Entre la ideología y la compasión: Guerra y paz en Cuba, 1895-1903: Testimonios de los Archivos Vaticanos by Manuel P. Maza Miquel, S.J. (review)

book reviews139 Entre la ideología y la compasión: Guerra y paz en Cuba, 1895-1903: Testimonios de los Archivos Vaticanos. By Manuel P. Maza Miquel, SJ. (Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic: Instituto Pedro Francisco Bono. 1997. Pp. 559. $25.00.) Manuel P. Maza Miquel has mined the Vatican Archives for information about the Catholic Church during the transformation of Cuba under three administrations : Spain, the United States, and Cuba. Maza Miquel's detailed history of Cuba's church-state relations under three flags is a significant addition to the historiography of Spain's colonial regime and the early Cuban Republic. An appendix contains copies of twenty-four Vatican documents as well as a list of papal nuncios in Madrid and one for bishops and archbishops of Havana and Santiago de Cuba. Although Maza Miquel focuses on Cuba from 1895 to 1903, he extensively reviews nineteenth-century developments in Cuba, Spain, and the Vatican. The core of the book, however, concerns the bishop of Havana, Manuel Santander y Frutos, and the archbishop of Santiago de Cuba, Francisco Saenz de Urturi y Crespo, both of whom served during and after the Cuban-Spanish-American War. Prominent Vatican officials featured in the account are Cardinal Mariano Rampolla del Tindaro, the nuncios in Madrid, and Archbishop Placide Chapelle of New Orleans. Church politics existed at several levels. In the Vatican, Pope Leo XIII sought to build European political support for his efforts to get Italy to return church lands. Thus, the Pope worked to strengthen his ties to Spain and the monarchy; he strongly supported Spain in its colonial wars in Cuba and the Philippines. Nevertheless, Bishop Santander, who assumed his Havana assignment in 1887, repeatedly challenged Spanish officials and resisted Spanish law that threatened ecclesiastical privileges. On the island divisive church-state issues concerned baptismal certificates, civil marriages, cemeteries, education, and clerical appointments; there were also financial irregularities. Some churchstate disputes continued during the Spanish-Cuban war. When the Cuban insurrection began, Santander believed God was punishing the irreligious, both Cubans and Spanish officials, for Masonry and liberalism. Archbishop Saenz,who arrived in Santiago de Cuba in 1894, ascribed the war to Cuban religious superstition and ignorance. Both Santander and Saenz supported Spain's military efforts, and later they recorded Cuban suffering as starvation and disease decimated the island. With respect to Spain, Maza Miquel reviews the Vatican's attempts to try to prevent a catastrophic Spanish-American war. These centered on encouraging Spain to offer a suspension of hostilities in Cuba. After the United States won the brief war, the Vatican sought to protect church interests on the island by naming Archbishop Placide Chapelle as Apostolic Delegate. Chapelle set out to conserve church properties and to improve 1 40BOOK REVIEWS the position of the clergy in Cuban society. Cuban patriots despised both Saenz and Santander, and Chapelle urged their replacement. Saenz was eager to leave the island, but Santander clung to his office.Accordingly, Chapelle wrote a stinging condemnation of Santander's administration, a copy of which has been translated from French and placed in the appendix. Despite the Church's proSpanish stance, Cuban nationalists and United States officials showed little vindictiveness . Cuban nationalists, however, worked assiduously to fill church positions with insular patriots, and under the new Republic they eventually got their way. John L. Offner Shippensburg State College, Pennsylvania The Mexican Right. The End ofRevolutionary Reform, 1929-1940. ByJohnW Sherman. (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger. 1997. Pp. xxii, 154. $55.00.) Anyone who has watched pilgrims walking on their knees to get to the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City on the evening of December 1 1 knows that Mexico is a deeply religious country. However, until a few years ago, the Catholic Church and the Mexican government had an extremely uneasy relationship , at least in terms of public pronouncements. There was often a similar bifurcation between the attitudes of the hierarchy of the Mexican Church and those ofits lower clergy. For example, two of the most important leaders of the Mexican independence movement—Miguel Hidalgo and José María Morelos —were priests whose bishop firmly supported the Spanish Crown. This split continued after the Revolution of 1910...