Yankee Come Home Read online

  I didn’t know what to do. But somewhere in there, somewhere between the invasion and the first release of Abu Ghraib torture photographs, I’d found myself thinking something as irrational as anything that angry father had come to believe.

  I had to go to Guantánamo.

  Maybe there was a story waiting there. The family legend of my great-grandfather “Papa” O’Brien’s Spanish-American War service had inspired me to read up on 1898 as a boy and again as a student of American history. I’d been to Cuba before and seen our forgotten legacy written not only on plaques and monuments but in ballparks and Baptist churches and bitter smiles. And in all the post-9/11 reporting on the “detention center” at Guantánamo Bay, I’d seen little or nothing about how the United States came to possess this corner of Cuba, the first piece of overseas real estate we ever took and refused to give back.

  Maybe nobody was bothering to write about it because 9/11 was supposed to have “changed everything,” transcending history. Yet our response to the attacks had taken us right back to 1898, to the spot where we ditched our republican ideals for the charms of empire. Now America was using “Gitmo” to experiment with life outside the Constitution, beyond the reach of law, liberated from compunctions about torture.

  It was spooky, the way we’d circled around on ourselves, the way Guantánamo was once again the place where we’re deciding who we really are.

  Some people wait outside prisons when inmates are executed. Some stand by the gates of desert nuclear weapons sites, outside abortion clinics, in front of bishops’ mansions or corporations’ headquarters. Some of us need to see Ground Zero at Alamogordo or in lower Manhattan.

  In late November 1963, some Americans drove cross-country for two days straight just to stand along Pennsylvania Avenue as JFK’s coffin rolled by. Their view of the procession may have been blocked by the crowd or their own tears. It didn’t matter. Being there was a compulsive act of witness to our loss, to national disaster.

  Sometimes we don’t know what we’ve lost until we touch the scars.

  My own government would make it hard to get to Cuba, impossible to visit the base. The Cubans might let me approach from their side, but how close? Perhaps I’d only be able to look through binoculars. It didn’t matter. I felt compelled to get as close as possible to Gitmo, just to see the place where my country was betraying itself.

  I’m an old-school, peace-and-justice Catholic, gratefully dependent on faith and skeptical of institutional power. I’m pretty damned sure that Jesus commands us to comfort the afflicted and afflict those made comfortable by other people’s misery. I didn’t know what I’d see that would be worth writing home about, but in Cuba you can travel as a pilgrim travels, confident that the journey itself will be a revelation, that signs will appear along the way.

  So I was going, and legally, too, thanks to Esau. The reverend had promised to provide license extensions that would allow Maricel, her accordion accompanist, Walter Gomez, and me to stay in Cuba after the chorus went home. We’d travel together to Havana; then I’d return to Santiago for a third week’s research on my own. Esau had met us here in Kingston without those extensions, but he’d assured me that all was well. His staff was still cleaning up a few details, and the extensions would be faxed to our Santiago hotel.

  Now, hours later, still stuck in the terminal, it occurred to me that if his assurances were as unreliable as his accountancy, I might never see those extension forms. But unless I found some way to please Ileana, I might never get close enough to Cuba to need them.

  A rattlebone rasta stood by the front door. He was very thin, and his knit red, green, and black cap enclosed a mass of dreads so high and broad as to resemble a pharaonic crown. He seemed to have some relationship with the airport redcaps that enabled him to hang around the building’s street door, where tourists and travelers might place a dollar in his just slightly outstretched hand. In between such opportunities, he watched the spectacle of comings and goings.

  Early on, we’d noticed each other noticing each other, and nodded respectfully. Now he made eye contact again, this time following through with a shrug that was half consolation—Whatcha gonna do?—and half I told you so. I returned it, as if ambivalence were some kind of universal middle-aged-guy salute, and at last we both smiled.

  Behind him, a frieze of Jamaican faces pressed against the glass wall, hands cupped around eyes, staring after friends, at the drama of departure, at the dream of elsewhere. Beyond the terminal, the Blue Mountains’ long shadows climbed the palms lining the road to Kingston Town. Afternoon was fast becoming evening; the business day was shutting down. I could see that if our problem wasn’t settled soon, the people with the power to make deals would go home, the Cubana plane would fly back to Santiago without us, and we’d be sleeping God knows where until we could start standing by for seats on tomorrow’s flights back to JFK.

  If Santiago de Cuba seemed near and yet far, I at least had the consolation of historical perspective. Research into U.S.-Cuban relations had taught me that Kingston has always been tantalizingly, dangerously close to Santiago.

  Tantalizing because, rich as Jamaica has ever been, it never could compete with Cuba’s claim to be Queen of the Antilles; Kingston merchants, pirates, and smugglers alike longed for a closer acquaintance with the Spanish colony’s treasures. Dangerous because Santiago is the historic heart of Cuban rebellion, and Kingston—just two hundred deepwater miles to the south—is the perfect staging port for filibusters, gunrunners, and desperate patriots.

  That’s why the War of 1898—the one we Americans call the “Spanish-American War”—almost started in November 1873.

  On October 31 of that year, the Spanish man-of-war Tornado gave chase to an American-registered freighter named Virginius off Morant Bay, Jamaica, a favorite smugglers’ hidey-hole just a few miles east of Kingston. The Virginius was a gunrunner, notorious for reinforcing Cuba’s insurrectos with arms purchased by the Cuban rebel junta in exile in New York City. She’d eluded the Spanish Navy for three years, but perhaps this time someone in the New York command had been careless—or greedy. Somehow or other, the Tornado had known just where and when to pounce.

  Both ships were built for speed. During our Civil War, the Union blockade of Southern ports had created a business opportunity for daring smugglers. Blockade runners sailed some of the world’s fastest, tightest ships, the expense of their state-of-the-art technology justified by fantastic profits. The Virginius had started life as the Virgin, a sidewheel steamer purpose-built in England to outrun any ship in the Union fleet. Her successes won an illicit fame that brought her builders more business; the same English firm created other blockade runners, including the Tornado.

  Now both ships were fighting in another civil war, a Cuban rebellion that had begun on October 10, 1868, in the hamlet of Yara, when an idealistic lawyer and tobacco plantation owner, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, issued the Grito de Yara, the “Cry of Yara,” a call for independence from Spain. Céspedes freed his slaves and exhorted them to join the struggle. The next day, Céspedes and his rebel band were all but wiped out by Spanish soldiers, but he and a few survivors—apocryphally, a disciple-like dozen—carried on the fight as the grito was answered by patriots all across the island. Always short of guns and bullets, the rebel army soon developed its signature, surprisingly effective tactic: the carga al machete, the machete charge, devastating when launched from a jungle ambush. Spain sent for reinforcements, and a revolutionary government elected Céspedes “president of the Cuban republic in arms.”

  The war divided the island by class, race, and region, with plenty of ambiguous overlap. The mambi army drew its greatest strength from Oriente Province, Cuba’s easternmost, poorest, and blackest province. (Mambi was a nickname applied by Spanish troops who had fought rebels led by a black Spanish renegade, Juan Ethininius Mamby, in Santo Domingo in the 1840s. Then Cuba’s rebels adopted machete tactics that reminded Spaniards of the Dominican war. Los mambises, “the M
en of Mamby,” became Spanish imperial troops’ generic label for Caribbean peasant revolutionaries, just as haji covers a multitude of Muslims for U.S. troops in the Middle East today. And, like “Yankee-Doodle,” the nickname mambi was cheerfully adopted by the rebellious peasants who were supposed to resent it.) Céspedes and other white liberals were joined in arms by mulattoes and liberated slaves. Some mambises wanted an independent Cuban republic; others favored annexation by the United States. While the rebels tended to be Cuban-born, the Spanish drew loyalist strength from peninsulares—Spanish-born immigrants—and conservative Cubans, notably sugarcane planters whose estates couldn’t function without numerous slaves.

  The rebels needed foreign supplies to keep fighting, and running the Spanish blockade was brisk business. Profit margins were, however, much skimpier in the service of Cuban libertad than they had been in the service of King Cotton. The rebel junta’s ships may have skimped on maintenance; in any case, Virginius had been used too hard for too many years. As she strained to flee Tornado’s ambush, her seams began to open. The pumps couldn’t keep up. During an eight-hour chase, crewmen threw guns and ammunition overboard; when the firemen ran out of coal, they stoked the boilers with bacon and ham. Nothing they did could stop Tornado from closing the distance and firing a plank-smashing hit that promised immediate destruction.

  Virginius surrendered her 103 passengers—almost all Cuban rebels, including Colonel Pedro Céspedes, brother of the revolution’s leader, and Brigadier General George Washington Ryan, an American volunteer—and her crew of 52 American and British sailors. Her commander, Captain Joseph Fry, a veteran of the U.S. and Confederate navies, protested that Virginius was “an American ship, carrying American colors and papers, with an American captain and an American crew.” In response, Spanish tars hauled down and gleefully defiled Virginius’s American flag.

  Their gesture signaled Spanish exasperation with American interference in Cuba. Having lost almost all their Latin American possessions, the Spanish intended to hold on to Cuba, clinging not only to her queenly wealth but also to the remnants of their imperial pride. Yet the United States seemed to view Cuba as a future star on its flag, an inevitable acquisition over which the Spanish were exercising a temporary, inept stewardship.

  The Founding Fathers had avidly discussed the wisdom of purchasing Cuba cheap—or taking it outright. The island’s proximity and strategic location, commanding the most important approaches to the Gulf of Mexico (and thus all the trade the new nation would float to the mouth of the Mississippi), argued for the necessity of U.S. possession. Thomas Jefferson couched his Cuba policy in language that smacked of cool seduction. Rather than fight Britain or Spain for Cuba, he told James Madison, “It is better to lie still in readiness to receive that interesting incorporation when solicited by herself.”

  The Cuban temptation seemed to grow stronger with each U.S. generation, becoming something of an obsession. John Quincy Adams thought owning Cuba “indispensable to the continuance and integrity of the Union itself.” In 1843, Secretary of State Daniel Webster grew panicky over fantastic rumors of a plot by rogue English diplomats and antislavery activists to arm an invasion force of free Jamaican blacks and make Cuba “a black Military Republic under British protection.” However delusional, such worries were bound to arise again and again, given the American conviction, later voiced by William Henry Seward, “that this nation can never safely allow the island of Cuba to pass under the dominion of any power that is already, or can become, a formidable rival or enemy.”

  Why this fixation on control? It’s true that, on the map, Cuba appears to command the entrances to the Gulf of Mexico, as well as the Grand Bahama Bank and the Straits of Florida. But appearances are deceptive. No European power ever seriously imagined that it could support a Cuba-based naval blockade of U.S. access to the gulf. On the contrary: The United States’ many East Coast ports “outflank” Cuba and dominate its Atlantic approaches. Rather than Cuba presenting a blockade menace, it is the United States that has Cuba surrounded. The 1962 Cuban missile crisis demonstrated that even the Soviet Union’s huge navy had no chance of challenging a U.S. blockade of the island. Like many excuses for imperial ambition, the supposed strategic “threat” posed by Cuba’s location has always been more fanciful than actual.

  Webster’s fear of an “Ethiopico-Cuban Republic” illuminated another, far more potent geopolitical motive for America’s Cuban compulsion. He believed that with “600,000 blacks in Cuba, and 800,000 in her West India Islands,” Britain could “strike a death blow at the existence of slavery in the United States.” With every year that America failed to find a political cure for its dependence on slavery, Cuba loomed larger as a possible Achilles’ heel—or, in some minds, a panacea.

  If Spain—or a meddlesome Britain or France—should free Cuba’s slaves, plantation owners in Southern states imagined their own slaves rising in irrepressible rebellion. But as long as Spain preserved slavery, Southerners felt less isolated in the practice of their “peculiar institution.” And then there was the dream of adding Cuba to the United States. Slaveholding states gloried in visions of gaining those “600,000 blacks,” each of whom was, according to the Constitution, disenfranchised and yet worth three-fifths of a white person when the Census counted heads for proportional representation in Congress. Some freesoilers shared the slavers’ enthusiasm for acquiring Cuba, though not as a state. Both before and after the Civil War, an annexed Cuba was one of the proposed destinations (along with Liberia and Santo Domingo) for the deportation of all of America’s nearly five million blacks, a process that would—in the minds of many white thinkers, including, at one point, Abraham Lincoln—solve the race problem at a stroke.

  One way or another, young America usually discussed Cuba’s future as if the Spanish—not to mention the Cubans—had nothing to do with it. This bullheaded passion flared up periodically, often when economic crisis or political pressure seemed to make a foreign-policy distraction especially welcome.

  For example, Webster’s alarm over a black republic came at the weary tail end of a long depression following the Panic of 1837. Then, in 1854, as the proposed Kansas-Nebraska Act forced an unprecedentedly vicious political battle over the expansion of slavery, the Spanish seized a U.S. vessel, Black Warrior, in Havana Bay for lack of proper paperwork. The affair gave Southern fireeaters a chance to call for invasion, and it escalated after then ambassador to Spain Pierre Soulé met with James Buchanan and John Mason, ministers, respectively, to England and France, in Ostend, Belgium, to discuss U.S. Cuban policy.

  Their report reflected mainstream Democratic Party sentiment, which Franklin Pierce had expressed in his 1853 inaugural speech: Democrats had no patience with “timid forebodings of evil from expansion.” Still, the ambassadors’ opinion, which became known as the “Ostend Manifesto,” shocked Northerners and European powers by its unapologetic greed and thuggery.

  A masterpiece of hypocrisy, the manifesto expressed infinite concern for our “oppressed neighbors” in Cuba and claimed that the United States “have never acquired a foot of territory except by fair purchase” or the “free and voluntary application” of people “who desired to blend their destinies with our own.” Declaring Cuba “as necessary to the North American republic as any of its present members” and raising the potent fear that freedom for Cuban slaves could somehow “spread like wildfire” to the Southern states, the ministers wrote that the United States should buy Cuba if Spain were willing and the price right. If not, the United States “shall be justified in wresting it from Spain if we possess the power.”

  Though the Ostend Manifesto’s lack of subtlety embarrassed the Pierce administration, Democrats went on to make the acquisition of Cuba a plank in their party’s 1856 platform. If they hoped to distract the nation from internal troubles, they were disappointed. The Black Warrior’s paperwork problems had been resolved, and civil war in “Bleeding Kansas” was focusing the nation’s belligerence inward.
/>   The people of the United States wouldn’t return their attention to Cuba for several apocalyptic years. Then the Grito de Yara sounded in 1868, three years after Appomattox, attracting the military talents, frustrated energies, idealism, and ambitions of men such as Captain Fry and George Washington Ryan. Cuban rebels depended on money, arms, and volunteers from expatriate Cubans and sympathizers in the United States. The federal government was fighting the social and political wars of Reconstruction and was far too busy to chase after violations of its neutrality. Numerous American citizens joined the mambis or engaged in schemes to undermine Spanish rule. Even Trumbull White, a prominent Gilded Age journalist and the unabashedly jingoist author of Our War with Spain for Cuba’s Freedom, conceded that both before and after Virginius’s capture, “Filibustering was constant and scarcely discouraged by the people of the United States.”

  When they weren’t risking a lot for a little by bringing arms and reinforcements to the rebels, Yankee smugglers were making big-time money defying Madrid’s monopolistic taxes. It was cheaper to ship a barrel of American flour to Spain for taxation and transshipment to Cuba than it was to ship the same barrel directly to Havana, incurring a Spanish levy many times the flour’s worth. Bold smugglers couldn’t resist the opportunity to sell goods directly and illegally to Cuban consumers, and the Spanish Navy found the smugglers’ insolence as infuriating as the Spanish Army did the presence of Yankee soldiers of fortune in the Cuban rebels’ ranks.

  Virginius’s capture offered Spain a rare opportunity to confront official America with its citizens’ unofficial crimes. For starters, the crippled ship was towed into the nearest Spanish port: the beautiful, spectacularly embayed harbor of Santiago de Cuba. Four days after the capture, four passengers—including George Washington Ryan and Pedro Céspedes—were executed by firing squad. The corpses were beheaded, and the heads stuck on poles and paraded through the streets by Spanish loyalists.