by Alec Waugh
Every battery in the harbour opened fire on him; the steam launch of the New York, which had followed to pick up survivors, was forced to retire. The rudder and stern anchor of the Merrimac were shot away. It was impossible for Hobson to anchor her where he had intended. The ship drifted past the narrow neck.
Hobson and his crew had been instructed to leap from the deck as soon as the ship began to sink, and make for the row boat, but the fire was so intense that he felt that it would be unwise for them to show themselves. He therefore ordered his men to lie on their faces on the deck, to go down with the ship, and when they were flung to the surface out of the whirlpool of eddying waters, to swim to the life raft. By a combination of luck, tenacity and skill, every man reached the raft, where they lay waiting for the daylight.
In every particular the mission failed, but its execution was the most dashing exploit of the war. It fired the imagination of the public on both sides. In the quick-risen daylight of the Antilles, Hobson saw a steam launch bearing men in uniform. He shouted to it, ‘Is there an officer on board to receive the surrender of prisoners of war?’ The officer on board was Admiral Cervera. Later in the day, Cervera sent under a flag of truce a message to the American admiral, announcing the safety of Hobson and his crew. ‘Daring like theirs,’ he wrote, ‘makes the bitterest enemy proud that his fellow men can be such heroes.’ *
The excitement in America was prodigious. Hobson became a national hero. He was tall and handsome, with elegant moustaches. On a subsequent lecture tour, young women flung their arms round his neck. In Denver he was kissed by three hundred debutantes, and a brand of chocolate called ‘Hobson’s Kiss’ was put upon the market. Many years later, Hobson remarked cryptically that the man was unfortunate who tasted success too young.
It would have been better for Cervera if Hobson’s mission had been successful. A few weeks later, in accordance with instructions from Madrid, he slipped out of the harbour, to meet destruction in the open seas. As one of his ships went down in flames, the crew of an American ship began to cheer. Their captain stopped them. ‘Don’t cheer. There are men dying there.’ The traditions and courtesies of chivalry had not yet died.
It was in keeping with her history that the United States should be readier to go into action with her fleet than with her army. In most peace-loving countries the general staff opens a new war in terms of the tactics of its predecessor. Under the compulsion of the press, to the slogan of ‘Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain’, recruits rushed to the colours, but there were few arrangements for their accommodation; there was a shortage of arms, barracks, uniforms; there was no training cadre, but the national spirit of enterprise was in the ascendant. Theodore Roosevelt was at the time Assistant Secretary to the Navy, and his duties clearly lay in Washington, but he was not the man to sit at a desk in wartime; his spirit called him to the battlefield. He resigned his post and was soon busily organizing at Tampa, under the command of Colonel Wood, a body of élite troops called the Rough Riders. Wood was in his fifties; he commanded his men with a Harvard accent and a Bowery vocabulary. While the federal troops were being fitted with woollen tunics which would have provided admirable protection against the frosts of the Adirondack^, Wood asked for stable uniform, of light, dun-coloured cotton, and wide-brimmed Western hats that were admirably suited to the damp heat of the semi-tropics. The Rough Riders were handpicked. Any recruit whose stomach measurement was larger than his chest was rejected. Wood and Roosevelt welcomed Oyster Bay aristocrats when they could get them, but they wanted fighters first.
We’re rough, tough, we’re the stuff.
We wanna fight and we can’t get enough.
As a young man, Wood had served in the Confederate army, and occasionally got confused as to which war he was fighting in. ‘Come on, boys,’ he shouted. ‘We’ve got the damned Yankees on the run.’ Wood was a wangler, a débrouillard; he got men on trains that had been reserved for other troops. His Rough Riders went into action before the troops that had been earmarked for the assault, and it was at their head that Theodore Roosevelt, waving his sabre, charged up San Juan Hill.
On July 25, Santiago surrendered, and on July 26 the French ambassador sued the United States for peace, in the name of Spain.
As the clouds of war dispersed, Washington found itself faced with a problem that it had not anticipated, the island of Puerto Rico, which had never until that moment presented a problem to anyone, so placidly had it followed its uneventful course outside the current of Caribbean politics. The third largest island in the Caribbean, it was for centuries one of the most neglected. It had offered no problem to the United States; it had offered no problem to Spain; it had offered no problem to itself. Yet when the United States found themselves at war with the Spaniards in Cuba, they were automatically at war with the Spaniards in Puerto Rico. So eventless had its history been that the war correspondents who hurried to the public library to ‘read it up’ could find practically nothing about it in the English language.
On sighting the harbour of San Juan Ponce de Leon had exclaimed, ‘Ah, que puerto rico!’ (‘What a rich port!’) And it was prophetic of the island’s destiny that that name should have been chosen, its subsequent importance to the Spaniards being simply its value as a port. It had no rich minerals, but the prevailing trade winds gave it a strategic value, and the citadel that had resisted Drake was strongly fortified. Though Cumberland held it for a little while, fever soon killed off his troops. During the long wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Spanish flag flew from its ramparts. It became the Gibraltar of the Caribbean. But nothing was done to develop the interior of the island. In the middle of the seventeenth century a priest was to report that, while it had many cattle farms, there were only seven sugar mills. Ginger was one of its chief commodities. It also exported tobacco and hides.
The workers were very undeveloped. The priest stated in his report that: ‘They scarcely know what implements are; they bring down a tree, principally by means of fire; with a sabre, which they call a machete, they clear the jungle and clean the ground; with the point of this cutlass, or a pointed stick, they dig the holes or furrows in which they set their plants or sow their seeds. Thus they provide for their subsistence and when a hurricane or other mishap destroys their crops they supply their wants by fishing or they collect edible roots.
‘Indolence rather than want of means makes them confine their cultivation to the level lands which they abandon as soon as they perceive that the fertility of the soil decreases, which happens very soon because they do not plough nor do they turn over the soil, much less manure it, so that the superficies soon become sterile; then they make a clearing on some mountain side. Neither the knowledge of the soil and climate, acquired during many years of residence, nor the increased facilities for obtaining the necessary agricultural implements, nor the large number of cattle they possess that could be used for agricultural purposes, nor the government’s dispositions to improve the system of cultivation, have been sufficient to make these islanders abandon the indolence with which they regard the most important of all arts, and the first obligation imposed by God on man – namely the cultivation of the soil. They leave this to the slaves, who are few and ill-fed and know no more of agriculture than their masters do. . . . Their great laziness, together with a silly, baseless vanity, makes them look upon all manual labour as degrading, proper only for slaves, and so they prefer poverty to doing honest work. To this must be added their ambition to make wealth quickly, as some of them do, by contraband trading which makes good sailors of them but bad agriculturists.
‘These are the reasons why they prefer the cultivation of produce that requires little labour. Most proprietors have a small portion of their land planted with cane, but few have made it their principal crop because of the expense of erecting a mill and the greater number of slaves and implements required; yet this industry alone, if properly fostered, would soon remove all obstacles to their progress.
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It is useless, therefore, to look for gardens and orchards in a country where the plough is yet unknown, and which has not even made the first step in agricultural development.’
At this time the capital was the only authorized port open to commerce, so that there was smuggling all along the coast.
A century later the position was very much the same. A commission sent by Charles IV in 1765 reported: ‘To form an idea of how these natives live and still live it is enough to say that there are only two schools in the whole island. Outside the capital and San Germaÿ, few know how to read; they count time by changes in the Government, by visits from Bishops, and by the arrivals of situados. They do not know what a league is. Each one reckons distance according to his own speed in travelling. The principal ones among them, including those of the capital when they are in the country, go barefooted and barelegged. The whites show no reluctance at being mixed up with the coloured population. In the towns (the capital included) there are few permanent inhabitants beside the curate; the others are always in the country, except Sundays and feast days, when those living near to where there is a church come to hear Mass. During these feast days they occupy houses that look like hen coops, which consist of a couple of rooms, most of them without doors or windows and therefore open day and night. Their furniture is so scant that they can move in an instant. The country houses are of the same description. There is little distinction among the people. The only difference between them consists in the possession of a little more or less property and perhaps the rank of a subaltern officer in the militia.
‘The priest Abberd wanted the population increased by distributing unoccupied lands among the agregades or idle hangers-on: the convicts who have served their time and do not want to return to the Peninsula, the freed slaves and deserters from ships. Their numbers are so small and the soil so fruitful that they generally have an abundance of bananas, maize, beans and other food. Fish is abundant. They are rarely without a cow or two. The only furniture they have and need is a hammock and a cooking pot. They make plates, spoons, jugs and basins out of bark. A sabre or machete is the only agricultural implement they use. They can build a house in a day or two.’
It had not, in fact, greatly altered in over a hundred years, nor was it to alter greatly in the next seventy. In 1830, a visitor, Captain Flinter, was to say:’ If some perfect stranger were to be dropped from the clouds as it were on this island, naked, without any other auxiliaries than health and strength, he might have married the next day and maintained a family without suffering more hardships or privations than fall to the lot of every labourer in the ordinary process of clearing and cultivating a piece of land.’
The leaders of society at this time were the Spanish civil and military leaders who married rich Creole women and made the island their home, as well as the merchants and shopkeepers who did not marry and who returned home as soon as they had amassed sufficient money. The tradesmen and artisans were Creoles. In addition, there were a number of adventurers who came and went. There were also a quantity of ex-convicts who settled with their coloured families. It was probably on account of them that Puerto Ricans enjoyed at this time a bad reputation in the French and British islands. Horse racing and gambling were their chief amusements. In San Juan there was a gambling house in every side street. ‘Let them gamble,’ said one of the magistrates. ‘While they are at it, they will not worry about politics, and if they ruin themselves it is for the benefit of others.’
The descendants of the early settlers who had spread through the interior had cleared themselves pieces of marshland that no one wanted. The peasants, called Jibards, were sickly and anaemic in consequence of the insufficient quantity and innutritious quality of their food and the unhealthy conditions of their homes. Rice, plantains, sweet potatoes, maize, yams, beans, salted fish composed their diet. They wore no shoes; their damp clothes dried on their backs. Their two-roomed rectangular huts, raised on posts two feet from the ground, were made out of cane, trunks of coconut palm, bark of trees. They were racked by fever. They usually had many children.
‘Civil in their manners,’ Captain Flinter was to continue, ‘they are so acute in their dealings that they are sure to deceive a person who is not very guarded. Although they would scorn to commit a robbery yet they think it only fair to deceive or over-reach in a bargain. Like the peasantry of Ireland, they are proverbial for their hospitality and like them they are ever ready to fight on the slightest provocation. They swing themselves to and fro in their hammocks all day long, smoking their cigars or scraping a guitar. The plantain grove which surrounds their houses and the coffee trees which grow almost without cultivation afford them a frugal subsistence. If, with these, they have a cow and a horse, they consider themselves rich and happy. Happy indeed they are; they feel neither the pangs nor the remorse which follow the steps of disappointed ambition nor the daily wants experienced by the poor inhabitants of northern regions.’
Puerto Rico was a garrison, no more and no less than that; a fact that explains the distinctive nature of its population. Only a small proportion of its natives have marked African features – the crinkled hair, thick lips and nose – that you will find in Guadeloupe, Antigua and Jamaica. The average Puerto Rican has a darkish skin, but straight black hair and delicate European features. This cannot be due to the original Indian strain, for here, as in Hispaniola, the Indians were eliminated within a few years of the occupation. Very few Spanish women came out during the first decades, and it must have been with imported Africans that the Spanish troops formed their alliances. But as the plantation system was not developed, the number of slaves imported was limited to the needs not of an agricultural community but of a garrison. Its population in 1765 was thirty thousand, of whom only five thousand were slaves. In consequence, the Spanish strain predominated over the African.
Puerto Rico was always given favoured treatment. Its value was not to be assessed in terms of a credit and debit balance sheet. Spain did not expect it to pay dividends. Its value lay in the protection that it gave her shipping. Its successive governors appear to have been more liberal than those which were appointed to Peru and Mexico. It was not till 1815 that Puerto Rico was raised to the status of a colony.
From this time on her population and prosperity increased. Hither, as to Cuba, came many of the landowners from South and Central America who wanted to retain their links with Spain. Sugar was planted. Relations with Madrid were cordial. There was little civil disorder, little resentment against the government. In 1870 Puerto Rico became a province of Spain. In the very year that the Spanish-American war broke out, Spain, through the diplomacy of Luis Muñoz Rivera, the father of the governor who in the late 1940s launched ‘Operation Bootstrap’, was on the point of ratifying a constitution that granted the colony a high measure of autonomy. The majority of Puerto Ricans were as contented with their lot as any group of mortals in an imperfect universe. They had no particular wish to become Americans, but they had no alternative. Spain had no longer any standing in the Caribbean. The island could not be administered from Madrid. It could not stand on its own feet. It could not federate in a joint parliament with Cuba. It had to come under the protection of the United States. The caprice of history had ordained for Puerto Rico a surprising destiny which is still very far from settled.
An armistice was declared at the end of July, but it was not till the end of the year that peace was signed. Under the best conditions, Spaniards are leisurely negotiators, and there were many points at issue. It was recognized from the start that Puerto Rico should be handed over to the United States and that Cuba should become an American protectorate, but Spain was reluctant to cede the Philippines. The United States were adamant, however. The security of the Pacific seaboard depended on their retention; there was at this time no Panama Canal. The talks in Paris progressed slowly. Spain had much to worry her. The Carlists were causing trouble once again. The national finances were desperate. Spain had received no money for the loss of Cuba, yet
she was not relieved of the Cuban debt. The bondholders were indignant. And all the time disbanded Spanish soldiers were being landed in Málaga, penniless and homeless. Letters were written to the London Times, pleading their distress.
In Cuba itself, conditions were no more comfortable. The Cuban army, numbering thirty-five thousand, was under arms, without pay or food; it was in a disgruntled mood. Its troops had been fighting consistently for three years and intermittently for thirty, so that their flag should fly from the mastheads of Havana; instead of that, the stars and stripes were fluttering in the trade wind. Their war for freedom had become the Spanish-American War. They were delighted to see the Spaniards go, but this was not quite what they had wanted. In the meantime they were hungry.
Moreover, the maintenance of order in Havana itself was proving difficult. The Spanish police, like the married Spanish officers, were exiled from their homes, without their savings and without their wives and families. The city police – a force recruited from the Cubans – was disbanded under tumultuous circumstances. They demanded their savings, which they had been forced to deposit, but no money was available. They mutinied, and a general ordered his troops to fire on them. The troops refused, and next day the troops were shipped back to Spain. There were a number of shooting affrays. Spanish soldiers stood about in pairs or wandered about in groups of eight. Toward the end of November, American troops began to arrive. On the tenth of December the treaty was signed; the take-over was fixed for the first of January.
The ceremony took place at noon. Very few people attended to watch the control of Cuba being handed over to the US general. It was not what the Cubans had wanted when they went to war, but they accepted the inevitable in a spirit of acquiescence. The Spanish residents remained indoors. The royal flag of Spain was lowered, the stars and stripes run up, and a salute was fired. The Spanish general retired to the throne room to bid his officers farewell. Tears were in his eyes. ‘Men, I have been in more battles than I have hairs upon my head, and my valour has never failed me except today. Goodbye. Goodbye.’ He then marched to a Spanish transport. The US military band played the Spanish royal march. The ship drew away from the quay, and the last symbol of Spain’s majesty and power passed, after four hundred years, from the area that she had found and won and ruled. The twentieth century had begun. The first volume of West Indian history had closed.
