War and Genocide in Cuba, 1895-1898 (review)

Often overshadowed by the U.S. military victory of 1898, the last Spanish-Cuban War has failed to receive the attention from historians that it deserves. This important and engrossing book does much to fill the historiographical gap, providing readers with an excellent account and analysis of the conflict in its military, political, social, and economic dimensions. Making good use of extensive archival work in Spain, Cuba, and the United States, author John Lawrence Tone casts serious doubt upon conventional historiographical wisdom from all three countries.

The book begins with a brief look at the origins of the conflict and the uprising of 1895, which Tone describes as the work of a revolutionary elite that lacked widespread popular support, regardless of what Cuban historians have since written. He later takes on the Cuban nationalist version of events again, arguing that the Cuban independistas were not on the verge of the victory in 1898; instead, only the intervention of the United States made possible the defeat of the Spaniards. Furthermore, he questions the view that a majority of Cubans supported the War of Independence itself. The arrival of Antonio Maceo's forces in western Cuba, for example, "was never a simple moment of 'liberation' but a complex encounter characterized by collaboration, resistance, and attempts to avoid either" (p. 142).

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of the book is its treatment of "reconcentración," or the forced migration of civilians into camps, in which Tone estimates that around ten percent of the entire Cuban population perished. The book not only makes the most credible estimate to date of the scale of the hardship and deaths caused by reconcentración, but it also explores the personalities, strategic thought, and developments that lay behind the concentration camps. Needless to say, Spanish general Valeriano Weyler looms large in Tone's book, which goes well beyond the one-dimensional portrayals of "the butcher" that still prevail in many works. Although Tone in no way diminishes the horrors of the camps or Weyler's role in their creation, he explains how Weyler's decision to "reconcentrate" civilians made sense from a purely military perspective, noting that history contains plenty of examples of similar strategies of counterinsurgency and that contemporaries did not always deem the Spanish case exceptional. Even more controversially, Tone argues that the concentration camps stemmed in part from the actions of the Cuban independence leaders, who also waged deadly economic warfare and thereby generated a massive refugee crisis themselves. This crisis, he writes, "needs to be taken seriously as a precursor to, and even a cause of, Weyler's reconcentration" (p. 197). According to Tone, Weyler was on the verge of military victory when he was recalled to Spain.

The book's account of Weyler's recall by the Madrid government forms one part of its coverage of developments in Spain throughout the war. Tone describes, for example, the fascinating series of events and connections between Spanish anarchism, government repression, and the assassination of Spanish premier Antonio Cánovas, which in turn set the stage for Weyler's recall, the corresponding recovery of the seriously debilitated Cuban independence forces, and the decision of the United States to declare war on Spain. Tone finds little evidence of major popular opposition in Spain to the war, once again contradicting a widely accepted interpretation, this time as seen in the work of Carlos Serrano and others. The book also revises—or at least adds significant nuances to—common assumptions of U.S. military historiography. Regardless of what happened in the end, Tone writes, at the time it was not that unreasonable to doubt that U.S. ground and naval forces would experience easy or even inevitable victories.

In addition to its very solid grounding in original research and analysis, the book also benefits from its author's style and narrative technique, which combine to make it highly readable. It is a significant work...