The Structure of Cuban History: Meanings and Purpose of the Past

1. All This We Prefer

ALL THIS WE PREFER We prefer to see our Cuba converted into a mound of ashes, and the cadavers of its sons reduced to charred remains, before consenting to the continued rule over this unhappy land by Spanish domination. — Salvador Cisneros Betancourt to Antonio Aguilera (December 31, 1896) [After 1868] everything was rubble, smoke, pain; and at every step a tomb was erected. In that revolution . . . [we] learned to die and kill; patriotism and self-esteem were defined along precise lines. And a sentiment of dignity took hold within the heart of the country. — Manuel Márquez Sterling, Alrededor de nuestra psicología (1906) On January 1, 1899, the true Cuban people [el verdadero pueblo cubano] had no worries. . . . Everything was joy and brotherhood. If it had been possible for human beings to show their heart it would have revealed a people who yearned to see their idolized Cuba free and independent. — Ricardo Batrell Oviedo, Para la historia: Apuntes autobiográficos de la vida de Ricardo Batrell Oviedo (1912) 1 22 | ALL THIS WE PREFER T he war ended in the summer of 1898. Only then was it possible to begin to take in the magnitude of the devastation wrought by Cuban determination to achieve independence: the culmination of nearly fifty years of protracted warfare and intermittent insurrection, marked by recurring cycles ofdestruction and disruption, decades of political repression alternating with economic depression interspersed with years of destitution and dispersal. Peace found a people prostrate. The war had been especially cruel in its conduct and frightful in its consequences. Spaniards were ruthless in their defense of colonial rule, and Cubans were relentless in their demand for national sovereignty. Contending forces laid siege to the largesse of the land, preying upon the bounty of its resources, consuming cultivation and confiscating livestock as a matterof need and destroying the rest as a method ofwar. The wartime abundance of displacement and destruction found its inevitable consequences in the peacetime prevalence of impoverishment and indigence. It had been total war, a campaign in which the practice of pillage and plunder was adopted as a cost-effective method ofwarfare, in which the systematic destruction of property and production became an acceptable if not the preferable means each side used in the effort to defeat the other.What the Cubans spared, the Spanish destroyed—and vice versa.Total, too, in that the war produced havoc in almost all the 1,000 towns and villages across the island, where the distinction between civilians and combatants lost any useful meaning, where neutrality was suspect and security was often obtained only behind oneor theother battle line, rarelyeveroutside them, and never between them. The losses were incalculable, the suffering was unimaginable. Powerfully destructive forces were let loose upon the land, sometimes as a matter of policy, planned and deliberate; at other times as a matter of happenstance, improvised and random.These were perhaps differences without distinction, for the results were almost always the same: chaos in the lives of the affected men, women, and children, lives shattered and forever changed. Few Cubans in 1898 found home as they remembered it—if they found home at all. Many of the things that they had previously used as reference points in their lives had disappeared, or no longer worked. Objects of memories no longer existed, familiar landmarks had vanished, old boundaries had disappeared: not dissimilar to the experience of Iznaga in Luis Felipe Rodrí- ALL THIS WE PREFER | 23 guez’s short story “El despojo” (1928), who returns home after the war to discover that he was “a stranger in his own land.”1 The causeof Cuba Libre had been sustained with the support of Cubans ofall classes, men and women, black and white. Many had abandoned their businesses , shops, and farms; others had discontinued their educations and disrupted their careers. Vast numbers of Cubans lost their principal sources of income and their only means of livelihood. Many succumbed to indebtedness from which they never recovered. They willingly had sacrificed personal assets and family fortunes, great and small, in pursuit of sovereign nationhood. Thousands of families lost the savings of a lifetime and property accumulated over several lifetimes: businesses, professional offices, retail shops, farms, and homes—almost everything of worth and anything of value—possessions and property lost to tax collectors or creditors, or to punitive confiscations or the ravages of war. They were without homes, without money, without jobs...