Throughout this war, Spain betrayed an uncanny knack for stealing defeat from the jaws of victory. Had Spain followed up the assault of the night of June 12â13 with an equal or greater onslaught the next day and night, it might have driven the marines from Windward Point. But all remained quiet through the following day and night, leaving the Americans time to devise an end to Spain's harassment. When Cuban scouts explained the pause in the Spanish fire as a break for reinforcements, Huntington and McCalla drew up plans for an assault on Cuzco Well.
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With Windward Point cleared of Spaniards, the navy put the bay to good use. Within days of the marines' victory, the
Yankee
could be found coaling comfortably along Hospital Cay in the middle of the outer harbor. Ships needing repair pulled into the coves near Camp McCalla. Enemy ships captured during the siege of Santiago were brought to Guantánamo and held there until the end of hostilities. The base became the navy's favored rendezvous site in the region.
As early as June 10, Spanish general Felix Pareja noticed that the Americans had taken an immediate liking to Guantánamo Bay. “The American squadron in possession of the outer bay has taken it as if for a harbor of rest,” Pareja reported in a letter intercepted by a Cuban patrol. “They have anchored as if [at] one of their own ports since the 7th, the day they cut the cables. In the entrance and center of the harbor, I not being able to reach them, they have not again molested me except with two cannon shots on the 8th. It appears from the work that is being done that they are preparing to plant the harbor with mines, or place their ships for disembarkation at Playa del Este, their favorite place.”
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Playa del Este would indeed become the navy's favorite place at Guantánamo Bay. Located around the corner from Fisherman's Point on the Windward side of the bay, it consisted of a series of protected
natural jetties and coves that lent themselves to all manner of port activities. Pareja knew Playa del Este to be the one strategic spot at the outer harbor suited to the disembarkation of Spanish troops. He assured his boss Linares that, should the “Americans abandon port, which I doubt,” he would do “everything possible ⦠to reestablish communication, to which end I have everything ready.”
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To this day, Playa del Este remains the hub of activity at the now expansive U.S. base.
Though Spain had been driven from Windward Point, the bay itself remained hot through June and into July, with small mobile bands of Spanish pickets taking potshots at U.S. troops from outcroppings above Hicacal Beach and Toro Cay. Weary of the impertinence, McCalla dispatched some of his ships to shell the local port of Caimanera, and through mid-June, the
Texas
and
Suwannee
engaged Spanish snipers at the northern and western perimeters of the outer harbor. Spain retained control of the inner harbor through the armistice.
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This last point deserves attention. Unquestionably in command of the outer harbor, and with firepower dwarfing that of the solitary
Sandoval
, the navy might have cleared the region of Spanish troops, occupied the inner harbor, and even pushed the marines on toward Guantánamo City. McCalla declined to do so, judging it wiser not to precipitate a confrontation with the six thousand or so troops of Felix Pareja, who were strung out along a ten-mile ribbon between Caimanera and Guantánamo City. Pareja and his boss Linares expected the Americans to advance on Santiago through Guantánamo Bay, just as Vernon had urged Wentworth to do in 1741. The longer Pareja thought such a move imminent, the longer he remained in place, thereby cheating Linares of reinforcements. The last message Pareja had received from Linares before Captain Goodrich cut the cable line was to hold Guantánamo City no matter the cost.
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Herein lay the short-term significance of the marines' accomplishment of holding Guantánamo Bay. Had the marines been driven from the bay, had they retreated (as Huntington appears to have wished), Pareja's troops in Guantánamo City would have had no reason to stay put. Pareja could have broken through the relatively sparse Cuban line separating Guantánamo City from Santiago, thereby ending his isolation and joining forces with Linares. Six thousand more Spanish troops
might just have been sufficient to turn the ensuing ground war in Spain's favor.
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Cut off from communicating with Linares, Pareja was hardly idle. Between Caimanera and Guantánamo he erected some fifty blockhousesâsmall forts, really, consisting of stone foundations and wooden superstructures. He threw up several more at the Guantánamo City junction of the old Santiago-Baracoa road. He fortified the territory behind the town of Caimanera. Finally, he constructed breastworks and dug trenches around Guantánamo City itself. Meant to contain the Americans, Pareja's work effectively isolated Guantánamo City from the rest of Cuba, at great cost to the local inhabitants. Captain McCalla would later report that, though “the Spanish officers were well fed” at Guantánamo City, the “civilians were starving.” Even the troops “had been without quinine for weeks and fifteen or twenty of them were dying every day” of malaria. An indication of just how cut off the towns of eastern Cuba were from one another is given in an Associated Press account of a pirate boat out of Baracoa inadvertently pulling into Guantánamo Bay in July. Apparently its crew had heard nothing of the American arrival.
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A graphic report out of Santiago, less isolated than Guantánamo City, conveys a sense of conditions throughout eastern Cuba at about the time the American army arrived. “In the stores many articles were wanting,” observed José Muller y Tejeiro, a Spanish army lieutenant, in his diary late that June. There was no flour in Santiago, hence no baking and no bread. There was no milk, “indispensable for the sick and for babies.” Though “music continued to play at the Alameda,” Santiago's bayside promenade, there was nobody to listen to it, nobody to walk with, nothing to eat. Dead dogs and horses littered the streets, and the city gradually “acquired the stamp of sadness and absence of life which is seen in places into which cholera and plagues carry sorrow and death.”
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A month later, reports out of Guantánamo City had become so dire that McCalla asked Admiral Sampson to urge his army counterpart, William Shafter, to hasten the work of the Spanish surrender so that food might be delivered to the city's starving inhabitants. In the end, McCalla decided he couldn't wait. Two days before the formal end of hostilities, he sent a launch up the bay waving a white flag and offering
Pareja flour and bacon captured off a Spanish vessel.
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Sampson himself weighed in a few days later. “There are about 5,000 Spanish soldiers in Guantánamo and Caimanera, 1,700 [one third] of them sick,” he wrote navy secretary Long. “There are political prisoners still in jail in Guantánamo [threatened by Sp Volunteers]; ⦠steps should be taken in interest of sanitation and humanity.” Reluctant to act without authorization, Sampson declared himself “most ready to assist, if desired.”
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Sampson's and McCalla's willingness to come to the aid of local Cubans reflects the atmosphere of reciprocity and respect that characterized relations between U.S. naval officers and their Cuban counterparts at Guantánamo Bay in those early days of the war. By any measure, the Cuban-American cooperation at the bay had been a notable success. As Máximo Gómez anticipated, the U.S. encounter with the Cubans at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere during the American intervention, and their accounts home of it, would play a crucial role in shaping U.S. public opinion about Cubans' propensity for self-governmentâand in determining U.S. policy toward Cuba in the aftermath of the war.
Initial reports were encouraging. After a meeting with the Cuban general in chief, Calixto GarcÃa, aboard his flagship,
New York
, Admiral Sampson described GarcÃa as man “of the most pleasant character. He is a large, handsome man, of most frank and engaging manners, and of most soldierly appearance.” Arriving off Santiago de Cuba in late May, Sampson's fleet had distributed food, clothing, and weapons to the Cubans, besides “rendering them all assistance possible.” Sampson assured Washington that “the returns” for the American aid would be good. “We have the best evidence of this in the activity and courage shown by the Cubans at Guantánamo, and commander McCalla has been most eulogistic in reference to their conduct.”
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Huntington, if uncomplimentary in his private remarks, publicly praised the Cubans' contribution at Guantánamo Bay. “I suppose native Cubans are not all black,” he wrote his son, Bobby, “but 99/100 in the part of the country are, and the average US cannot help regarding them as inferiors and while I do not doubt the wrongs of Cuba I doubt
if it was a case for governmental interference unless we were going to take and keep the country.”
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Still, Huntington described the Cubans as “excellent woodsmen and fearless,” and ultimately “of the greatest assistance.”
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And, though crediting the success of the assault on Cuzco to U.S. “coolness, skill, and bravery ⦠alone,” Huntington acknowledged that the “affair was planned by the Cubans,” and that had it not been for their arrival at the bay, the demoralizing Spanish attacks on the U.S. camp “might be going on now.”
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Meanwhile, Keeler himself described the Cubans as “all men of good size, some of them being over six feet in height.” The Cubans were proud and appreciative of the warm reception extended them by Captain McCalla and Huntington's marines. “We were glad to see them,” Keeler remembered. “It gave us courage when we were able to look upon those who we were fighting for.”
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Finally, even
The New York Times
, though skeptical early on in the war of the Cubans' competence, recognized virtue when it saw it. Evidence from Guantánamo suggested that the Cubans would be a big help in the coming ground war, the
Times
reported. “The insurgent forces, which have been armed and equipped by Capt. McCalla, not only prove to be daring scouts, but brave fighters and good shots with the Lee-Metford rifles. Our own men are warm in their praise, and look for unexpectedly strong cooperation upon the part of the Cuban Army.” A day later, according to the
Times
, passengers on board a naval supply ship arriving in Key West reported that “100 Cubans had joined the United States marines when a landing was effected” at Guantánamo Bay. The Cubans had “fought gallantly and rendered great assistance to the Americans, their aid being specially valuable in the work of throwing up entrenchments. The American officers speak highly of the efficiency and bravery of the soldiers.”
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How dissonant, then, seem the reports of Colonel Herbert H. Sargent, journalist Stephen Crane, and others of the Cuban Army's lack of discipline, professionalism, or commitment at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Sargent described Cuban contributions to the defeat of Spain at Santiago as negligible.
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Cubans did not fight “with desperation and courage.” They did not “take the initiative and lead the way in every battle,” to
prove that they were “worthy of freedom.” Rather, “in only two ways were they of any assistance in this campaign”: in providing information and in harassing the Spanish general Federico Escario's column outside Santiago. In short, “taken as a whole, they had neither the discipline nor the courage to close with the enemy and fight until one side or the other was defeated or crushed.” GarcÃa's troops, earlier commended by Sampson, were now reported to have “utterly failed to perform the easy task assigned them.” While the fate of Cuba was up in the air, “they stood by, inefficient, inactive. The reward was theirs, but the Americans made the sacrifice.”
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Sargent's book was not published until 1907, long after the fate of independent Cuba had been sealed in the United States. But there was no shortage of opinion like it in the eyewitness accounts of Stephen Crane and other journalists. In contrast to the sturdy, competent figures of Sampson's and Keeler's accounts, Crane's Cubans were undisciplined and “noisy,” “a hard-bitten, undersized lot, most of them negroes, and with the stoop and curious gait of men who had at one time labored in the soil.” From Crane's descriptions of the Cubans, one might have gotten the impression that it was they, rather than the Americans, who were joining a contest already three years old, so radically did their dishevelment contrast with the U.S. Marines' noble bearing.
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“The marines were silent,” Crane wrote; “the Cubans were cursing shrilly.” In Crane's accounts “toiling, sweating marines” were juxtaposed to “shrill, jumping Cubans.” The Cubans were bad shooters: “The Cubans, who cannot hit even the wide, wide world, lapsed into momentary peace.”
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By contrast, “the firing-drill of the marines was splendid. The men reloaded and got up their guns like lightning, but afterwards there was always a rock-like poise as the aim was taken. One noticed it more on account of the Cubans, who used the Lee as if it were a squirt-gun.”
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