Yet we’d all been visiting the fort together before lunch. She’d looked a little grim, but I’d assumed she was exhausted. I certainly wasn’t going to ask her about Oscar—I’d already scheduled an interview with her aunt Lilia for tomorrow. Better, for now, not to think about things that might have happened here, in the black rooms I was passing.
And the wells. Legend insists that these shafts were convenient for dropping bodies down to splash into hidden sea caves, there to delight a tribe of sharks sustained by centuries of tyranny.
History’s prettier on the upper ramparts. There were cells here, too, but at least they had views. And most of the castle’s architectural flourishes are up here, where folks can see them. The Moorish touches include little dome-capped towers at sharp angles in the walls, one-man guard shacks offering a little shade and shelter. There’s usually an antique cannon nearby. Everyone takes pictures with these quaint shapes in the foreground and varying proportions of sierra, sea, and sky beyond.
Perhaps the most unusual views of El Morro were sketched and painted by Winslow Homer. In 1885, the great Yankee artist was forty-nine years old, nationally famous, and successful enough to have given up commercial work and build his studio retreat in Brunswick, Maine. The lifelong bachelor was even doing well enough to spend winters in the tropics, and in late February arrived in Santiago de Cuba. In a letter to a friend, he described the city as “a redhot place full of soldiers,” declaring it “certainly the richest field for an artist that I have ever seen.”
The paintings he brought back from that trip document his response to Oriente’s inspirational effects of light and shadow: the doubled glow of a sky footlit by a reflective sea, the drama of tropic sunshafts cut by mountains and clouds. His masterful watercolor technique was equal to the disparate textures and colors encountered in Santiago’s streets; he scuffed paper to mimic the visual grit of crumbling stucco, caught the bilious green trickle of sewage in a gutter, recorded the procession of saffron, russet, and purple façades down a street of decrepit mansions.
And he both sketched and painted El Morro, responding to its architectural intricacies but not avoiding the inevitable composition of guard tower, sea, and sky. Though these Cuban works are among Homer’s more obscure today, they attracted notice in their time. He hadn’t been back in the States ten days before the New York Times observed, “Mr. Winslow Homer has been a diligent student this winter of the effects of color on the Bahamas and at St. Iago di Cuba. He brings back a big portfolio of watercolor sketches, in which his well-known boldness in painting things as they are appears to great advantage.”
Homer never returned to Santiago, but he neverthless painted El Morro again, sixteen years later, and this time in oils. Searchlight on Harbor Entrance, Santiago de Cuba is a big (thirty-by-fifty-inch) nightscape version of the turret-cannon-seascape he’d sketched and painted in day-bright watercolor. This scene is moody and cryptic, with castle and cannon appearing in silhouette against indigo sky, sea and cliffs lightened only by a distant moon and wedges of searchlight beams.
In comparison to most of Homer’s famously narrative paintings of sailors, hunters, and storms, Searchlight on Harbor Entrance might seem deliberately inscrutable today—but it wasn’t in 1901, when every literate American knew how to find Santiago de Cuba on a map, and most would immediately recognize El Morro’s iconic domed turrets, even in silhouette. The Spanish-American War had ended only three years before, and key images of the United States’ first fast-film photography war were almost as familiar in their time as mushroom clouds and falling towers would be to later generations. And the one true naval battle of that war, fought in the waters south of El Morro on July 3, 1898, was being fought again in court and in the newspapers, as two admirals dueled over who had been in command at the great victory. Their war of egos was making headlines, inspiring political cartoons, vaudeville parodies, and even satirical shorts in that amazing new medium, the motion picture.
Homer’s subject was nothing less than the beginning and the end of the Spanish-American War.
Most Americans think of the War of 1898 as beginning with the destruction of the USS Maine in Havana Bay and ending with Teddy Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill.
That’s all most of us know, a story as recognizable and reductive as a well-designed corporate logo. But the story seemed far more complex to the Americans, Cubans, and Spaniards who lived it, its antecedents and effects stretched over centuries and seas.
American devotees of Manifest Destiny claimed that the United States’ war with Spain over Cuba had been part of God’s plan since the Creation. Why else would He place a great, fertile island at the tip of a continent’s pointing finger?
Students of political history might believe that war began when Thomas Jefferson lusted for Cuba in his heart, or when James Monroe made a doctrine of U.S. hegemony in the Western Hemisphere.
If not that far back, then surely war was inevitable by the 1850s, when Cuba’s trade with the United States was one third of its total foreign trade, greater than the island’s trade with Spain. Of all ships entering Cuban ports between 1851 and 1855, more than half flew the Stars and Stripes. Of the 388,000 tons of sugar the United States used in 1856, Cuba’s vast sugarcane plantations supplied 372,000. Even as leadership in world sugar production shifted to German and Austrian beet sugar in the 1880s, the United States remained profoundly dependent on Cuban sugar, thanks to a politically powerful “Sugar Trust” that controlled Stateside sugar refining and—by consuming the lion’s share of Cuban cane sugar—dominated the island’s economy.
By 1897, U.S. Ambassador to Spain Stewart Lyndon Woodford could confess to his British counterpart that Cuba’s sugar was “as vital to our people as are the wheat and cotton of India and Egypt to Great Britain.” Note that India and Egypt were conquered territories. Great nations don’t like being dependent on commodities they don’t control.
One reason the United States refrained from seizing Cuba until the very end of the nineteenth century was convenience. In 1882, U.S. Consul Ramon O. Williams noted that “Cuba is already inside the commercial union of the United States. The whole commercial machinery of Cuba depends upon the sugar market of the United States.” In effect, we yanquis already owned the island, but Spain still had the burden of administering it, policing it, and providing the subminimal services that had typified Spanish colonial policy since 1492.
The Ten Years’ War demonstrated Cuban insurgents’ willingness to wage economic war. Starting in Oriente, they began burning cane fields and sugar mills, coffee plantations and tobacco farms, as well as shutting down mines and blocking the roads and railroads that brought goods to market. American property and investments in Cuba suffered throughout the long struggle, but the Grant administration honored early Republican Party scruples about Democratic imperialist adventures such as the Mexican War.
By the time the Cuban revolution reignited in 1895, however, the parties had switched places. During Grover Cleveland’s two administrations, the Democrats concentrated on civil service reform and domestic matters while deploring filibusters and foreign entanglements. By contrast, the most energetic wing of the Republican Party committed itself, during its 1892 campaign, to “the achievement of the manifest destiny of the republic in its broadest sense.”
The solipsisms of Social Darwinism were deeply pleasing to expansionists such as Senators Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts and Albert Beveridge of Indiana. Like their friend Theodore Roosevelt, who had risen to national celebrity as a reform-minded commissioner on the New York City police board, they found it easy to believe that their lives of privilege and success were proof of the “survival of the fittest.” They did well because they did well; those who fared poorly had only themselves to blame. The fact that so many of the poor were swarthy, red, yellow, or black just underscored the scientific basis of white superiority.
Like most white Americans at century’s end, the expansionists weren’t shy about racial prejudice,
but Roosevelt was absolutely race-besotted. In his multivolume history The Winning of the West (1889–96), he comes out foursquare for genocide: “The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman. The rude, fierce settler who drove the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him.” It doesn’t matter how “horrible” the white man’s deeds are, Roosevelt writes, because “it is of incalculable importance that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black, and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races.”
The way Roosevelt and his fellow expansionists read it, Darwin’s The Descent of Man decreed white supremacy; they were only following nature’s orders. Likewise, in acting out the imperial implications of Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History, they were only doing their patriotic duty.
A naval officer and philosopher of history, Mahan declared sea power the key to political and economic survival in the modern world.
In this study and its successor The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire, Mahan analyzed colonial struggles and Napoleonic strategy, changing technologies and eternal problems of geography, concluding that control of the sea-lanes is control of the decisive advantage in competition among nations. Access to colonies, markets, and materials were the prizes enjoyed by successful competitors in peacetime, and only a strong navy could protect those assets in war. Only a large, up-to-date, and aggressive force could sink enemy warships, pounce on competitors’ merchant vessels, blockade and raid hostile coasts, deliver invasion forces to distant shores. In Mahan’s view, nations without state-of-the-art sea power had no real power at all.
Mahan’s works were published while Britain, Germany, Russia, Japan, and several other powers were pursuing the greatest arms race the world had ever known.
Germany’s naval buildup was fueled by Wilhelmine envy of British sea power and colonies. Late in becoming a unified nation, awkwardly located for the projection of naval might, Germany had been slow to get into the global game of colonization. By the time she was ready to play, in the early 1880s, all the choice spots had long since been stolen by Portugal, Spain, Holland, France, or England. German squadrons cruised the oceans like scavenging sharks, appearing wherever there was diplomatic trouble, hoping for blood in the water.
At great expense and out of perceived imperial necessity, Great Britain controlled the world’s most strategic waterways. Both Britain and Germany believed themselves to be racing for survival, forced to build ever bigger navies around ever more daunting “dreadnoughts” or lose everything—colonies, trade, and even homeland security—at the apocalyptic finish line.
Russia was trying to create a navy that could offer, if not an offensive challenge, then at least a credible deterrent to German bullying in the Baltic while also projecting power on its Pacific frontier. That put the tsar’s fleet-building program in direct competition with Japan’s Imperial Navy.
Commodore Matthew Perry’s 1853 “opening” of isolated, medieval Japan to foreign trade wasn’t so much a social occasion as a stickup. President Millard Fillmore justified the “trade mission” as a remedy to alleged Japanese mistreatment of shipwrecked Yankee whalers, who were supposedly forced to trample crucifixes and forswear their Christian faith. But these hackneyed grievances were only a cover story for the government’s true aims. “We want accommodations for fuel and a depot for our steamers,” a naval officer reported to President Millard Fillmore, “and we have good cause for a quarrel.”
Sailing into Tokyo Bay in defiance of Japan’s nearly 250-year-old policy of cultural, technological, and economic quarantine, Perry threatened to shell the wood-and-paper city into charcoal and ash if the Tokugawa shogunate didn’t accept extortionate trade agreements and allow the United States to use Japan as a way station for its exploitation of China. This was Japan’s introduction to the humiliating and destabilizing “gunboat diplomacy” that had made Western colonies of so many Asian and African nations.
By toppling feudal Japan, Commodore Perry—and the China-trade business interests represented by his cannon—had only made way for modern Japan, an amazingly adaptive and aggressive nation that made a 250-year technological leap over the next three decades. By the 1890s the Japanese were building up a fleet that could challenge any Western power in the Pacific.
The arms race had been on for decades, since the first battle of ironclad ships—the Union’s Monitor versus the Confederate Merrimack, fought to a draw in Hampton Roads, Virginia, on March 9, 1862—announced a new naval era of steam and steel. Having made the announcement, the United States dropped out of the game. In the great tradition of our prenuclear republic, as soon as the shooting stopped we allowed our Civil War armament—including the world’s greatest and most technologically advanced navy—to shrink to insignificance. We sold much of the fleet, barely maintaining an eccentric assortment of decrepit steam-sail vessels and rust-scabbed ironclads. By the early 1870s, our whole navy put together couldn’t have whupped one of the ships being built by European powers. The race we’d begun had passed us by.
Only the occasional diplomatic tiff made Americans question their naval passivity. There was the Virginius incident, for example, and a long-running “Venezuela boundary crisis,” which pitted American investment interest in Venezuela—and the credibility of the Monroe Doctrine—against English interest in the gold mines along the disputed border between Venezuela and British Guiana. Negotiations faltered now and again, and irresponsible newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic sometimes printed war talk. Yet neither mother country nor child wanted to fight, and both knew it. The United States was happy to let Great Britain pay the price of empire and play policeman to the world.
At least most Americans were. But the long peace after 1865—broken only by frontier campaigns conducted by a tiny cadre of professional soldiers—eventually gave rise to a profound boredom among many men of the post–Civil War generation. Comparing themselves to their pioneering ancestors and war-hero fathers, many young men felt cheated. This restlessness complemented the expansionist ideas of businessmen and politicians who saw the United States faced with the same problems that had caused European powers to conquer so many overseas colonies.
American industries wanted cheap access to raw materials, which would allow them to keep prices low enough to compete on the world market. American factories and farms produced far more of everything—locomotives, wheat, cloth, carpet tacks—than Americans could buy or use. Colonies could be forced to produce raw materials at prices just a bit higher than theft, and could be forced to trade only with their proprietors. Four centuries after Columbus’s discovery, colonies were also becoming scarcer than hen’s teeth. Expansionists believed that the United States needed to get into the empire game before it was too late.
Playing in that league required a navy.
Theodore Roosevelt had published his first book, The Naval War of 1812, in 1882, when he was just twenty-three. It anticipated Mahan by stressing the importance of preparedness. While scolding the Founders for neglecting defense, Roosevelt also demolished the national myth of a scrappy underdog succeeding against a superior foe. The United States won key battles on the Great Lakes because it brought more cannon to the fight. On the high seas, its handful of superior frigates prevailed in isolated actions, but they were no substitute for a strong seagoing navy. Throughout the war, the British were free to land expeditionary forces in Maryland, Virginia, Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana; they even sacked and burned Washington.
The Naval War of 1812 was an instant bestseller. Since the Virginius incident, public opinion had been trending in favor of building a new, modern navy; Roosevelt’s book benefited from the trend and gave it a new, powerful impetus. His well-researched, iconoclastic interpretation of the war started debates in the popular press and scholarly journals; the War of 1812 often served as little more than
an icebreaker for blazing arguments about present policy.
In a preface to the book’s third edition, Roosevelt accused Thomas Jefferson and James Madison of “criminal folly” in failing to prepare for war, especially on the nation’s northern border. Bringing his criticism up to date, he noted—with obvious annoyance—that the United States “are still hemmed in by the Canadian possessions of Great Britain,” but “there is now no cause for our keeping up a large army; while, on the contrary, the necessity for an efficient navy is so evident that only our almost incredible shortsightedness prevents our at once preparing one.”
The Naval War of 1812 proved such an antidote to “shortsightedness” that it was adopted as a textbook by the Naval War College, which was established in 1884—one year after the Brazilian acquisition of a British-built battleship, Riachuelo, made Brazil the dominant naval power in the Western Hemisphere. In 1886, the Navy determined that a copy of the book should be on board every ship in the service.
When William Hunt, navy secretary to the Garfield and Arthur administrations, called the roll back in 1881, he found only seventeen iron-bodied ships, fourteen of which were Civil War veterans. Another thirty-seven wooden-hulled vessels, ranging from tiny sloops to frigates, would still float, but they hardly mattered. In December 1882, Hunt, Congress, and a new Naval Advisory Board authorized the building of four new ships that were supposed to form the nucleus of a new, steelhulled navy.
It was hardly an ambitious program, calling for three “protected cruisers” and a slender dispatch boat. Yet by early 1885, when President Grover Cleveland replaced Hunt with William C. Whitney, only the dispatch boat Dolphin was complete and awaiting sea trials. The contractor, John Roach & Sons, was one of the nation’s biggest employers and by far its busiest shipbuilder. Proprietor John Roach was also a prodigious Republican Party contributor, a fact that some critics felt explained the Navy’s marked reliance on John Roach & Sons. Cleveland was the first Democratic elected president since James Buchanan in 1856. Whitney felt justified in investigating the Roach contracts and questioning the whole program.
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