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

Histories of 1898 vis-à-vis Cuba have long followed nationalist standpoints. Understandably, historians of Cuba have emphasized Cuban agency, arguing in many cases that separatists largely defeated Spain before the United States' intervention. Spanish historians have viewed events as a disastrous dénouement to a nineteenth century fraught with disorder and decline. To U.S. historians, 1898 often signaled an anomalous and brief imperial opening of the "American Century" in which the decisive actions of a rising power—the "splendid little war"—rendered lesser nations' impact on final outcomes minimal at best, and not worthy of sustained attention at worst.

Hispanist John Tone has written a highly accessible, explicitly revisionist narrative military history of Cuba's War of Independence, based on secondary literature and primary research in archival collections in Cuba, Spain, and the United States. The book exemplifies emergent transnational scholarship that has begun to meet the challenge raised during the 1998 centennial for a new historiography drawing on Cuban, Spanish, and U.S. perspectives.¹ Tone asserts that the received U.S. historiography "with the Cubans left out" (xii, 289) always faced challenges such as that posed by labor historian Philip Foner's Spanish-Cuban-American War.² But quite apart from critiques that Foner's work rather uncritically repeated Cuban nationalist claims, such scholarly corrections made little impact in popular understandings of the conflict.

Early on, Tone warns the reader to "expect a tragedy" (9) as he deftly describes the motivations, trajectory, and grim effects of a cruel late-nineteenth century total war on civilians and combatants. His treatment includes a reckoning of the Spanish army's notorious counterinsurgency reconcentration policy whereby rural inhabitants were forcibly relocated by both insurgent depredations and colonial troops to Spanish-controlled towns—a tactic that introduced the term concentration camp to the twentieth century's lexicon—together with careful scrutiny of political developments in the colony and metropolis. Tone eschews the "thirty years war" periodization of independence from the Ten Years' War (1868–1878), arguing that such an approach foredooms the intervening decade's politics and social developments to irrelevance (25–26) even though tactical innovation was slight between the two wars in spite of technological changes. Nevertheless, within the narrative, key parsed details of the earlier conflict appear in biographic chapters about important leaders.

His stark descriptions of prevailing social conditions in both Cuba and Spain, military institutions, and of the ghastly mortality rate inflicted by tropical diseases are told with verve and pathos. For Tone, war in Cuba foreshadowed twentieth-century decolonization wars of national liberation. An armed separatist insurgency prefigured Mao's dictum that the objective of guerrilla strategy is to pit few against many, while the tactic pursued is to pit many against few. Ultimately, the colonial metropolis sent a large conscript army of 190,000 backed by some 60,000 native auxiliaries against the poorly armed rebels, outnumbered ten to one. He finds that total Spanish combat casualties numbered 4,032 deaths and 10,956 wounded. Fully twenty-two percent of the Spanish colonial army in Cuba, over 41,000 soldiers, however, died from tropical diseases (9–10, 97). Such statistics are lower than many estimates but higher than the recent figure of 37,721 by a Cuban military historian.³

By 1896, faced with an island-wide insurgency after the invasion of sugar-rich western Cuba, the Spanish military placed General Weyler in charge. He executed but did not single-handedly plan the forcible reconcentration of the rural populace—figuratively draining the sea in which the insurgent fish swam—a "sound strategy" (209), but with an appalling and fearful cost. Using fragmentary evidence, Tone revises the death toll of reconcentration, down from oft-cited claims of hundreds of thousands made by Weyler's many enemies, but up from some recent estimates, to arrive at a conservative number of 170,000. This figure, even if lower than many, is frightful in its implications: fully ten percent...