Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba

by Gjelten, Tom

  As they began searching, Elvira stood off to the side, her stern expression betraying no trace of the terror she felt inside. Tall and sturdily featured, with long, thick, black hair clipped behind her head, she projected elegance, seriousness, and strength. Turning to the police chief, she pointed to Georgina and said, almost contemptuously, “She’s the cook. Is she allowed to go to the market?” The chief hesitated, then nodded, and Georgina left the house with the incriminating letters stuffed in her bosom and under Lalita’s hat. She headed straight to the house of Enrique Schueg and Amalia Bacardi and left the letters there for safekeeping.

  Though the move probably saved Emilio’s life, it did not keep him out of prison. The police claimed they found a letter signed by Tomás Estrada Palma, a longtime Cuban exile who took charge of the revolution’s business in New York after the death of Martí. Emilio was hauled off to the Santiago prison, where he was held incommunicado pending further investigation. His imprisonment left thirty-three-year-old Elvira at home with seven children. Under such circumstances, most Cuban wives would have retreated quietly to the privacy of their homes, tending to their children, deferring to other males in their families, and doing nothing that would call attention to themselves or further jeopardize their husbands’ position. Elvira Cape, however, was an uncommon woman. Born into wealth and possessing the confidence and poise that good education and international travel conferred on a woman of her era, Elvira saw no reason to take cover behind her family. She shared Emilio’s commitment to the struggle for Cuba’s freedom, and after he was arrested she resolved to continue his correspondence with the rebels, in spite of the risks to herself and her family.

  The arrival of Elvira’s first messages left the rebels wondering who had written them. One Cuban officer who chronicled his war experiences wrote that the commanders in his camp were deeply discouraged by the news of Emilio’s arrest and wondering how they would survive without him. Shortly thereafter, a messenger arrived with a new package of coded letters. One appeared to be signed “Phocion,” the pseudonym Emilio had used. “This surprised us,” the commander wrote. “How could Phocion have written us while he was imprisoned in Santiago? Had the Spaniards gotten Bacardi to write that letter to us as part of a trap they were preparing for us?” Once they had carefully decoded the letter, however, the commanders saw that it was signed “Phociona,” the feminine counterpart of Phocion. There was no additional clue to the writer’s identity, but it contained the same kind of news and instructions that Emilio had been sending.

  A portrait of Elvira from this period shows her well dressed, with jeweled earrings dangling from her ears and a long-sleeved black dress with a white lace neckline. But she is unsmiling, and her piercing gaze suggests she is not a woman to be crossed. Like her husband, who disapproved of Santiago’s raucous carnival festivities, Elvira was not much of a partygoer. Her sister Herminia later said Elvira did not like to dance, which for a Cuban is almost unthinkable. “She used to say she didn’t want any man grabbing her by the waist, smelling her breath, and twirling her like a top,” Herminia recalled.

  But Elvira was devoted to her husband, and the correspondence between them during Emilio’s imprisonment shows they both felt the pain of their separation. After a few weeks, a military judge in Santiago released Emilio from solitary confinement and allowed him and Elvira to exchange written communication. Over the next months, Emilio wrote Elvira a note almost every day, using whatever materials he could scrounge. A brown paper bag, torn in pieces, would give him paper for a dozen or more brief notes. Elvira was Emilio’s link to the world, and he often asked her to bring him things: a candle and a box of matches, shoe polish, even some sherbet. (“I’m not dying for it, but if you send some, better to send milk than fruit.”) Their anniversary came and went (“9 years? Hombre, how outrageous to have it ruined like this!”), but Emilio was always looking ahead. (“I am fine. I hope you are the same. One day more. Adelante.”) All the notes ended the same way: Besos y abrazos. Kisses and hugs.

  Emilio’s prison notes to Elvira highlight his remarkable powers of discipline and will. Never does he despair. This is a man who is in his second extended imprisonment, and he has no clue when it will end. Months earlier, he has lost a beloved teenage son. His eldest son is somewhere with the Cuban rebel army, wounded once already and in almost constant combat. But every note to Elvira is determinedly upbeat. Paciencia y paciencia, he tells her, over and over again.

  Notable is the absence of any reference to God or prayer or faith. Emilio is a rationalist, appealing always to logic and reason, a tendency he shows throughout his adult life. He clearly has a sentimental side, especially evident where his children are concerned, about whom he inquires daily. But Emilio Bacardi Moreau is also a proud and stubborn man, and in his prison letters he shows a prickly side of his personality that will come out many times again in his business and political life. When the Spanish prison warden tightens security and puts all the inmates behind an extra set of bars, Emilio is furious and refuses to allow anyone to visit, even his wife. “During visiting hours, I will close my door,” he warns Elvira. “Pretend I am on a trip. I swear to you, it would disgust me, more even than this prison itself. It would be to descend to their depths. Remember what I have always said: All we have is our dignity and our honor.”

  Emilio remained in the Santiago prison for nearly five months. His case in the meantime was turned over to Valeriano Weyler, who was showing no mercy toward anyone suspected of sympathizing with the revolution. (Shortly after taking command in Cuba, Weyler instituted a policy of forcibly moving the rural population into nearby fortified cities, in order to separate the rebels from their civilian supporters.) After considering Emilio’s fate for three months, Weyler decided that he should be deported and sent back to the prison in the Chafarine Islands off the African coast. The order to move him came on October 19. Emilio was taken from his cell that night and put aboard a steamship waiting in the Santiago harbor. Elvira had time only to send him a flower, with this note: “Whatever our fate may be, we have planted our path with flowers, and may our children reap the riches of what we have made.” Emilio had the note with him that October night as he sat wedged between two police officers in the coach that carried him through the dark and empty streets of his hometown.

  The steamer left at 6 A.M. the next day for Havana, slipping out through the fog that hung over Santiago Bay. Emilio and another prisoner were put to work swabbing the deck and then left in handcuffs, propped against the ship’s forward hatch. The voyage to Havana took four days. The prisoners were each given an old tin cup, a plate, and a spoon with which to eat their daily meal, though they had no water to wash themselves or their utensils, and each day the sweat and grime and smell was a little thicker. Emilio, ever mindful of his dignity, used his handkerchief to wipe clean his dishes, hands, and face as best he could. He was detained another month in Havana, then put aboard another ship for the voyage to Spain, during which he was tied together below deck with other prisoners, without a glimpse of sky or sea.

  Back in Santiago, Elvira found herself increasingly under pressure. The police raided her house several times, suspecting she was carrying on her husband’s conspiratorial work. Concluding that her first responsibility was to protect the children in her charge, Elvira chartered a small boat to take her and her family, including Doña Amalia, her seventy-three-year-old mother-in-law, to Jamaica. Before sailing, she passed Emilio’s secret codes to Enrique Schueg, making him the rebels’ new Santiago agent.

  In December 1896, General Antonio Maceo was shot and killed while leading a small reconnaissance team behind Spanish lines in western Cuba. The mission was highly dangerous, and most of Maceo’s aides, including Emilito Bacardi, had been forced to stay behind. Killed alongside Maceo was Francisco Gómez, the son of rebel commander Máximo Gómez.

  The loss of Maceo shook Cubans almost as deeply as the death of José Martí. Having risen from humble origins under the burden of racial preju
dice to lead his country’s revolution, Maceo symbolized their nation and its aspiration for independence. His “Protest of Baraguá,” when he refused to accept the peace terms at the end of the Ten Years’ War, had salvaged the integrity of the cause for which the Cubans had fought and would fight again. Maceo’s legendary heroism on the battlefield—he is said to have been wounded in combat twenty-seven times—and his military genius inspired the rebel army and frustrated his Spanish adversaries. Máximo Gómez, having lost his own son as well as his top general, struggled to contain himself but resolved to keep fighting. In a letter to Maceo’s widow, María Cabrales—exiled in Jamaica along with Elvira Cape and many other Cuban women—Gómez wrote, “Weep, weep, María, for you and for me both, since for this unhappy old man, the privilege of relieving his innermost grief by letting go a flood of tears is not possible.” On December 28, 1896, Gómez announced Maceo’s death in a general order: “Now the country mourns the loss of one of its most mighty defenders, Cuba the most glorious of its sons, and the army, the first of its generals.”

  Two days later, Emilio Bacardi arrived for the second time in his life on the Chafarine Islands after more than a month of being shuttled from one awful Spanish prison to another and being marched, handcuffed, in his filthy clothes through the streets of Málaga. Another prison detention lay ahead, but on that day his thoughts were characteristically patriotic:Morocco in front of me, Spain to one side, lost in the haze.... And over there, across the immense Ocean, bluer and bluer the more it looks toward the sky, Cuba; yearning and battling for her freedom ... with the flames of her fires edging the clouds with red and highlighting the colors of her flag, falling at times, but never defeated!

  Chapter 6

  The Colossus Intervenes

  The Republican Party delegates who gathered in St. Louis, Missouri, for their national convention in June 1896 were reminded every day of the fighting in faraway Cuba: Hanging prominently from the pine rafters in the convention hall was a big Cuban flag. No one objected to its placement. Cuba’s struggle against Spain was one of those easy-to-embrace causes that had broad popular support at the time and almost no opposition. An adjacent banner said “Republicanism Is Prosperity.”

  Whether the convention delegates paid much heed to the issue was questionable. The convention chairman, Charles Fairbanks of Indiana, declared in his opening address that the Cubans’ independence fight “enlists the ardent sympathy of the Republican Party,” but the line was buried deep in his speech, and the only people in the cavernous convention hall who could hear him were the newspaper reporters seated in the front row. The paramount issue at the convention was whether the United States should use silver as well as gold coinage. The silverites lost. The delegates nominated a “sound money” man, William McKinley, to be the Republican presidential candidate. The party platform approved at the convention did say the U.S. government “should actively use its influence and good offices to restore peace and give independence to [Cuba],” but it was just one plank among many. The platform also called attention to the massacres in Armenia, declared that Hawaii belonged to the United States, backed the construction of a canal across Central America, demanded tougher immigration controls, and called for better pensions for Civil War veterans.

  The Cuba plank was noteworthy largely because it suggested a possible Republican challenge to the policy of President Grover Cleveland, who was interpreting American neutrality laws as requiring the interdiction of arms shipments to Cuba from U.S. territory and the prosecution of any U.S. citizen found to be assisting the independence struggle. In Spain, outraged parliamentarians censured the Republicans for having endorsed the Cuban independence cause; Cuban-Americans were thrilled. When McKinley went on to defeat the Democratic presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan, Cuban rebel leaders hoped for a major policy change in Washington. They had been urging the U.S. Congress to recognize their revolutionary movement as a “belligerent” party, which would have put it on the same legal basis as the Spanish colonial authority and made it easier to acquire weapons.

  Among the Cubans closely following the American political developments was Elvira Cape in Kingston, Jamaica, where she was managing a large household of children and other Bacardi family members, along with her sister Herminia and other exiled Cuban friends. Elvira had a U.S. connection through her old friend Federico Pérez Carbó, who had gone to the States to recover from the gunshot wound he suffered in combat. After McKinley was elected, Elvira wrote to Pérez Carbó to ask whether he thought the new administration might bring a turn in Cuba’s fortune.

  U.S. Cuba policy at the time was one of Pérez Carbó’s chief concerns. Tomás Estrada Palma, the “chief delegate” of the exiles’ revolutionary committee, or junta, in New York, had made Pérez Carbó deputy chief of the “Expeditions Department,” which organized the smuggling of arms and volunteer fighters to Cuba. He worked out of the junta’s headquarters in a dingy building at 120 Front Street in lower Manhattan, just off Wall Street. José Martí had lived and worked there, in a cramped room on the fourth floor at the end of a dark corridor, and the building subsequently had become the center of Cuban exile activity in the city. Among the volunteers who manned the Front Street offices and prepared propaganda flyers, the mood was upbeat, but Pérez Carbó did not share their optimism. Cuba, he noticed, was barely mentioned during the presidential campaign. Already a grizzled and grumpy old-timer at forty-one, Pérez Carbó had endured a long imprisonment in Spain, he had combat experience in both revolutionary wars in Cuba, and he knew the struggle for independence would be long and hard. U.S. Navy ships were halting more than half of his arms shipments to Cuba, and by the end of 1896 their interference had made him bitter. His response to Elvira Cape’s query about the meaning of McKinley’s election could not have been more harsh.

  “You’re thinking about McKinley? Well, dear friend, let me dispel your illusions,” Pérez Carbó wrote. “Expect nothing, absolutely nothing, from these people.” After winning the election, Pérez Carbó explained, McKinley had backed away from any commitment to support Cuban independence, as had some of Cuba’s alleged friends in the U.S. Senate.

  Haven’t you seen how the clamor [for Cuba] in the press and the Congress has suddenly disappeared? This should give you an idea of how much these men are capable of doing for Cuba in her desperate fight for freedom. Fire and blood! That’s our salvation.

  In the months that followed, the McKinley administration proved to be just as opposed to granting the Cuban rebels belligerency status and just as determined to deny them arms and ammunition as the Cleveland administration had been. “There are spies all around us,” Pérez Carbó wrote to Elvira in May 1897, “watching every move we make.” Some Cubans suspected U.S. investors in Cuba had managed to convince the new administration that if a state of belligerency were recognized in Cuba, the Spanish government could no longer be held responsible for the protection of U.S. properties there. Others believed the United States was simply waiting for an opportunity to take Cuba for itself. José Martí had warned that the “Colossus of the North” could eventually be as great a threat to Cuban independence as Spain had been. Antonio Maceo, his fellow rebel leader, had agreed. “I don’t expect anything of the Americans,” General Maceo wrote to Pérez Carbó in July 1896, a month after the Republican convention in St. Louis. “We must stand on our own efforts. It is better to rise or fall without their aid than to contract debts of gratitude with such a powerful neighbor.”

  Those debts were eventually incurred, however. Cubans soon had to rethink their patriotic struggle in a new geopolitical context, facing U.S. prejudice and arrogance rather than Spanish tyranny.

  Pérez Carbó’s complaint about the diminishing U.S. “clamor” over Cuba notwithstanding, 1897 brought a surge of sympathetic reporting from the island. In some of the first examples of what would later be called human rights journalism, American correspondents described in detail the murderous reality of General Valeriano Weyler’s “reconc
entration” of Cuban civilians in tightly confined areas, with the disease and starvation it inevitably produced. The rebels’ cause remained broadly popular in the United States, and newspaper publishers such as William Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer saw a great opportunity to boost circulation: Compelling stories about barefoot Cuban rebels holding out year after year against the vastly superior Spanish army made for good reading. U.S. newspapers were soon expending considerable resources in their Cuba coverage.

  For journalistic effect, the U.S. correspondents routinely exaggerated the heroism of the rebels, the innocence of the Cuban victims, especially women, and the cruelty of “The Butcher” Weyler and other Spanish commanders. Accurate reporting in 1897 would have shown both sides to be suffering and in trouble militarily. After the death of Antonio Maceo, rebel forces were not able to continue his offensive in western Cuba, and across much of the country they were reduced to hit-and-run guerrilla actions and defensive operations. But the situation of the Spanish troops was no better. An insurrection in the Philippines had forced Spain to fight a two-front war, and Spanish forces in Cuba were overextended, exhausted, and undersupplied. A Santiago writer described what he called the “grave” situation in his city in April 1897:The Spanish army has not been paid for seven months. The troops in the streets are poorly dressed and undernourished. The hospital is full of wounded and sick soldiers. Military barracks have been turned into infirmaries, because every day there are more patients in need of attention. The local economy is in crisis. People are working in exchange for food, without getting paid. The poor people who wait outside the military gates, hoping for scraps from the soldiers’ rations, are out of luck. There are no scraps.