Louis Perez, The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and Historiography (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1998)

 

Preface (excerpts)

 

Most U.S. historiography commemorates 1898 as the moment in which the nation first projected itself as a world power, whereupon the United States established an international presence and global prominence. Spanish historiography has looked back on 1898 as el desastre (the disaster)—an ignominious denouement of a five-hundred-year-old New World empire, after which Spain plunged vertiginously into decades of disarray and disorder. For Cuba and the Philippine Islands, 1898 represents a complex point of transition from colony to nation in which the pursuit of sovereignty and separate nationality assumed new forms. For Puerto Rico, the transition was even more complicated, with central elements of nation and nationality persisting unresolved well into the next century.

 

For all the importance traditionally accorded to 1898, and indeed the consensus has been one of the more notable characteristics of the historiography, generations of U.S. scholars have treated the war with Spain with ambivalence, uncertain as to where exactly to situate it: sometimes a war of expansion, other times an accidental war; an inevitable war or perhaps an unnecessary one; a war induced by public opinion or one instigated by public officials.

 

The telling of 1898—in historical discourses both popular and professional, repeated and refined—has served as a means of self-affirmation of what the nation is, or perhaps more correctly what the nation thinks itself to be. In the United States, much of what has informed the analysis of the U.S. purpose abroad has usually been derived from generally shared if often unstated assumptions about motive and intent, which U.S. scholars tend to divine as generous and well-meaning. At the receiving end, where the analysis of the U.S. purpose is measured by actions and consequences, conclusions have typically been less charitable.

 

It began, of course, with the very construction of the conflict as the ''Spanish-American War," which immediately suggested the purpose and identified the participants of the war. The representation of the war underwent various renderings—"the Spanish War," "the Hispano-American War," "the American-Spanish War"—before arriving at the "Spanish-American War." All shared a common exclusion of Cuban participation, palpable evidence of the power of dominant narratives to define the familiar and fix the forms by which the past is recovered, recorded, and received.

 

This study has to do with memory, incomplete and imperfect, transmitted and preserved in the popular and professional histories of the last one hundred years. Americans believed themselves to be benefactors of Cuba. They cherished a memory of having sacrificed life and treasure in 1898 in what they understood to be a noble undertaking in behalf of Cuba Libre, from which they perceived Cubans indissolubly linked to the United States by ties of gratitude and obligation. That this was not exactly what 1898 was about does not diminish in the slightest the resonance of those constructs. On the contrary, it has contributed to a historiography dense with contradiction and incoherence, in which historical narratives have blurred distinctions between interests and intentions, confused popular sentiment with official policy, and mistaken proclaimed objectives for actual outcomes. Much in the subsequent American understanding of the U.S. role on the world stage was influenced by misrepresentations of 1898, which in turn contributed to fashioning the purpose for which Americans used power.

 

Chapter 1: "On Context and Condition" (excerpts)

 

The United States emerged from the war as a colonial power, seizing the far-flung remnants of the Spanish empire in the Pacific and Caribbean with remarkable efficiency of effort and economy of means. Whether or not empire was the object may matter less than that it was the outcome, as the United States acquired territories in the time-honored fashion of war and conquest—responsibilities, in any event, it assumed without protestation, without hesitation. Successively the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico were seized. But it was Cuba that mattered most and, indeed, what the war was mostly about.

 

The sources of the war reached deeply into the nineteenth century. Americans began to contemplate Cuba very early in that century, mostly in the form of musings on possession, linked directly to the national concern for security and prosperity: "an object of transcendent importance to the political and commercial interests of our Union," [John] Adams proclaimed, and more: "indispensable to the continuance and integrity of the Union itself." "[Cuba's] addition to our confederacy," Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Monroe as early as 1823, "is exactly what is wanting to round out our power as a nation to the point of its utmost interest." James Buchanan thought a great deal about the implications of Cuba and gave compelling expression to U.S. concerns: "If Cuba were annexed to the United States, we should . . . be relieved from the apprehensions which we can never cease to feel for our own safety and the security of our commerce whilst it shall remain in its present condition." Several times in the nineteenth century the United States attempted to buy the island outright. James Polk offered $100 million for it in 1848, without effect. Six years later Franklin Pierce raised the purchase offer to $130 million, but with no greater success. The Grant administration also contemplated purchase, but nothing came of that project either.

 

''Permit me . . . to remark," U.S. Minister John H. Eaton explained to the Spanish minister of foreign affairs in 1838, "that while the United States are solicitous, that nothing may arise to disturb the jurisdiction of Spain over this Island, or to cause its transfer to other hands, they could not with indifference & unconcern look upon an attempt, to pass it, into the possession & ownership of another power." Minister Daniel Barringer reiterated the U.S. position at midcentury: "Our government [is] resolutely determined that the Island of Cuba should never be in the possession of any other power than that of Spain or the United States." Any modification of sovereignty that did not result in U.S. acquisition was unacceptable. War was the recourse the United States reserved for itself, explicitly and unabashedly, as the means to guarantee succession to sovereignty: war in the first instance as deterrent and as the last recourse defense. Secretary of State John M. Clayton reaffirmed the U.S. position. "This Government," he warned, "is resolutely determined that the Island of Cuba, shall never be ceded by Spain to any other power than the United States," adding: "The news of the cession of Cuba to any foreign power would, in the United States, be the instant signal for war."

 

[Cut out: section on successful Cuban rebellion against Spain 1895-98]

 

In early 1898 the McKinley administration contemplated the impending denouement with a mixture of disquiet and dread. If Spanish sovereignty was untenable, Cuban pretension to sovereignty was unacceptable. The Cuban insurrection threatened more than the propriety of colonial administration; it also challenged the U.S. presumption of succession, for in contesting Spanish rule Cubans were advancing the claim of a new sovereignty. In 1898 Cuba was lost to Spain, and if Washington did not act, it would also be lost to the United States.

 

Cuba was far too important to be turned over to the Cubans. Free Cuba raised the specter of political disorder, social upheaval, and racial conflict: Cuba as a source of regional instability and inevitably a source of international tension. Many had long detected in the racial heterogeneity of the island portents of disorder and dissolution. "I do not believe that the population is today fit for self-government," McKinley's minister to Spain, Stewart L. Woodford, commented in early March 1898. Woodford characterized the insurgency as "confined almost entirely to negroes," with "few whites in the rebel forces." Under the circumstances, he asserted, "Cuban independence is absolutely impossible as a permanent solution of the difficulty." Woodford predicted: "I see nothing ahead except disorder, insecurity of persons and destruction of property. The Spanish flag cannot give peace. The rebel flag cannot give peace. There is but one power and one flag that can secure peace and compel peace. That power is the United States and that flag is our flag."

 

By early spring the Cuban triumph appeared inevitable. Negotiations between Spain and the United States were becoming increasingly irrelevant to the outcome in Cuba, for events were being determined by forces beyond their control. Cubans were dictating the pace and the place of events. By spring 1898, as the summer neared, President McKinley faced only two choices: Cuban independence or U.S. intervention. News of McKinley's April 11 message to Congress, proposing intervention without recognition, immediately provoked hostile reactions from the Cuban leadership. "We will oppose any intervention which does not have for its expressed and declared object the independence of Cuba," Gonzalo de Quesada vowed. Horatio Rubens released a statement bluntly warning the U.S. government that an intervention such as McKinley had proposed would be regarded as "nothing less than a declaration of war by the United States against the Cuban revolutionists." The arrival of a U.S. military expedition to Cuba under such circumstances, Rubens predicted, would oblige the insurgents to "treat that force as an enemy to be opposed, and, if possible, expelled." He added: "Should the United States troops succeed in expelling the Spanish; should the United States then declare a protectorate over the island—however provisional or tentative—and seek to extend its authority over the government of Cuba and the army of liberation, we would resist with force of arms as bitterly and tenaciously as we have fought the armies of Spain."

 

 

Chapter 4: "Constructing the Cuban Absence"

 

The war became known as the "Spanish-American War," a construct that in purpose and point of view denied the Cuban presence and participation. Cubans seemed to have disappeared, denied a role in the very outcome to which they had contributed so significantly. They had been displaced from the front lines. They were excluded from the negotiations for the surrender of Santiago de Cuba. They did not take part in the deliberations on the armistice. They were not signatories to the Treaty of Paris. On January 1, 1899, during the official ceremonies in Havana signaling the end of four hundred years of Spanish rule, Cubans formed an audience of mere onlookers as sovereignty of the island passed from Spain to the United States.

 

It did indeed appear that the sixty-day conflict in Cuba was a Spanish and American war. In press dispatches and army field reports, Cubans were portrayed as unworthy allies, undeserving of the sacrifices made in their behalf, whereupon it became easy to disparage, dismiss, or deny altogether their contribution in the final months of their war for independence. "They are the most worthless . . . lot of bushwackers extant," Captain Frank R. McCoy informed his parents. Major James Bell was brief and to the point: "What they want is to see us to the work and themselves reap the fruits." When later asked to evaluate the contribution of Cuban troops during the war, General Samuel B. M. Young responded categorically: "They were of no use to me whatever." These pronouncements had far-reaching implications, of course, for if it could be demonstrated that Cubans had actually declined to play a part in their own liberation, their claim to independence could hardly warrant serious consideration. The New York Times correspondent agreed: "The Cubans who have made a pretense of fighting with us have proved worthless in the field. . . . It would be a tragedy, a crime, to deliver the island into their hands."

 

The absence of Cubans from frontline U.S. military operations was the result of decisions made at the highest official levels in Washington precisely as a means to reduce, if not preclude altogether, Cuban demands to participate in the negotiations of postwar settlements. In fact, Cubans played a decisive if largely unacknowledged role in the U.S. victory. They served as scouts, guides, and interpreters; they provided vital intelligence and information. But most of all, they engaged in military operations at critical moments of the campaign. Cubans secured the beaches and facilitated the landing of U.S. forces. Cuban army units took up positions across southeastern Cuba to contain and check the movement of Spanish military forces. The part played by Cubans in the outcome of the war passed largely unrecognized and unacknowledged in the United States. "We should have been better off if there had not been a single Cuban with the army," Theodore Roosevelt grumbled. "They accomplished literally nothing, while they were a source of trouble and embarrassment, and consumed much provisions."

 

American troops arrived in Cuba on a self-proclaimed mission of liberation, in the self-conscious role of liberators, to rescue the downtrodden Cubans from Spanish oppression. It is not unreasonable to appreciate their desire to be received the way they saw themselves. Instead, they were greeted with doubt and distrust. "One must not suppose that there was any cheering enthusiasm at the landing of our army here," Stephen Crane cabled from Cuba. On the contrary, the Cubans acted "stolidly, almost indifferently." General O. O. Howard attributed "the prejudice against the Cubans" principally to "a feeling that these patriots have not properly appreciated the sacrifices of life and health that have been made to give them a free country." These circumstances were similar, Howard suggested, to the "dislike of black men in 1863" in the United States, "because so many of them did not seem to understand, or be grateful for, what had been done for them."

 

That Cubans seemed to have disappeared from the view of contemporary observers was in large measure the doing of U.S. policy. That they also vanished from U.S. historical accounts suggested in still one more fashion the ways that the policy paradigms of 1898 continued to shape the historiographical representations of 1898. In the historical literature of the "Spanish-American War," Cubans all but vanished, a disappearance that began with the very name by which the war became known. The North Americans seized the past in part because historians conceded preeminence to the self-proclaimed victors, but particularly because historians themselves have shared the normative foundations and ideological assumptions on which that success was constructed.

 

The proposition of empire as the purpose of war has not fit easily into the historiography of 1898. Imperialism and colonialism as facets of the American experience, that is, territories acquired by military force and administered without the consent of the governed, have not been compatible with the ideals of constitutional democracy and civil liberties. It was a proposition that even at the time—and especially at the time—was not easy to reconcile with long-held notions of the nation and could not be readily accommodated within the normative hierarchies by which Americans chose to arrange the terms of self-definition. Constructs of the acquisition of distant places and peoples were obliged to conform to larger national ideals.

 

 

[footnotes in original excluded]