Go.
I still had work to do, but in my heart I already knew what I’d come to find.
Yanquis. If we norteamericanos left Guantánamo, if we had the courage to give it back now, despite our fear of looking weak, despite our terror of terrorism, where could we go?
Home. We could return to ourselves, to the America we were trying to be before 1898.
Since then, like a broken mirror, Cuba has preserved a thousand fractured images of her conqueror. Each likeness of us wielding money and guns to control what isn’t ours prefigures trouble we’ve brought on ourselves. Every reflection of us as we like to see ourselves—of hometown baseball, Lieutenant Hobson’s heroism, the Declaration of Independence as revered by Garcia, Martí, and Fidel—is a vision of the peace we could have known if we’d stuck to our founding principles, if we’d never denied another people the rights we cherish, if we had the courage to let others be free.
I was homesick in Havana, but it was homesickness that had taken me there. I’d gone looking for the America we’ve lost since 9/11, only to realize we’ve been lost much longer than that. Even David, who got lost trying to swim to Guantánamo, knew enough to tell me where we should go.
Home.
Yankee, come home.
Plate Section
Our Lady of Charity, Cuba’s patron saint, rescues “the three Juans” from a storm.
Thomas “Papa” O’Brien poses in a Boston photography studio after enlisting for the war with Spain. Note the painted “Cuban” backdrop. (From the author’s collection)
El Castillo de San Pedro de la Roca, familiarly known as El Morro, guards the narrow entrance to Santiago Bay. The Sierra Maestra mountains barricade the coast beyond.
Admiral William Sampson chose to blockade Santiago Bay rather than test its antiquated defenses.
José Martí, the “Apostle of Freedom,” issued the grito for the War of 1895, which he called “the necessary war.” He died in one of its first skirmishes.
Oscar Lucero Moya and his wife, Blanca, appear in the pages of a Havana newspaper describing their revolutionary exploits. (From the author’s collection)
General Calixto Garcia cooperated with U.S. troops but protested Cubans’ exclusion from the Spanish surrender. His defiant words appear on this Peace Park monument in Santiago. (William Craig)
General William Rufus Shafter had the steady character required to lead the chaotic V Corps, but his incapacitating corpulence made him a questionable choice.
Wounded yanqui soldiers receiving aid during the battles of July 1, 1898.
Ex–Confederate General Joseph “Fighting Joe” Wheeler, front left, and subordinates Colonel Leonard Wood (second from right) and Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt.
While publicity focused on Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, professional soldiers of the Tenth Cavalry (Colored) played a key—and underreported—role in the U.S. victory.
Park rangers at the San Juan Hill battlefield preside over a historic site that doubles as open space for a crowded neighborhood. (William Craig)
Elbert Hubbard’s essay “A Message to Garcia” glorified obedience to employers.
Lieutenant Andrew Summers Rowan delivered the real message to Garcia, with plenty of help from Cuban rebels.
The USS Maine enters Havana Bay on January 25, 1898. Even the U.S. consul, Fitzhugh Lee, thought her visit unwelcome and potentially incendiary.
The wreck of the Maine.
Havana’s monument to the Maine stands against the Malecón seawall, the gray Atlantic, and a sullen sky. (William Craig)
Detail of allegorical figures of the United States (left) and Cuba mourning together on Havana’s Maine monument. (William Craig)
A monument atop San Juan Hill in Santiago honors soldiers of the Seventy-first New York Regiment and all the U.S. soldiers who fought in the 1898 invasion. (William Craig)
Not far from the New York yanqui, a statue of the victorious mambi celebrates the Cuban insurrectos who fought the Spanish in the Ten Years’ War and the War of 1895. (William Craig)
Steep slopes and a determined defense led by Spanish General Vara del Rey made the U.S. assault on El Viso, the key fort at El Caney, a desperate battle. (William Craig)
United States Marines raise the flag on a hilltop overlooking Guantánamo Bay, June 10, 1898. Originally desired as a naval coaling station, “Gitmo” is now America’s most notorious prison.
After another night playing the musica tipica of Oriente, Las Perlas del Son head home through Santiago’s streets. (William Craig)
Acknowledgments
I will always be grateful to Maricel Lucero for sharing her story. It is a great privilege to have been welcomed by the Lucero family in Santiago de Cuba and Havana. I thank them all, and recognize my special indebtedness to Lilia, Yolanda, Manuel, Davíd, Yoli, and Mari. They are all heroes to me.
Yankee Come Home found form through the insight and expertise of Wendy Strothman, an agent who champions literature and a friend who champions joy. George Gibson gave this book a home and patient encouragement; I am humbled by his integrity. Jacqueline Johnson is the brilliant, honest editor of every writer’s dreams; this book would have been lost without her.
Scholars in Santiago de Cuba gave me a crash course in their city’s history. Reynaldo Cruz Ruiz was a generous tutor and a gallant host, Herbert Pérez Concepción a revelatory guide. I heartily thank the Office of the City Historian, the Museum of the Spanish-Cuban-American War, and the Museum of the Clandestine War.
I am also indebted to numerous writers and scholars in the United States, including Philip Foner, Louis A. Pérez Jr., Mark Reutter, David Carlson, María Elena Díaz, and Jualynne E. Dodson.
Among writers who offered inspiration and advice I am especially grateful to Jack Beatty, John Griesemer, Sally Brady, Laurie Horowitz, Don Metz, Allan Stam, Tom Miller, and Ben Corbett.
Nancy Marashio and my friends and colleagues at River Valley Community College know how much this work owes to their kindness and active support.
Talented colleagues at the Valley News gave this adventure an on-the-job genesis and kindly granted permission to adapt selections from stories that first appeared in that fine paper. The good folks at Seven Days in Burlington, Vermont, offered much-needed encouragement
My travels would have been impossible without the assistance of staffers from the offices of Vermont’s peerless congressional delegation. Particular thanks are due to Susan Sussman of Senator Patrick Leahy’s office, Geoffrey Pippinger and Whitney Leighton of Senator Bernie Sanders’s office, and Rachel Seelig and Patricia Coates, who work with Representative Peter Welch. Bill Stetson’s help was invaluable in government affairs.
Charlet Davenport and Isolina Palacios Gaston offered invaluable moral and practical encouragement. I am grateful to Jerry Buffa of Lemur Music and Barrie Kolstein of Kolstein Music for their gifts to the bass players of Santiago de Cuba. Thanks to Diego Moncada and Nora Pasternak for assistance in transcribing interviews. For spiritual aid I owe special thanks to Our Lady of Charity and Osain, as well as to friends Al, Chris, Thayer, and Gus.
I hope, in time, to make clear how much I appreciate my family’s love and patience on this long journey. It is my prayer that the spirit and memory of Thomas Francis “Papa” O’Brien are in no way offended by this account of his legacy. It was written with love and thanks to my mother, Eleanor Craig Green, who carries Papa’s charm in her smile. Thank you, cousins Claire Kelley, Carol Barton, and, most profoundly, Janice Fairman for genealogical work that revealed Papa and his past to all O’Briens.
The greatest blessing of this story is Brendan Duffy’s safe return from service with the Marines in Iraq. My beloved daughters Anne and Catherine, Martha and Alison made this book possible with patience and kindness.
Whatever this book understands and makes known, it owes to Kathleen Craig. I can say the same for my heart.
Notes
Chapter 1: FALSE FLAGS
“Filibustering was co
nstant and scarcely discouraged by the people of the United States”: Trumbull White, Our War with Spain for Cuba’s Freedom (Chicago: Monarch, 1898). Among the few great books on filibusterismo, Rodrigo Lazo’s Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), takes a literary approach that brings adventurers and controversies to life.
Chapter 2: SANTIAGO DE CUBA
In the cosmology of West African people enslaved in colonial Cuba, “the dead ones” are spirits, “people no longer living in a physical body”: Jualynne E. Dodson, Sacred Spaces and Religious Traditions in Oriente Cuba (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008). This superb book approaches Oriente’s supernatural reality with respect and historic insight.
… eastern Cuba is a living folk tradition, a constant revival of songs first sung by grandfathers and great-great grandfathers: Ned Sublette, Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2007). Sublette helps even nonmusicians understand what makes Oriente’s music move and sing like no other.
“Stringy, sweetly smiling, in a blue shirt and black pants, he watches over each and every one of his soldiers”: José Martí, Selected Writings, trans. Esther Allen (New York: Penguin, 2002).
The archetypal Cuban war story may be “The Murdered Puppy” … by the Argentina-born Cuban soldier, Che Guevara: Ernesto Che Guevara, Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War (Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2006).
Chapter 3: THE REVOLUTIONARY VIRGIN
The Spanish started the New World’s first Euro-style mining operation here within sixteen years of Santiago’s founding, in 1515: The city celebrates its anniversaries in reference to a July 25, 1515, ceremony by which the conquistador Diego Velasquez formally named and founded Santiago, the second settlement in Cuba. However, numerous histories insist the town got its start in 1514, before the official ceremony.
The miracle marked the holy spot, and Our Lady of Charity and Remedies of Cobre have been working miracles in her shrine there ever since: María Elena Díaz, The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves of El Cobre: Negotiating Freedom in Colonial Cuba, 1670–1780 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000). This is history at its finest, doing the work of reclaiming lost worlds. Reconstructing the history of El Cobre, Díaz shows us how the poor and powerless managed to reclaim dignity and self-determination in the holocaust of early colonial Cuba.
In any case, from historical and cultural points of view, it’s probably most important to understand that, one way or another, the cobreros created a purely Cuban saint, a patron saint of Africans and Indians: Sources for this discussion of Our Lady of Cobre’s identity include Díaz, above, Father Bartolome de las Casas’s Apologetic History of the Indies, and Irene A. Wright, “Our Lady of Charity,” Hispanic American Historical Review 5 (1922).
The development of santería and other traditions enabled Africans to weave their sustaining beliefs through the traumatic experience of slavery as integral elements of the blended black and white and Indian cultures that became Cuba: It’s hard to find books on syncretistic religions that are neither arid academic studies nor credulous devotionals. In addition to Dodson, above, readers may enjoy the overview provided by Migene González-Wippler, Santería: The Religion (St. Paul, Minn.: Llewellyn Publications, 1999).
Chapter 4: EL MORRO I
The fact that so many of the poor were swarthy, red, yellow or black just underscored the scientific basis of white superiority: Julius W. Pratt, Expansionists of 1898: The Acquisition of Hawaii and the Spanish Islands (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1936).
We sold much of the fleet, barely maintaining an eccentric assortment of decrepit steam-sail vessels and rust-scabbed ironclads: Japan’s first ironclad was the steam-and-wind-powered ram Kotetsu, which had started its seagoing life as the Confederate States ship Stonewall. Built on commission in France and launched too late to affect the Civil War, Stonewall was in Havana Bay when her captain got word of the Confederate surrender. He sold her to the Spanish, who sold her to the Union, which sold her to the modernizing Meiji government in 1869.
Nations would go on believing in the decisive potency of battleships long after they’d been rendered obsolete by submarines, aircraft carriers, and planes: Having wasted anxious decades and irreplaceable billions in the race for naval superiority that culminated in World War I, Great Britain and Germany finally discovered the same paradoxical truth that led to stalemate at Santiago. Neither side dared use its supposedly decisive dreadnought battleships to decide anything. Submarines, mines, torpedoes, and nascent airpower made them too vulnerable. The two navies’ sole fleet action, the Battle of Jutland (May 31–June 1, 1916), was brought on in part by the difficulty of explaining why their nations had paid so much for so long for weapons so useless. The fleets sallied, met, inflicted proportionally minor but terrifying losses, and parted as fast as honor would allow. The dreadnoughts went back to their bases and were irrelevant to the rest of the war.
Chapter 5: EL MORRO II
“In winter we sometimes varied these walks by kicking a foot-ball in an empty lot, or, on the rare occasions when there was enough snow, by trying a couple of sets of skis or snow-skates, which had been sent me from Canada”: Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1900).
Chapter 6: EL MORRO III
Their cell was part of a larger operation code-named la Red Avispa, which means—of all things—the Wasp Network: It’s hard not to wonder at the significance of this code name. Does it imply that Santiago fans have more clout in Cuban intelligence than Havana rooters? Or could it mean that, as so often in Cuban history, people from Oriente are doing the dirty work while the capital calls the shots?
Their job was to report on terrorist or terror-supporting groups such as the Cuban-American National Foundation, Alpha 66, and the F4 Commandos: It’s easy to sympathize with Cubans who chose not to participate in the Revolution’s turn to the left and took refuge in the United States. Still, no matter how legitimate their grievances, we call folks who declare their own private wars on other countries or systems and conspire in violent attacks “terrorists.” Alpha 66, for example, states publicly that its purpose is to make commando raids on Cuba. It has been illegal to conduct such activities in the United States for more than two hundred years. That these terrorist groups are allowed to collect arms, raise funds, and train in post-9/11 America is remarkable.
The bill also calls on the president to persuade the United Nations to adopt the U.S. embargo and implement sanctions that would cut Cuba off from the entire world: Coming from Jesse Helms, the senator who blocked the United States’ payment of its U.N. dues, this hopeless proposal must be appreciated as a ploy to make the United Nations look still worse to angry conservatives. Or perhaps it was an example of Helms’s sense of humor: In 1993 he amused himself by whistling “Dixie” to Carol Moseley-Braun, the first black woman senator.
Until Barack Obama lifted the ban in 2009, the United States was the world’s only industrialized nation demonizing foreigners infected with HIV: Helms also was a vehement opponent of the 1990 Ryan White Care Act, a program to provide health care and support for people living with HIV/AIDS, despite the bill’s association with White, a hemophiliac diagnosed with AIDS at age thirteen. Though White contracted HIV from blood transfusions, Helms persisted in opposing any intervention in the nation’s HIV/AIDS epidemic on the grounds that people with AIDS were suffering as punishment for their “deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct.”
Presidents and senators and representatives can always point across the Straits of Florida and earn cheap strong-on-defense points by accusing Cuba of drug smuggling, terrorism, and plotting invasion: While it’s impossible to prove a negative, common sense makes it hard to believe perennial allegations that Cuba is smuggling drugs, sponsoring terrorist attacks on America, or plotting attacks against South Florida.
Cuba looks nothing like
the hemisphere’s big drug-smuggling nations. Drug-dealing nations are everything Cuba is not: fractured, violent, unstable, easily penetrable by any thug or foreign agency with a big bribery budget. If Cuba were an important player in the narco game, there’d be no keeping it a secret. (Do we have to guess whether Mexico or Colombia have drug problems?) And why would any drug cartel partner with Cuba? If you want to get drugs to the world’s biggest market—that’s us—would you transship through the only nation on the planet under U.S. embargo? Finally, Fidel’s no Manuel Noriega. He’s not dumb enough to give the United States a convenient excuse for invasion.
It’s amazing that U.S. leaders can still scare voters with talk of Cuban-sponsored terrorism or Cuban military attacks on U.S. territory. The United States didn’t hesitate to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. Even if Cuba were the least bit inclined to hurt the United States, it would be suicidal to do so. Why do we worry about Cuba attacking the United States? A guilty conscience is never at peace.
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