The Sugar King of Havana (8 page)

Landing at Key West, Loynaz wrote to the revolutionary junta’s military leaders about what had happened. Gómez hesitated when he read the report, and the uprising, originally planned for later that year, was delayed. “The main reason for the setback is that I haven’t received assurances from Camagüey, which I consider the central nerve of the Revolution,” Gómez told Martí. Martí also knew that Cuba wouldn’t respond to calls for an uprising so long as the Autonomists’ hopes of reform might become a reality. “Martí was very clear about that. . . . War will be impossible,” Gómez later wrote. “It was only afterwards, when the [Autonomists’] reforms collapsed and Cuban disenchantment grew, that revolution became a real possibility. And that’s what we did.”

The war of liberation, launched on April 11 the following year, had an uncertain start. Martí put in with a small group of men at a rocky beach on the far southeastern coast of Cuba to begin the offensive. They landed on the same stretch of coast as Castro would on the yacht
Granma
sixty-one years later, and their landfall was as equally haphazard. “The boat is lowered,” Martí wrote in his war diary:

Martí and his men trekked inland though bramble-covered hills, living off sour oranges, forest honey, and wild pig. It was sixteen years since Martí had last been in Cuba, and he reveled in the countryside and the delights of being on the march. “Climbing hills together makes men brothers,” he wrote. He met with his generals, Gómez and Maceo, at the sugar mill La Mejorana at the beginning of May, but the three leaders squabbled. Six pages torn from Martí’s diary that have never been recovered supposedly record a violent argument. Whatever happened, they parted afterward: Maceo for the mountains, Martí and Gómez inland to prod Camagüey into war.

Seeing what was coming, but believing that fighting was not the answer, Bernabé sailed for New York the following year. He left behind Antonio Aguilera, his son-in-law, charged with safeguarding the mill, a canny decision given the impeccable rebel credentials of Aguilera’s father. Francisco Vicente Aguilera, a fabulously wealthy eastern planter, had sold his vast estates to fund the Ten Years’ War and died penniless in New York in 1877 (but was fittingly rewarded during the Republic with his portrait on Cuba’s 100-peso bill). Bernabé’s eldest son, Bernabécito, also remained in Cuba to join the rebel
mambí
ranks.

The rebels made steady progress west across the island, singing the rebel anthem, “Hymn to the Invader,” which Loynaz had composed: “Every march will be a victory, the triumph of good over ill.” They gathered support as they marched, especially after General Valeriano Weyler, the Spanish commander in Havana, adopted radical tactics to blunt their advance. Weyler ordered his troops to force huge numbers of Cuban civilians into fortified settlements, where thousands of the
reconcentrados
died in what were in effect the first concentration camps. Having drained the countryside, Weyler then declared all of Cuba outside the Spanish-held towns a free-fire zone. The rebels responded by burning farms, destroying mills, and slaughtering cattle. Thousands of acres of sugarcane and tobacco went up in flames. Soon much of the population was starving, bitterly angry, and passionate in its support of independence.

Martí never saw these glimmerings of victory. He died five weeks after landing, shot by the Spanish in a surprise skirmish, conspicuous on a white horse, a life of Cicero in his saddlebags. Eager to prove his fighting ability, and against Gómez’s instructions, Martí had rushed forward into the line of fire. Ironically, a raw recruit called Angel de la Guardia, literally guardian angel, rode by his side. Like so many other nineteenth-century Romantic poets, Martí had anticipated his own death. Seven weeks before he was shot, Martí wrote a brief letter to his son: “I leave for Cuba tonight: I leave without you, even though you should be by my side. If I should disappear on the way, find with this letter the watch chain that I used when I lived. Farewell.” José Francisco was then sixteen. Learning of his father’s death, he immediately abandoned school, joined the revolutionary forces, and rose through the ranks to become a captain. It is said that he rode the same white horse from which Martí fell.

Three years later the U.S. Army intervened. It was the culmination of an impulse that had been building almost since the days of the founding fathers. In 1821, after the United States won control of the Florida peninsula, Thomas Jefferson wrote to President James Monroe that he had “ever looked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of States.” The image of Cuba as a ripening fruit that would one day fall into the hands of Uncle Sam had endured ever since. A cartoon published in
Puck
magazine in 1897 had shown him standing beneath a fruit tree with a basket, staring intently at “Cuba,” a ripe plum hanging from an upper branch. On February 15, 1898, the United States finally gained its pretext when the USS
Maine
, a battleship on a “friendly” visit to Havana, exploded mysteriously in the harbor. Two months later, encouraged by William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers (“Remember the Maine. To hell with Spain”), the United States declared war on Spain. Ostensibly it was to help the Cuban rebel cause. But at the Spanish surrender only a few months later, the authorities raised the American flag over Havana—not the Cuban. And when Spain and the United States signed the treaty ending the war, the Cubans were not even invited.

Just before he died, Martí wrote a note that his comrades had pinned to a pine board at their campground. “It is my duty to prevent through the independence of Cuba, the USA from spreading over the West Indies and falling with added weight upon other lands in Our America.” If Martí had survived, he would have become Cuba’s first president and history might well have been different. Instead, in dying, he left a figure so disturbingly necessary in Cuban history: the martyr. Judged by his own high standards, Martí’s plans had also failed.

 

 

THIS THEN WAS THE CUBA that Bernabé found when he returned to Camagüey from New York in 1898, the autumn of peace. Martí was dead, and Weyler and the rebels had left the country a smoking ruin. One journalist, traveling from Havana to Matanzas, described it as a “country wrapped in the stillness of death and the silence of desolation.” It was a beautiful land, he said, but he did not see in it a single house, man, woman, child, horse, mule, cow, or dog—not one sign of life, except for an occasional vulture circling in the air. After three decades of fighting for independence, the island was as quiet as a grave.

At Senado, Bernabé found that many of the houses, sheds, and warehouses around his
batey
were roofless. Nearby, where once had stood a village, there were only scattered piles of rubble and charred wood. Bridges had fallen and the railway lines that snaked though Bernabé’s land and had once carried cut cane to the mill from the fields were unusable: the wooden sleepers had rotted. A yellow fever epidemic broke out.

It began to rain. Bernabé grew anxious. Deep in debt, he was desperate to prepare for the
zafra,
which begins with the dry season in December. But the weather was like a curse. “We are living in the mill but it is raining so much that it is impossible to do anything, even leave the house,” he wrote to his brother. “You know what the rain is like here.” As rainstorms pounded the fields and the world around him turned brown—red-brown earth, damp-brown wood, black-brown clouds—Bernabé’s frustration became palpable. His handwriting grew smaller, more urgent, and he broke off his words at the margin of the page, continuing on the line below:

When the rain paused, Bernabé set to work immediately, rebuilding the mill’s chimney. The oxen he hoped to find to plow his fields were dead. So he bought mules that had pulled Spanish cannon only a few months before. He tried to hire disbanded Cuban troops to work in the coming
zafra
. But the fever epidemic complicated his plans; most men remained camped in distant hills, where they were safe from disease and could also forage for food. Then one of Bernabé’s grandchildren died of malaria, and his son Pedro caught dysentery. “It is true that Rome was not built in a day,” a despondent Bernabé wrote to his banker George Mosle in New York. “But Rome did not have debts to pay, nor was it subject to the caprices of nature and the consequences of war.”

Martí was right to call Bernabé Sanchez an “enemy of the revolution” when he learned of Loynaz’s betrayal to the Spanish. But Bernabé was not a selfish old fool. He was a pragmatist and a survivor. At the very least, autonomy would have preserved the island from the ravages of a dreadful war and the ambiguity of U.S. military rule that followed it. Alejandro Rodríguez, a young soldier who had carried the Camagüey Autonomists’ first message of protest to Martí in New York and then went on to fight as a general against the Spanish, confided as much to a friend after the war. “You know that abandoning my interests and family, I was among the first to reach for arms and support the revolution. . . . But I who have served my country, for which I have sacrificed everything, cannot even have my family by my side for lack of means to support it. I cannot embark on any business or reconstruct my farm due to lack of funds. I see myself perhaps forced to emigrate in search of bread in a strange land.” In letters written from his mill at around the same time, Bernabé had similarly contemplated his age, his looming poverty, and the destruction of his mill and his country. “Is this the price of a Free Cuba?” he asked sarcastically. Many Cubans have wondered the same ever since.

—THE CONDESA DE MERLIN,
Viaje a la Habana

 

 

H
avana’s Prado is a magnificent shaded boulevard nearly a mile long that stretches from the city’s central park down to the sea. In the colonial era it was a fashion catwalk, the place to be seen, the women wearing white muslin, the men dressed in frock coats, linen trousers, and ties, all riding in
volantes
with a liveried black footman in high boots and silver spurs driving the horse-drawn carriages up front. Later, my grandmother remembered the evenings in the 1920s when men still promenaded up one side and women down the other, while orchestras played among the Prado’s open-air cafés and laurel trees.

At the end of 1898, though, when the occupying U.S. Army set up camp in Havana, the Prado became a tent city. Habaneros looked on with bemusement and some horror as U.S. soldiers pitched canvas, drove tent pegs into tree beds, and strung their laundry between the lampposts. General John Rutter Brooke described the city as a place of “desolation, starvation and anarchy.” The mast of the wrecked USS
Maine
could still be seen sticking out of the harbor water, and the remnants of the old
reconcentrado
dwellings, grim tenements, lined the city walls. Yet Havana had also escaped the worst of the fighting and even then was what it remains today, one of the Americas’ great capitals, a city of cobbled streets, graceful balconies, and grilled windows, the names of past sugar barons carved into massive stone lintels above studded wooden doors.

Cubans were humiliated on New Year’s Day 1899 when they saw the Spanish flag come down over the old fortress in the harbor and the U.S. flag take its place. “Neither a colony nor a free state, Cuba suffers all the disadvantages of the former and none of the advantages of the latter,” the old Autonomist newspaper
El Nuevo País
lamented. When the U.S. military governor moved into the former captain-general’s residence, they also wondered who their real enemy was and what progress really meant. At the same time, they marveled at the speed with which the occupying troops transformed the island.