between climbing up and starting downhill is just a single step. Tall and abrupt, it offers a hell of a view, though the panorama is broken up by unruly flowering trees and run-down apartment blocks. In the north, clouds pile up against a steep mountain wall separating the city of Santiago from the rest of the island of Cuba, which stretches northwest for hundreds of miles without quite reaching the Florida Keys. To the south, a wall of lesser mountains screens the Caribbean Sea, but I can taste salt in the wind. East is a plain carpeted with jungle scrub, tilled fields, and hectic clusters of cement-block houses. And when I turn west, toward the lowering sun, lesser ridges fall away like echoes, carrying this city of red tile roofs down to a great bay.

  It’s the kind of cityscape that could be an artwork in itself, like famous views of Florence and Siena. But Santiago de Cuba is no museum town, primped and groomed by money and fame. Fine old mansions and church towers dignify the view, but everywhere there’s evidence of gross decay and disrepair, of scabby whitewash and fallen façades. Run-down factories, hospitals, and apartment towers loom like modernist wrecks run aground in a sea of antique tile. Real ships cross slate-blue Santiago Bay, rusty freighters headed for the container port or smoky industrial plants on the far shore, in the stretching shadow of the Sierra Maestra.

  Santiago can’t afford to be as pretty as she really is. A beauty down on her luck, Santiago is the capital of old Oriente Province, one of the world’s most storied regions, home to Cuba’s most revered spiritual, cultural, and revolutionary traditions. From its “hidden” Afro-Cuban religions to the hideouts of Fidel Castro’s guerrilla army, the history of Oriente Province is fabulously rich in suffering, hope, and defiance. Made over by prosperity, the crumbling city would ravish our eyes; in her workaday travail, she wounds our hearts.

  San Juan Hill is studded with obsolete cannon and heroic statues, reminding me that even the most poignant landscape looks ominous through gunsights. Militarily, this ridge is the key to the defense of Santiago de Cuba. It’s open to attack from the plain to the east, lower and more vulnerable than the mountains to the north and south, but as defensible as many other hills that fights have made famous, from Bunker Hill in Massachusetts to Khe Sanh in Vietnam’s Central Highlands. Any landward assault on the city has to win this ridge. The victors can direct artillery fire onto the city below and the bay beyond, sinking any warships in the harbor or chasing them into the open sea.

  That’s what happened here in the summer of 1898.

  The United States of America sent its armed forces on a crusade to avenge a spectacular act of terrorism and help an oppressed people win freedom. Yankees “remembered” the battleship Maine’s mysterious destruction in Havana Bay by blaming Spain and invading her last great New World colony, Cuba. Joining forces with a Cuban rebel army that had been defying Spain for years, U.S. troops fought a brief war that began with the Marines’ landing at Guantánamo Bay, just fifty miles east of Santiago. The new base at Guantánamo supported a naval blockade that trapped the Spanish fleet in Santiago Bay while the U.S. Army landed troops on the beaches of Daiquiri and Siboney, somnolent villages only ten miles from here. Yankees and Cubans marched inland together, skirmishing with the Spanish rear guard at a crossroads called Las Guasimas. Their thirty-seven-day campaign climaxed with the U.S. Army’s assault on the fortified village of El Caney and the storming of the eminence known locally as la Loma San Juan. No longer safe from land-based artillery, Spain’s Atlantic fleet sortied from Santiago Bay to be annihilated by America’s recently created world-class navy. Defeated on land and at sea, the Spanish signed their surrender under a tree just a little ways downslope.

  Americans back home rejoiced—only to find that the real war had just begun.

  Most Americans had understood the war as a selfless quest, a mission of honor and mercy, but the nation’s leaders turned the crusade for “¡Cuba libre!” into a global land grab. The U.S. expeditionary force became an army of occupation. Former Spanish imperial possessions—Puerto Rico, Guam, the vast Philippine archipelago—became American colonies. Martial glory faded into years of counterinsurgency, profiteering scandals, torture, and massacres. The embarrassing war was willfully forgotten—along with its warning about the consequences of acting imperially.

  Not much escaped our deliberate amnesia. Ask an American today about 1898 and you’re likely to recover just three names: the USS Maine, Theodore Roosevelt, and San Juan Hill.

  I’m standing on San Juan Hill because a couple of those names figure
among my earliest memories. When I was a little boy, my great-grandfather Thomas O’Brien told me he climbed this ridge as a Rough Rider, running along at Teddy Roosevelt’s stirrup. “Papa” O’Brien was a five-year-old’s hero, and that’s all I needed to know—but now I need to understand what his war was really all about.

  I’m here in the last month of 2005 because, fifty-three miles to the east, there’s a Cuban bay that’s been a U.S. naval base since 1898. Guantánamo is back in the news, this time as an international symbol of power unchecked by law, a synonym for torture.

  And I’m here because my stepson is standing guard behind a machine gun on the perimeter of an air base in Iraq. I’d like to understand why his war seems too damned familiar.

  I’m here because patriotism has begun to feel like grief. Back home, we Americans can’t talk honestly about the wars we’re fighting now—not without fighting each other. So I’m traveling across old battlefields, trying to connect our present to our past.

  The statues and cannon all around me are fixtures of a historic park, a battlefield monument that has seen better days. There are breaches in the retaining walls that terrace its steep slopes. The narrow cement walkway threading the crest, lined with colored stones and artillery shells, breaks down, here and there, into ankle-twisting chunks. Tiled birdbaths are cracked and dry. Some guns are rusty, and the outbuildings downslope—little picnic pavilions and shelters—are graffitied, weatherbeaten, and weary.

  Nevertheless, it’s a high and breezy open space, a luxury in a city with a chronic housing shortage. Daytimes, the park is a playground for kids from the neighborhood’s anthill apartment blocks. As evening draws near, the park attracts young lovers, whose murmured conversations and preliminary caresses stake claim to roofed-over picnic tables and choice spots under broad-kneed trees.

  The battle fought on this hill was likewise an intimate affair. For all its modernity—the newfangled machine guns and telephones, the debut of moving-picture propaganda—the War of 1898 was a drama as character-driven as the Iliad or the Bayeux Tapestry narrative. Just as Troy’s fate hung on Achilles’ sulking and England’s on Harold’s lousy luck, so the monuments on San Juan Hill remind me that here Lieutenant John Parker dashed to the rescue with his Gatling guns; there, elephantine General William Rufus Shafter snubbed his ally General Calixto Iniguez Garcia, the old man with the Cyclopean bullet hole in his forehead; up this slope charged the Rough Riders’ impetuous Colonel Roosevelt, straight on into the White House.

  Intimacy also describes the battle’s crucial result: the tortured intimacy of an unstable ménage à trois. America entered the war as Cuba’s ally, but signed a peace treaty with Spain that passed Cuba from one colonial master to another. Then, for the next half century, yanquis and Cubans, betrayer and betrayed were joined in unequal embrace, a bought-and-sold marriage coupling selfish power to abject access. The eventual, inevitable divorce was so ugly, its radioactive anger almost burned the world down.

  The century-old tragedy memorialized in the park on la Loma San Juan is familiar to almost every santiaguero in the city below. They can name its heroes and villains, explain their motives and passions, quote the telling lines. They know all about that antique double-cross because they live with the ongoing consequences.

  Yanquis do, too. But few of us know how what happened here transformed our nation.

  Most of us norteamericanos know nothing about the conflict we alone call “the Spanish-American War.” But everywhere I go in old Oriente, I see our past and present influence, especially along the roads that run east from San Juan Hill all the way to Guantánamo.

  The crowds at Guillermon Moncada Stadium remind me that yanquis helped establish the supremacy of la pelota—baseball—in Cuban sporting life. It’s easy to hear the American jazz still inspiring son de Oriente, the regional musica tipica made world-famous by the Buena Vista Social Club. Monuments everywhere recall the legendary deeds of Cuban heroes, of Antonio Maceo, José Martí, and Frank País; in plaques, statues, and thickets of bright, new barbed wire, Oriente also reflects the best and worst of yanquis such as Teddy Roosevelt, Clara Barton, and Dick Cheney.

  As the sun drops onto the spikes of the Sierra Maestra, I stand alongside a statue of a Yankee soldier. Geographically, San Juan Hill is a “height of land,” a watershed boundary. In a hard rain, drops that fall on one side of the statue—behind us, on the east side, toward the plain over which he and his fellow soldiers marched to fight for “Cuba libre!”—will eventually trickle through the dirt lots around houses and shanties, down to a creek that joins a little river making its quiet way to the Caribbean Sea.

  However, raindrops that fall in front of us—on the Santiago side—will spill down through the city and pour into Santiago Bay. That’s the prize for which this bronze Yankee’s battle was fought. The capture of San Juan Hill drove the Spanish fleet from the bay and made us Cuba’s masters.

  This narrow-spined ridge with its bittersweet view is the divide between one United States of America and another. La Loma San Juan is the hill we climbed as a republic and descended as an empire.

  Chapter 1

  FALSE FLAGS

  We were trying to lie our way into Cuba. It wasn’t working.

  We were a feminist women’s community chorus from northern New England, a fundamentalist Christian preacher from Nigeria by way of Birmingham, and me, a journalist in disguise.

  We were supposed to have left Jamaica three hours earlier, but the Commies wanted their money up front and the reverend was tapped out. The diva was frantic, the chorus was clueless, and the graybeard rasta who’d been watching us all afternoon nodded as if he could have told me: When you start from a lie, every step is a betrayal.

  And we were all lying, more or less. Under the embargo, most U.S. citizens can either be honest or travel to Cuba. Some sneak in through Canada or Mexico. Others say and do whatever it takes to squeeze through one of the embargo’s licensed loopholes. For example, a feminist chorus might strike a deal with a fundamentalist pastor licensed to lead missionaries to Cuba. And a freelance writer anxious to see Guantánamo might turn missionary, too.

  Maybe some of us crossed our fingers, for lies or for luck. Yet here we were, grounded in Kingston, all our accommodations with truth as tangled as the vines and flowers woven into Ileana’s wild nylons.

  Ileana was Cubana Airline’s go-to girl at Kingston’s Norman Manley International Airport. The job title on her name tag, “Sales Manager,” symbolized the peculiar marriage of Marx and marketing forced on Cuba since the Soviet collapse. She embodied, as well, the island’s refusal to equate professionalism with prudery: Though the nylons and short skirt spoke for small-c cubana flair, from there on up Ileana looked every centimeter the corporate cadre in her blue blazer, thin smile, and cinched-back bun. Her rigid bearing did more than her few words to press the airlines’ demand: Unless the Reverend Esau came up with another U.S. $1,100, our charter to Santiago de Cuba would never fly.

  “Lo siento,” Ileana told me: Sorry about that. But she didn’t bother backing her lie with so much as a polite moue of sorrow. She wore the turned-to-stone face that Cuban officials often use on unofficial Cubans and uppity Americans. “There is nothing I can do.”

  Still, I kept her talking, putting my artless Spanish to the trip’s first test as I tried to understand just how much trouble we were in.

  Lots, it seemed. Without a trace of sympathy, Ileana explained that Jamaica collects a head tax on departing charter passengers. Cubana would owe the money to Jamaica, and the airline had no intention of fronting the Reverend Esau Onyegoro’s Overwater Missions such a sum.

  I turned to ask Esau, in English, “You don’t have this charter-tax money?” I tried to keep my pitch level, expressing nothing at all like surprise or accusation.

  “No, William.” Esau’s shoulders slumped, a curve as soft as the contours of his kind, fleshy face. “We had all the arrangements made weeks ago,” he said, lowering his voice until he was
sure that only I could hear him through the departure lounge’s high babel. “Then the Cubans switched the date, and it was too late to change your flight here. So I booked overnight rooms in Kingston, an unexpected expense, and that required a nonrefundable deposit.

  “But then the Cubans changed the date again,” the reverend marveled, haplessly. “They say they can fly us today only! And the hotel won’t give me our money back.”

  There was something wrong with Esau’s story, but I could see that we were losing Ileana. Switching back to Spanish, I asked her whether our Cubana plane was here in Kingston, waiting for us.

  “Quizas.” Perhaps.

  Was it ready to fly?

  “I can’t say.”

  Was there a time after which it would leave Jamaica, with or without us?

  “Certainly.” She walked away, the florid nylons twining into the crowd. Turning back, I caught the reverend watching, too.

  When America meets Cuba, you can never tell who’s lying. Considering their shared centuries of snarled double crosses, it’s safe to assume the dishonesty is mutual.

  At that moment, for instance, I was wondering whether there really was such a thing as a Jamaican departing-charter head tax. And was it really $1,100, or were Ileana and the man I could see her consulting with—a sharp-featured, short guy in an ill-fitting Cubana jacket—angling after an off-the-books bonus? Who could I ask, and what would it matter? Catching the Cubans out in a fib might set the facts straight, but it wouldn’t get us to Santiago.

  And what about Esau? How had he managed to screw this up? Was he less than competent or less than honest? Problem was, we needed the Reverend Onyegoro a lot more than he needed us.

  The chorus—the earnestly named Feminine Tone—wanted to sing at Santiago’s Eighth International Choral Festival. The chorus’s Cuban-born founder and director, Maricel Lucero Keniston, wanted to see her aging aunts in Santiago and Havana. And I was hitching a ride on my way to Guantánamo, via San Juan Hill and other shrines of 1898’s “splendid little war.”