Yankee Come Home

by William Craig

  Everyone watched as José’s movements became sweeping and powerful, strides and strokes. Then he jerked, shuddered, and left us entirely, replaced by a someone who announced, “¡El hombre llega!”

  The man is here.

  We chanted it back to him—¡El hombre llega! ¡El hombre llega!—as he became magnificent and calm, supremely confident, a thundering king.

  Changó moved around the room, stopping to prophesy for each family, each couple, each lone seeker. He chastised some, teased others. Sometimes the shaman spoke in florid, cryptic symbologies, which his listeners tried to memorize for future interpretation. It was lovely and terrible to see the faces of anxious parents pushing their children forward, waiting in fear or hope for the orisha’s bad news or blessing.

  Changó came to me early on. He breathed fire, smoke, and rum into my face and told me he could see my family of birth as four mountains, one for each sibling. Then he asked me how many brothers and sisters—her-r-r-r-rmanos y her-r-r-r-r-manas—I have, or have had.

  He was right, of course. We were four, until my sister Ann’s death in 1987. She, too, was a shaman—a title she preferred to “emcee” or “performance artist,” default descriptions of her role in the East Village art and club scene. She liked to think her shows were healing rituals, sacraments of familial inclusion for men and women far from home, the gender-bending avant-garde cast out of small towns and suburbs, exiled to the wilds of Alphabet City. She, too, believed that intoxicants could erase the walls between worlds.

  He was right about all that, so I didn’t know what to make of the rest. He declared me a man of marvels, a very good man. I knew that wasn’t true, but Changó’s presence was undeniable. Meeting his eyes was exhausting. He’d claimed the future, blessed the present, and touched on the never-dead past.

  Prophecies received, many families headed home. Manuel began to follow José around, tending to the man possessed, making sure Changó didn’t do any damage. After another half hour of divine outbursts and ingestions, they were seen no more. The band started up again, and rather than dance, the remaining crowd sat and sang. I shared a rickety chair with Yasel, who stared at the drummers as if they were gods—which they may have been by that late hour.

  We sang for Changó, and Isolina was surprised that I knew so many of the words. I sent a message of thanks to Baba. The drummers thrilled me, playing polyrhythms I’d never heard or imagined, headstrong beats that warred with the pulse, married it in passionate flurries, and made war again.

  The lead drummer still didn’t like me, and when he passed around the campanela—a mattock head, the traditional bell used in Changós songs—he deliberately passed me by. The rusty mattock was passed from lap to lap, but no one could keep the beat against the drummers’ challenge. Finally the bell landed in my lap, and I played the rhythm just as Baba taught us long ago. Ko ko ko ko-ko, ko, Changó’s insistent, crowing call.

  Everyone was happy except the lead drummer, who played hard against me, trying to shake the pattern. I held on until he stopped, took the campanela from me, and handed it to the lady in the next chair, who didn’t want it at all.

  It was time to go home.

  Chapter 12

  UNKNOWN SOLDIERS

  The office of the city historian is downhill from the Parque Cespedes, on a street corner that was the site of Cuba’s first cathedral. After the church, Santa Catalina, was destroyed by an earthquake in 1528, the lot was occupied by a hospital for more than a century; then, in 1828, the governor-general ordered the construction of a prison. The lockup wasn’t completed until 1845, but it was built for keeps, with walls so thick that windowsills on the ground floor are much deeper than my arm can reach.

  It had to be solid, to hold hundreds of men at a time. In 1867. a riot by more than two hundred prisoners, including some revolutionaries, was put down with fourteen executions. Most of Virginius’s crew were held here through tense months in 1873, when street feeling was so outraged that Spanish authorities must have prayed the walls would prove as good at keeping Cubans out as they had at keeping them in.

  What was a security measure in the mid-1800s is an energy-saver today; all that masonry helps keeps two stories of offices, classrooms, archives, and reading rooms a few blessed degrees cooler than narrow, sun-blind Aguilera Street. A single fan in any of the rooms off the central atrium seems to do more good than an air conditioner in some other Santiago public buildings.

  Still, it was demasiado calor, plenty hot when I visited on a late June day, even in the city historian’s upstairs corner office, where Jorge lifted a battered cardboard box from an elaborately carved case and brought it over to his absent boss’s desk. I was sweating hard, pulling my sticky shirt away from skin and flapping it, but the effort only seemed to make me hotter. Juan Manuel looked thoroughly cool, despite his excitement over the box’s contents.

  “Mira,” he said, unfolding the dusty flaps and revealing a jumble of bones. “At first it was a criminal investigation. When these bones were revealed by weather and time, the police thought there might have been a recent murder. Things rot fast here, and a body can be reduced to a state that looks a lot like this very quickly. But then they looked closer, and they called us.”

  Like his colleagues at the office, Jorge is a historiador, but he’s also an archaeologist, so he was the one who went to see the bones and the one who eventually brought them back to the Office of the City Historian.

  “The site is about where the fighting was fiercest on El Caney,” Jorge said. “We don’t know who it is, but it could be an American soldier. But it’s right where the Spaniard commanding El Caney, General Vara del Rey, was last seen. And his body has never been found.”

  The bones were stained from years in the burnt-sienna soil. Dirt still clung to some of the ribs, vertebrae, and arm and leg bones all mixed up in the box; at the bottom, hand, foot, and other little bones rested in fine red-brown silt. I felt as if I were staring into a portable, cardboard grave. The ends of bones had worn away to reveal a porous pith, like fossilized sponge. Jorge lifted a yellow plastic grocery bag and said, “El cráneo.” The bag was semi-opaque, but its flimsiness revealed the shallow bowl shapes of pate and brow bones, the crook of a jaw.

  Mesmerized, I stared but didn’t touch. Jorge might not have objected, but my curiosity was overruled by an unexpected superstition or scruple: I felt that the bones should be handled as little as possible, and only by those who could read them. Since my touch couldn’t contribute a speck of knowledge to the dead man’s identification, I had no right to touch. It would have been disrespectful.

  The idea of respect broke the spell for a moment, making me self-conscious and aware of my surroundings again. Without thinking, I had put my dusty camera bag down on the city historian’s desk. Olga Portuondo Zuniga is a formidable scholar and author whose work has helped shape Santiago’s—and the nation’s—Revolutionary identity. Her handsome, high-ceilinged office is decorated with paintings in styles that vary from an abstraction of yearning figures to a surreal vision of a naked man with an umbrella contemplating the cathedral from Parque Cespedes. The third painting is a larger-than-life portrait of Santiago himself, St. James, the city’s patron saint, hanging behind the city historian’s chair. This canvas is done in a folk-art style and shows the saint as santeros see him, as an avatar of the orisha Oggún, whose many attributes and powers identify him with hard work, justice, righteous war, and iron. In this painting, Santiago wears the broad-brimmed hat of a peasant—or a mambi liberation fighter—and carries his great sword, symbolic of his martyrdom by King Herod and his triumph over evil. It’s a potent image of the city, its spiritual strength and, by its placement, of the power of the city historian. I hadn’t met Olga Portuondo Zuniga, but I got the message and moved my bag off her desk and onto the floor.

  Jorge was clearly excited by the idea that these bones could be those of the gallant Spanish general who commanded the defense of El Caney, a village in the foothills of the Si
erra de la Gran Piedra about three miles northeast of Santiago. On July 1, 1898, General Shafter divided his V Corps into two wings, sending one of his three divisions north to ward off any moves against the rear of the divisions attacking Santiago. In the aftermath of the July 1 fighting, U.S. reportage focused on the heroes of the attack on Santiago, with its climax at San Juan Hill. Spanish and Cuban imaginations focused on the image of Vara del Rey—a soldier who’d battled the mambises for three years, scoring significant victories, only to go down fighting the yanqui juggernaut.

  The historical record insists that the general fell in the battle’s last moments, shot through both legs just after he’d shouted, “¡Salvase quien puede!” “Save yourself if you can!” Stretcher bearers took him up, but before they could get far the general was shot through the head. The next day, his remains were said to have been positively identified by Spanish officers before American soldiers buried him in a shallow grave. A Spanish commission recovered his body months later, and it was transported back to Spain for a hero’s interment.

  However, rumor and a dissenting few voices testified that the general’s body was lost, the commission deceived. The mystery—if it is mystery, and not just a persistent shred of the fog of war—seems about as consequential as claims that George Armstrong Custer survived the Little Bighorn, but it has never quite been dispelled. Jorge was, apparently, a believer.

  “Look at these buttons,” he said. “For now, they’re our only clue.”

  They were brass, as weathered and dirty as the bones. “We don’t know who they belong to,” he said, meaning which side. It was obvious to me—there’s Columbia’s shield, there’s the eagle—but then, I’d been to scores of U.S. history museums. American military uniforms weren’t Jorge’s specialty, and I realized that he and his colleagues couldn’t do what scholars almost anywhere else in the world would have done weeks earlier: Google something like “button 1898 ‘u.s. army,’” click on “Images,” and solve the problem. Cubans don’t have that kind of Internet access. Sometime soon, perhaps, he’d be able to compare these buttons to some on display in the museo de la guerra hispanocubanonorteamericano, the Museum of the Spanish-Cuban-North American War, south of the city on the road to Siboney. Or one of its scholars would find time to make a trip to see this box of bones.

  I told Jorge that I thought the buttons were definitely from a U.S. soldier’s uniform, and we talked about what that could mean.

  It was possible, he supposed, that a Spanish or Cuban corpse could have been wrapped in an American tunic for burial. Perhaps even Vara del Rey! Or there was the possibility that a Spanish soldier, “saving himself” as the general ordered, might have taken a fallen U.S. soldier’s shirt as getaway camouflage. From what I’d read of the fighting, that seemed highly unlikely; the Americans were either too far away, enduring Spanish rifle fire, or they were too close, inside Spanish works and demanding surrender.

  It seemed much more likely that a Cuban mambi would be wearing an American shirt. The mambises were famously ragged, and many of them added cast-off yanqui clothing to their meager wardrobes. These bones could, with luck, answer a question for a Cuban family who never knew what happened to its son.

  The simplest-seeming explanation—that the man in the box was a dead U.S. soldier—wasn’t simple at all. Eighty-one Americans died at El Caney, and some 360 were wounded out of 6,600 engaged. Only one was reported missing in action. In the entire campaign, only a handful of American soldiers remained listed as missing a few weeks after the battle, and most of those seem to have been cleared up, one by one, over time.

  How likely is it that an American soldier at El Caney went missing and stayed missing?

  If this simplest explanation were true, it would mean that some family in the United States might be able to bury its almost-forgotten great-grandfather. I told Jorge that the U.S. Army has tremendous resources for identifying the remains of missing soldiers, developed in the ongoing search for Vietnam War MIAs. If the Cuban government told the U.S. Army about these bones and invited its help, this mystery might find a quick and happy ending.

  “Perhaps so,” Jorge said. He’d mention it to his colleagues. We put the box back on its shelf, and I gave him all my contact information, asking him to keep me informed of any progress.

  As far as I know, those bones are still entombed in cardboard.

  Today the village of El Caney is considered part of the municipality of Santiago. Plenty of people who work in the city live out that way, in El Caney or in houses and hamlets strung along the road, commuting in by guagua (bus) or camion (truck).

  But in 1898, El Caney was an isolated outpost. Though the city can be seen from the village, the intervening valley had been owned by the mambis since the War of Liberation began in 1895.

  Records in the city archives, stored downstairs from the historians’ offices, show that in the years 1895–98, Spanish search-and-destroy missions sallied frequently from Santiago. Outposts such as El Caney needed supplies and replacements, which could not reach them without such escort; along the way, the patrols were almost certain to find or be ambushed by mambis, most likely killing a few and suffering a few casualties in return. To the Spanish generals who represented the Spanish government’s unwillingness to let go of Cuba, the point of these exercises was the reinforcing of strongpoints and the killing of mambis. If Spain still held the cities and towns, and the enemy body count kept rising, wasn’t that winning?

  Maybe, in some other kind of war. But Cuba in 1895–98 was no different for Spain than the thirteen North American colonies had been for England from 1775 to 1783, or than Vietnam was to be for the United States from 1965 to 1973: a litany of bloody but pointless triumphs that only delayed inevitable defeat. Time and again, as the archives show, captains and colonels might “have the honor of informing” their superior officers of “glorious” and “victorious” combats that supposedly killed more rebels than Spaniards. Vara del Rey, the general who died defending El Caney against the Yankees, the one whose body was never found, led many such expeditions when he was a colonel; the archives’ crumbling pages include proud after-action reports graced by his handsome signature.

  Yet the sameness of these reports, over months and years, tells a less glorious story. As much as the generals might deny it, or be unable to see it, the significance of resupply or search-and-destroy missions wasn’t the number of enemy killed or hamlets burned or supplies captured. It was what happened when each Spanish column had expended enough blood and ammunition to make its commander worry about having enough men and bullets to make it home. Month after month, year after year, at the end of every mission, the Spaniards retired to their forts, and the insurrectos remained in possession of the country.

  That’s not winning. Even Spanish successes, such as the killings of Martí and Maceo, only increased support for the insurrectos at home and abroad. In August 1897, reinforced and at last supplied with a modicum of effective artillery, Máximo Gómez besieged the little city of Las Tunas. During the Ten Years’ War, successful resistance to the mambis had earned this bastion of Spanish loyalists a new name, Victoria de las Tunas—“Victory of las Tunas.” But “Victory” didn’t seem to prefer one side over another, and this time the mambis took the town. After Las Tunas, the Spanish started surrendering forts and towns, one by one, to rebel sieges.

  If that was winning, only pride, politics, and greed could distinguish it from losing. But those items are never in short supply, especially in wartime. Even as late as the fatal spring of 1898, some Spanish ministers and newspapers were promising a quick finish to the rebellion, saying an army of ignorant blacks could never defeat imperial Spain. Loyal—or at least white—Cubans were sure to rally. The rebellion could not exist without the aid of domestic traitors and foreign meddlers. Past policies might have failed, but the latest combination of combat strategies and political concessions was certain to divide and conquer Cuba’s so-called patriots, just as Zanjon had in 1878. Victory was near.<
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  Far from dispelling such Spanish fantasies, the United States’ intervention gave them new life. Congress’s declaration of war treated Spain to a shot of that intoxicating but spurious unity familiar to nations newly under attack. Predictably, imperialists were joined by many of their opponents in declaring that the American outrage “changed everything.” Demands for an end to partisan bickering effectively silenced debate about questions that were, if anything, more urgent than ever: Why was Cuba in revolt? Could a counterinsurgency succeed? What is the cost of empire, and who pays it? Who benefits? The United States’ interference absolved Spanish politicians and generals of responsibility for all past mistakes, putting Spain in the right again. Surely the righteous would prevail.

  Walking back into town, I stopped at the Hotel Melía to check for faxes or e-mail from the Reverend Esau Onyegoro and Overwater Missions. No OFAC license extensions, and not a word. But there was news from home, in an e-mail from my mother. My stepbrother Peter was making a brilliant recovery from brain surgery. And Papa O’Brien had lied about San Juan Hill.

  Peter’s news was wonderful. Credit for his recovery went to Peter and the doctors, but I thanked Nuestra Señora de la Caridad y Remedios del Cobre, Our Lady of Charity, anyway. It’s wrong to ask for a blessing and not say thanks when it arrives.

  The news about Papa lying simply made sense. My mother had forwarded a few facts from our cousins’ genealogical research. Thomas Francis O’Brien had been a secretive man, but a baptismal certificate had led to a church, to cemeteries, census records, and muster rolls. What I read—there in the hotel, and more fully back home, as cousins contributed their findings and memories—was sad, but it made many other things begin to make sense at last.

  Almost all of the little we knew about my great-grandfather dated from the years after he started a family with Maria Louisa Botana. Known to her grandchildren as Mother Mamie, Maria was a Spanish beauty with a glossy black braid hanging all the way down her back. She was one of eleven children born to Joseph and Louisa Maria Botana, immigrants from the impoverished countryside near Gibraltar who had come to the United States to cook for a living. Joseph was a chef. Louisa may not have worn the title, but her cooking was fine enough to win her every-summer employment at Theodore Roosevelt’s mansion on Sagamore Hill.