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State of Ambiguity
Civic Life and Culture in Cuba's First Republic
By Steven Palmer, José Antonio Piqueras, Amparo Sánchez Cobos Duke University Press
Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7684-2
CHAPTER 1
A Sunken Ship, a Bronze Eagle, and the Politics of Memory
The "Social Life" of the USS Maine in Cuba (1898–1961)
Marial Iglesias Utset
In June 1961, at the age of 106, María de la Cruz acquired sudden notoriety. Learning to read and write at such an advanced age, as part of a major literacy campaign, turned this elderly woman into a public celebrity. Born as a slave on a Havana sugar plantation in 1855, María de la Cruz Senmanat witnessed the wars of independence, the emancipation of slaves, and, in 1898, the U.S. intervention that helped put an end to four hundred years of Spanish domination in Cuba. Like so many thousands of other residents of Havana, she probably saw the U.S. flag raised in the Explanada del Morro, only to see it, with exultation, lowered and replaced with the Cuban national flag in 1902. The Cuban Republic, formally inaugurated as an independent state, was nonetheless tied by "bonds of singular intimacy"—seemingly unbreakable—to the new imperial power in the region: the United States of America.
Nearly six decades later, María de la Cruz would witness another exceptional event: the symbolic rupture of those bonds. In January 1961, Cuba and the United States severed diplomatic relations. Three months later, in the early hours of May 1, in accordance with the declaration of the socialist character of the Cuban Revolution, a large crane from the Ministry of Public Works knocked down from its pedestal the bronze eagle that had adorned the monument dedicated to the victims of the explosion of the battleship Maine. Soon after, the former slave famed for the extraordinary longevity of her life recalled the event commemorated by the monument. On the night of February 15, 1898, while working as a servant in the house of her former masters—where, like many other ex-slaves in urban areas, she had continued to reside many years after her emancipation—she heard the explosion that sank the ship reverberating from the Bay of Havana. According to her testimony, she knew immediately that "the culprits of the explosion had not been the Spanish but the Yankees themselves." María de la Cruz likely adapted her account of the Maine explosion, which had occurred sixty-three years earlier, to accord with the nationalist and anti-imperialist reinterpretations of this event in the context of the Cuban Revolution. The interview took place in April 1961, when ardently anti-U.S. rhetoric permeated all media and public opinion, only days after the unsuccessful invasion of CIA-backed Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs.
The story I wish to narrate here takes place precisely at a time that is either omitted or demonized in the version of national history that begins to impose itself at the same moment in which María de la Cruz is called upon to recount episodes from her long life. Somewhere between the two most symbolic caesuras in Cuba's contemporary history—1898: the end of the "time of Spain," and 1959: the "time of revolution"—a republic emerges, flourishes, and perishes, marked from its birth by traces of its ambiguous conception. It was at once the legitimate child of the Wars of Independence and the bastard of U.S. intervention.
The sudden explosion and sinking of the battleship USS Maine in the Bay of Havana on February 15, 1898, was the singular event that gave rise to the first of these caesuras. The catastrophe provoked an impassioned reaction against Spain within U.S. public opinion that acted as a catalyst for the intervention of the United States in the war between Cuba and Spain. A few months later, Spain laid down its arms before the overwhelming military superiority of the United States, and the remainder of its once great colonial empire—Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines—was handed over to form part of the territories then under U.S. control. The U.S. Congress, nonetheless, approved a historic agreement known as the Joint Resolution due to strong sympathies and a sense of solidarity toward Cuba among the public, pressure from anti-imperialist circles, and the influence of Cuban émigré lobbyists. This resolution ultimately obliged the United States to concede to Cuba its much sought after independence in 1902, though it would be an independence circumscribed by the Platt Amendment.
The sinking of the Maine, the intervention of the United States in the war, and the birth of the republic have been subject to contradictory political interpretations in the Cuban historical memory. According to one interpretation, a young nation is constituted as a sovereign state by the noble gesture of a powerful state that, by intervening in the war against the old Metropole, lends a helping hand in eliminating the colonial yoke. In another version of these events, the U.S. intervention is condemned: the republic—an aspiration that had motivated more than thirty years of fighting over the course of two independence wars—was born deformed, bound as it was to the United States by neocolonial political ties that de facto prevented the exercise of full sovereignty. In other words, accounts of the factors behind the explosion of the battleship Maine are embedded in one or another political hermeneutic—either that of a rhetoric of gratitude for Uncle Sam's generosity or a rhetoric of nationalism denouncing imperialist intervention.
My text, however, is certainly not a historical investigation of the "real" causes of the explosion and sinking of the battleship, an issue that is in dispute even today, despite the sheer quantity of research and superabundance of literature on the catastrophe amassed over the course of a century. Rather than try to establish a history of "what really occurred" with the Maine, I am interested in exploring the politics of memory around this event, the ways in which it was remembered, reconstituted, and forgotten in different political contexts. Accordingly, this is a history of a lieu de mémoire, to use loosely the expression coined by Pierre Nora, where "place" is not exclusively a physical site, a material enclave, but a space of representation around an artifact (the contorted remains of a ship), the object of powerful remembrance on both sides of the Florida Strait.
The issue I am tackling here is not just a conventional history of a specific site of commemoration: the monument to the victims of the battleship Maine inaugurated at the beginning of 1925. What follows is a history of the "social life" of the Maine 's remains: the cycles of "death" and "resurrection" of its memory, cycles spanning several decades, and the dynamics of its sanctification as a relic of patriotism or, conversely, of its mutation into a banal object, rendered as merchandise or souvenir. Finally, I tell the story of its integration into the urban landscape—at first half submerged in Havana's bay and later incorporated into a collection of monuments at the city's seafront.
At the same time, as became evident after the mutilation of the monument at the beginning of the Cuban Revolution, the history of the vicissitudes of the sunken battleship and its wreckage is metonymically and inextricably related to the "bonds of singular intimacy" between Cuba and the United States. That is, studying the saga of the multiple political lives of the Maine 's "corpse" between 1898 and 1961 is also indirectly a way of contributing to an understanding of the tense, yet fascinating, history of the political and cultural relations between these nations.
"Remember the Maine"
It is quite possible that there is no other event over the long course of Cuban history that so immediately became "immortalized" in countless illustrations, photographs, films, and resurrections by way of a series of invocations and commemorations. Sent to the Cuban coast to protect "American life and property," the USS Maine, according to Fitzhugh Lee, the U.S. consul, entered Havana "gliding smoothly" into port on a peaceful winter morning on January 25, 1898. "It was a beautiful sight and one long to be remembered," Lee wrote in a letter to William R. Day, the U.S. assistant secretary of state. The consul was quite satisfied: since his appointment in 1896, he had pressed his superiors on the issue of taking part in the conflict between Cuba and Spain. His contentment, however, was not long lasting. Within a few weeks, the arrival of the Maine in Havana became, as Lee had predicted, an object of powerful remembrance. Nevertheless, the Maine was less remembered for the spectacle of its graceful entrance into the bay of Havana than for the terrible explosion that sank it and killed 266 members of its crew.
The day after the explosion, although news of the tragedy had only barely reached its destinations by telegraph, myriad accusations were published. The coverage of the Maine incident is a paradigmatic example of the kind of sensationalist and aggressive journalism that proliferated in the United States in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The industry fiercely competed for the attention of millions of readers that constituted the new urban public. People who had only recently gained access to the printed word augmented, without precedent, literacy rates: recent immigrants, women, migrants from the countryside, and descendants of slaves newly resident in large cities because of the start of the Great Migration. They seemed to enjoy sensational headlines, simple and emotive language, abundant illustrations, the comics, and numerous commercial advertisements. This new style of journalism also required bold journalists who could immediately mobilize to the site of action and telegraph dramatic accounts that, at times, although plagued by exaggeration or conveniently "fabricated," were nonetheless convincing and compelling. The coverage of the war in Cuba—especially the explosion of the Maine and the reactions to it—cannot be understood apart from this era of sensationalist journalism, boosted by the fierce war that sustained the New York press barons, Joseph Pulitzer of The World and William Randolph Hearst of the New York Journal.
As for the Maine, the magnitude of the disaster and the substantial loss of life, in addition to the mystery surrounding the explosion, turned this event into a news story of the first order. The sinking of the battleship raised the print run of newspapers to record numbers. The World, which sent divers to Havana to "cover the story" in situ, and the Journal, which first coined the slogan "Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain," and offered $50,000 to those who found the "perpetrators of this outrage," managed to sell 1.5 million copies in a single day. In turn, the coverage of the catastrophe provided a unique occasion to mobilize public opinion in favor of U.S. intervention. Despite a lack of evidence, most articles accused Spain of being responsible for the explosion. Within days, the headline "Remember the Maine!" put the entire country on the warpath. The promptness and enormity of this mobilization of popular opinion in favor of war with Spain, which ultimately developed into a national cause, was most certainly an expression of solidarity with the cause of a small populace confronted with a tenacious colonial power refusing to grant independence. Nevertheless, it revealed the strength of latent expansionist longings of a nascent U.S. imperialism that, with the closing of the western frontier, searched for new horizons to conquer abroad.
The image of the battleship was transformed into a powerful icon, whether accompanied by narratives of solidarity that emphasized Uncle Sam's responsibility to a nation struggling to free itself from the yoke of Spanish imperialism, or employed as an instrument of jingoist propaganda. It was reproduced, until thoroughly exhausted, in drawings, engravings, photographs, and stereoscopic pictures. The scenes of the Maine's catastrophe were represented in theatrical reenactments as well as in the short current-event documentaries with which the film industry made its debut. The silhouette of the USS Maine became a kind of trademark of the year 1898, permanently marking the memories of those old enough to remember it, both in the United States and, of course, in Cuba.
Perhaps surprisingly to us today, because of its popularity and resonance, the saying "Remember theMaine" was almost immediately turned into a slogan used to attract the attention of consumers. Employed so widely in solemn editorials, fiery news reports, and countless patriotic songs, poems, and hymns, it also appeared in enticing advertisements for merchandise as diverse as books, furniture, clothing, jewelry, dishes, and even pianos. The tension between the "sacred" and the "profane" manifested itself in a fascinating conjunction between the sacrificial rhetoric of editorials on the catastrophe, appearing in the first few pages of newspapers, and the references to it featured in the papers' advertisement sections at the back, is a vivid testimony to the complex ways in which nationalism was converted into a mass phenomenon and "consumed." By the end of the nineteenth century the rapid development of industrialization had lowered the prices of manufactured goods and hence broadened the consumer public; new practices of retailing, of advertising, and of extending credit all transformed the consumer landscape. If saving, abstinence, and frugality (associated with puritan creeds) still represented the ideal values of the Victorian generation, at the gates of the twentieth century, advertisement and the growth of a "shopping culture" were turning the increasing capacity to consume into one of the foremost indicators of success within the American Dream.
A profusion of merchandise—including spoons, dishes, buttons, clasps, brooches, ashtrays, paperweights, matchboxes, cards, and children's toys—began to appear stamped with the image of the battleship. Even biscuits were imprinted with the words "Remember the Maine." This abundance of representation certainly serves as a testimony to the popularization of a culture of nationalism, one that not only invaded public spaces but also penetrated the interstices of the domestic sphere as well, embodied as it was in the lure to purchase countless objects for daily use.
A Monument to the Memory of the Maine: The First Proposals
In contrast to the U.S. public, whose accounts of the sinking of the ship were received entirely through media, residents of Havana had been firsthand witnesses. Within barely half an hour of the explosion, even as desperate rescue measures were in place, the police battled with hundreds of onlookers. Attracted by the roar of the detonation that shattered the windows of neighboring buildings and rumors of the event that quickly traveled across the city, residents of Havana congregated near the bay, conjecturing over the causes of the explosion. When the sun rose, the sheer magnitude of the catastrophe, in all its dimensions, could finally be observed: that which hours before had been an impressive military gunboat was now reduced to a heap of twisted, blackened iron, half-submerged at one side of the city's bay.
Two days later, more than 50,000 residents of Havana, hundreds of reconcentrados among them, congregated in the streets to see the funeral procession on its way to the Cementerio de Colón. There the corpses of the first nineteen marines recovered from the bay received provisional burials. Among those present at the ceremony were the Spanish military and civil authorities, the captain of the Maine, Charles D. Sigsbee, his chaplain, Father John Chidwick, the surviving sailors, Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, and Fitzhugh Lee, the American consul in Havana. The funeral on February 17 was only the first of a series of interments and disinterments that—accompanied by public ceremonies that were at times modest and at other times spectacular, carried out in various locations including Havana, Key West, and Washington—kept the memory alive for more than a decade.
The remains of the victims were buried in a plot in the Cementerio de Colón, donated and designated for this purpose by the Roman Catholic bishop of Havana, and the idea of building a monument dedicated to the memory of the destruction of the battleship was born, literally, on the tombs of these victims. On March 4, 1898, on the occasion of another interment of sailors belatedly recovered from the bay, one attendee mentioned the idea of inaugurating a monument: "flowers were the only tribute possible at present to the poor fellows who died in the line of duty, but [it is hoped] that someday a shrine would rise there, to which Americans visiting Cuba would come to pay honor to the dead." Nevertheless, for the moment, in the absence of a definitive monument, the modest wooden crosses in the Havana cemetery would stand in place of a tribute.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from State of Ambiguity by Steven Palmer, José Antonio Piqueras, Amparo Sánchez Cobos. Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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