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  That the four were Cuban mambi officers, “traitors” long since condemned to death in absentia, didn’t change the diplomatic dilemma this news presented to President Grant and his secretary of state, Hamilton Fish. An American ship had been taken in neutral waters; its captors had killed four men protected, under international law, by American sovereignty.

  Spain might have gotten away with making an example of the four rebels. After all, Virginius was well known to be little better, from a legal standpoint, than a pirate ship, its American owner merely a front for the revolutionary junta. Spain had been struggling for five years to put down this latest outbreak of Cuba’s generations-old rebellion, and the Spanish were in a bloodthirsty mood. Their hold on the countryside around Santiago was so insecure that the island’s governor, Count Valmaseda, had recently issued a decree: “Every man over fifteen found beyond his farm will be shot, unless his absence can be justified. Every uninhabited hut will be burned. Every hamlet not hoisting a white cloth … will be reduced to ashes.”

  “I hope,” Secretary of State Fish had written to Admiral José Polo de Bernabé, Spain’s Washington ambassador, “the document is a forgery.”

  But Valmaseda’s order was an authentic indication of Spain’s attitude toward rebels—and those who aided them. Before Grant and Fish had formulated a response to the killing of the four mambi officers, word came that the Spanish had executed thirty-seven of Virginius’s crew, the majority of them American citizens.

  Like the first four captives, they’d been marched to a slaughterhouse on the city’s edge. According to at least one American witness, Captain Fry’s men were ordered to kneel at the edge of a trench by the slaughterhouse wall. Fry went along the line, saying good-bye to each man—“even the colored men who sailed among the crew”—and then knelt down himself. Fry “took off his hat and turned his face upward, as if in prayer.” When the Spanish marines fired, they killed some outright, including Fry, who was shot through the heart. But more writhed in agony. The Spaniards rushed forward and began hacking at the wounded men with swords and knives. Some pushed rifles into eyes and mouths and shot the prisoners again. Then a cavalry was ordered to trample the surviving crewmen to death, a process that took several bone-crunching passes. Finally, the bodies were abandoned to the loyalist crowd, which soon had heads mounted on poles for a parade into Santiago’s streets.

  The next day, December 8, the Spanish executed twelve rebel passengers, and were preparing to execute more crew members when HMS Niobe, a British warship, entered Santiago Bay. Her captain, Sir Lambton Lorraine, heard what was happening and turned his guns on the city. Arguing that there were British citizens among Virginius’s survivors, he ordered the Spanish to stop all executions or face bombardment.

  Meanwhile, the United States was reacting to confused but consistently horrific reports of the killings in Cuba. These were received by a nation already overexcited by weeks’ worth of catastrophic news; in the preceding month, the too-big-to-fail New York banking firm Jay Cooke & Company had declared bankruptcy, setting off an economic implosion that would come to be known as the Panic of 1873. Events in Cuba had plenty of frightened and frustrated Americans screaming for war.

  At least as many remembered the nation’s recent civil war well enough to take pause. Others contemplated the country’s minuscule navy and nearly complete lack of an army. Awkwardly enough, when news of the Virginius atrocities reached the United States, New York City was being visited by a Spanish ironclad warship more powerful than any vessel in the U.S. fleet.

  America’s ambassador to Spain, Republican desperado Daniel Sickles, was a stranger to caution. In 1859, while a New York representative to Congress, Sickles had murdered his wife’s lover, Philip Barton Key, the son of Francis Scott Key, author of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Sickles was the first American ever acquitted on grounds of temporary insanity, a verdict on the congressman’s judgment that somehow didn’t prevent his becoming one of the Union’s “political generals” in the Civil War. His pugnacious incompetence—or insubordination—on the second day at Gettysburg nearly lost the battle, cost many men’s lives, and cost Sickles himself a leg.

  Astonishingly, this excitable man had been appointed, at this sensitive time, America’s envoy to Spain. The incendiary tone of Sickles’s communiqués was matched only by the irresponsibility of Spanish foreign minister José de Carvajal, who liked to read his insulting replies aloud to cheering crowds in Madrid.

  Spaniards were desperate for something to cheer about. Carlos Manuel de Céspedes had timed his Cuban revolt to take advantage of an interregnum caused by the deposition of Queen Isabella II. She was chased from the throne by a liberal military junta that sought to create a constitutional monarchy—but couldn’t find an acceptable monarch. From 1868 to 1873, while sending more than a hundred thousand soldiers to Cuba, Spain had endured coups, revolts, and the outbreak of civil war with the Carlists, a powerful movement determined to restore a traditionally Catholic, authoritarian monarchy. The Virginius crisis fell upon Spain’s first republican government, a chaotic experiment in self-rule less than ten months old. In this period of weak hopes and violent dissent, about the only things most Spaniards could agree on were keeping hold of Cuba and defying yanqui interference.

  Despite all passions and incitments, the situation was defused by calm deliberation. The professionals, Fish and his Spanish counterpart, Admiral de Bernabé, succeeded in crafting the peace their presidents desired. A contemporary Thomas Nast cartoon for Harper’s Weekly shows General Joaquin Jovellar, the chief Spanish military official in Cuba, being forced at pistol-point by his boss, President Emilio Castellar, to return a toy Virginius to American authority, which is represented by a huge ship manned by Fish, Grant, and Secretary of the Navy George Robeson. On his way up the gangplank, Jovellar must stare into the muzzle of a cannon ironically emblazoned with Grant’s 1868 campaign motto “Let Us Have Peace.”

  Like many an international crisis, the Virginius affair ended in the sort of anticlimax that called all the preceding “no choice but to act” rhetoric into embarrassingly reasonable doubt.

  Spain released Virginius’s survivors—ninety-six insurrectos and crew, including thirteen Americans—though not without inflicting a final cruelty. The day before their liberation, the prisoners were told that they were to be executed the next morning; a priest was sent in to take confessions, and the prisoners spent their last night of captivity in mortal fear. The Spanish enjoyed their prank, but also made reparations to the families of the U.S. and British citizens they had killed.

  The ship, looted, leaking, and filthy, was turned over to the U.S. Navy, which sailed her out of Santiago Harbor on December 16. Spain’s honor was restored by a ceremonial rudeness: As the fraudulently registered ship departed, Spanish ships and forts were allowed to forgo the courtesy of saluting her new American flag. Headed for New York, the rotten old freebooter got as far as Cape Fear before her seams yawned and she sank, the Stars and Stripes still dubiously flapping at her masthead.

  The resolution of the Virginius crisis did nothing to bring peace to Cuba. The war that had begun with Céspedes’ 1868 Grito de Yara dragged on until 1878, entering history books as the Ten Years’ War. It was both a military and a social war, a war of constant, inconclusive guerrilla skirmishes and maniacal partisan violence on city streets. Spain trained and armed at least 230,000 regular soldiers and volunteer militiamen during the conflict, and lost more than 83,000 dead to wounds and disease. The mambi army may never have numbered more than 15,000 to 20,000 in any given year; Spanish officials boasted that their forces killed 13,600 Cubans in battle and put 43,500 prisoners to death. The Spanish tried to cut off the rebels from popular support by pioneering in the development of centers for reconcentración—concentration camps—where peasants herded in from the countryside starved to death by the thousands.

  Though Spain was manifestly unable to quash the rebellion, and despite the successful invasion of the western
provinces by rebel columns under generals Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo, the war ended in stalemate. Too many Cubans felt too many ways about independence. There was dissension within the revolutionary government itself, which unseated Carlos Manuel de Céspedes in 1874 and refused even to provide him with a bodyguard; the “father of his country” was hunted down by a Spanish column and died—perhaps fighting, perhaps by his own hand—in 1874.

  The mambises’ real weakness was Spain’s success in portraying the struggle for freedom as a “race war.” Too many white Cubans, especially in the west and in the capital, Havana, feared that the armed ex-slaves of Oriente would turn independence into a black-on-white bloodbath. They saw the white rebel leaders as deluded liberal aristocrats, and they were terrified by Maceo. This military genius from Santiago, a black man portrayed in the pro-rebel press as “the Bronze Titan,” was even distrusted by much of the revolutionary government, and racebased enmity between rebel factions eventually reduced the movement to armed impotence.

  In 1878, most rebel leaders signed the Treaty of Zanjón, laying down their arms in return for Spanish promises of amnesty for all, freedom for black soldiers, better trade terms for Spain’s last great colony, and limited autonomy. Diehards such as Gómez and Maceo had no faith in Spain’s word, but they’d been defeated by their own people, by Cubans’ willingness to hate one another. After a brief attempt at reigniting the war—a revolt based in Oriente called la guerra chiquita (the Little War) of 1879–80—they went into exile believing that sooner or later Spanish misrule would make another war inevitable. Somehow Cubans would have to be taught to trust each other next time.

  By choosing not to fight over Virginius, the United States and Spain avoided a war that neither was prepared for. When it finally came, twenty-five years later, America’s navy had been built up to world-power standards, while Spain’s had rusted into impotence. The Spanish Army had exhausted itself in losing battles against Cuba’s freedom fighters, while America could call on endless manpower. The first U.S. volunteer to die in the Santiago campaign of 1898 would be Rough Rider Sergeant Hamilton Fish, grandson of Grant’s peace-making secretary of state.

  Virginius’s story reminded me that Americans have always approached Cuba under false colors. Over centuries of slave trading, rum smuggling, filibusters, revolutions, and embargoes, we have sometimes been trying to deceive our own government, sometimes Cuba’s, and sometimes both. Sometimes we’ve only been lying to our friends and neighbors: pretending, for example, that forays to the Western Hemisphere’s most famous sex-tourism destination were really just fishing trips, beach vacations, casino junkets. No doubt we have often lied to ourselves, traveled to Cuba with one respectable thought in mind when the true impulse was a desire unnamable even to the mirror: a missionary’s yearning for a lover of the same sex, a failed businessman’s need for a less level playing field, a great democracy’s irrepressible letch for empire.

  And here we were, my companions and I, hoping to reach Santiago from Kingston, flying various questionable flags—Esau’s faith-based business, the choir’s accommodation with fundamentalist Christianity, my “missionary” journalism—yet expecting a fair deal from Cubans constrained by their own official hypocrisies.

  The sky had gone dark while Esau made fruitless cell phone calls and Ileana scowled triumphantly. A discreet chat with a Jamaican airport official had assured me that the departing-charter head tax was real. I couldn’t see our next move. At last, I noticed Maricel arguing in Spanish with a Cubana employee: not a suit, but a baggage handler. Her voice was rising, and heads were turning. I stepped over and sympathized—neither of them knew how much luggage would really be allowed to fly—and eventually took Pedro the porter aside, leaving Maricel to her anguished sorting.

  Short and skinny, Pedro seemed a put-upon nice guy, accustomed to hassle from both passengers and his higher-ups. He responded kindly when I asked if he knew what was really going on with our flight. “No se exactamente … I don’t know for sure,” he said, “but that one”—indicating Ileana with an almost imperceptible nod—“likes very much to make trouble for the missionaries. For Americans in general. They all do, but they like to screw missionaries best.”

  Y como no? I thought as I thanked Pedro. Why not? The Cubans knew that nonprofits like Esau’s were hard to distinguish from undercapitalized tour companies, and saw no reason not to squeeze for every ostensibly charitable dollar. Maybe the flip-flop of dates and reservations had been unavoidable; maybe it was Esau’s screw-up, or maybe the Cubans were hassling us for hassle’s sake. Maybe this was someone’s entrepreneurial shakedown, or a Havana-ordered hindrance. What did it matter? The money we’d paid Esau to cover the head tax was going to spend the night in a Kingston hotel while we flew back to New York.

  I remembered a conversation I’d had, that hopeful morning, with Jacob, the Jamaican redcap who’d pulled my share of our leaden charity the hundred yards from arrivals to departures on his creaking cart. Jacob was a powerfully wrinkled man with impressive thatches of ear hair who observed, on learning where I was headed, “Lot of Jamaican people going to Cuba these days.” He told me about the program known as the “Miracle Flights,” which brings Jamaicans threatened by blindness to Cuba for surgery.

  “The Cubans treat dem,” he said, pausing to underscore his respect, “for free.”

  Were the Miracle Flights acts of proletarian grace, or cynical propaganda ploys? Who cared? From Jacob’s point of view and mine, there could hardly be a downside to a child seeing again. And that evening, as I left Pedro and started walking purposefully toward Esau, I realized that I didn’t care who was incompetent, who had let us down, who might be ripping off whom. I was at least as guilty as anyone else of twisting the truth to suit my needs. I could not be mad at anyone, did not care what had to be done so long as by night’s end I could board a plane to Santiago.

  For the first but by no means the last time on what would prove a wondrous, revelatory, and sometimes frightening journey, I felt peculiarly calm and certain, almost guided. I saw that somebody had to get the Reverend Onyegoro in gear. And sure enough, Esau snapped to when I proposed that the chorus raise the head tax right then and there, as a loan for him to repay. The chorus’s latina percussionist, Annie, volunteered to negotiate with Ileana. When I laid the facts before the chorus, several FemTones helped squelch protests against extortion and incompetence; instead, they organized a collection of thirtysomething dollars from each traveler, enough to cover the head tax and put us (along with some 40 percent of the donated medicine and clothing) on the plane that turned out to be still waiting on the tarmac.

  “I’m not coming, William,” Esau said as he returned, beaming, from passing our money to Ileana. “The Cubans say they’ll help me explain to the hotel here why I should get our deposit back. I will fix it tomorrow morning and join you in Santiago by afternoon. In the meantime, I know you can handle everything.”

  There wasn’t much time left for talking. Esau pressed upon me a wad of bills—had this always been held in reserve, or was it a slice off the top of the chorus’s collection, taken when he bargained the Cubans down?—and instructions for handling the next twenty-four hours’ transactions in Santiago: check-in at the Hotel Melia; the official Cubana fee for bus fare and the very unofficial “tip” for the drivers and guide; paying for the festival tickets. I had become a tour operator.

  Even as I pressed Esau for the receipt—the IOU—that prudent chorus members had insisted on having, I was wondering what to do about a hunch that I wouldn’t be seeing him tomorrow. What then? What would I need to know? As he sat on a suitcase and wrote out the receipt, I asked who we were supposed to meet, what we were supposed to do come Monday to live up to our missionary obligations. I scribbled notes: pastors’ names and addresses, agreed-upon divisions of the chorus’s aid. As for all the rest of our advertised plans—the chapel painting and school construction, etc.—Esau assured me he’d be there in plenty of time to arrange all that.
What about those OFAC extensions for Maricel, Walter, and me? On their way, no problem, don’t worry.

  He stood, and I automatically stuck out my hand. Even as he thanked me and called God’s blessing on our mission, I couldn’t help noticing that Esau shook hands in the West African way, like laying a dead fish in someone else’s palm. It’s just a cultural difference, doesn’t mean a thing, but it felt like the opposite of conviction. Still, his smile seemed sincere.

  The departure terminal was almost deserted. The old rasta was gone, and no chorus members were in sight. Pedro was standing by the gateway entrance, waving urgently. I picked up my bags and ran.

  The plane that lifted us into the blackness over Morant Bay was an antique Soviet turboprop. Sailing over Virginius’s old course, the plane genuflected violently to every drop in air pressure. We cheered and sang anyway, until the tiredest among us began to fall asleep. Antonio Maceo Airport was less than an hour ahead, with so many hopes waiting after.

  I was tidying up my belongings, prior to attempting a few minutes’ shut-eye, when I finally read the Reverend Esau’s receipt: “The chorus has paid Cubana Airlines one thousand one hundred thirty-three dollars for Jamaican charter tax. Esau Onyegoro.”

  That, and the date. Nothing more. No obligation, nothing enforceable. But somehow I didn’t feel as if anything had been taken from us. Far from it: I felt as if I were holding our pennant in my hands, the appropriately irresponsible motto and banner of our infinitely precedented expedition. One way or another, we were at last on our way to Cuba. It was everything but a lie.

  Chapter 2

  SANTIAGO DE CUBA: A REBEL YESTERDAY

  We flew low in darkness, and as I closed my eyes I thought I could feel the Caribbean shifting below us. My nap was disappointingly brief; I woke up worrying about Esau’s arrangements. Would there be buses waiting? Would the hotel be expecting us? I started making a to-do list and a list of questions for the bus driver, the guide, the hotel staff. When we landed at Antonio Maceo, 8:10 P.M. felt a lot like the far side of midnight.