Por Pedro Roig J.D.

 

Before Spain declared war on the United States on April 24, 1898, the Cuban Army of Independence had been fighting for over three years and inflicting devastating losses to the Spanish Army and Economy.  From its vast supply of men, mostly poor, illiterate peasants, Spain paid the staggering price of losing, mainly to yellow fever, over 25% of those soldiers that made the transatlantic voyage to Cuba. One in every four soldiers, fighting in the mosquitos infested fields, never returned to their families in Spain. Cuba’s Army of  Independence also accelerated the Spanish economy into bankruptcy. When the U.S.entered the war, Spain was facing military and financial disaster.

On July 1, 1898 after ferocious fighting in San Juan Hill and El Caney, Santiago de Cuba was encircled by American and Cuban forces. The water supply was cut off. With the possibility of the Spanish fleet being captured in the harbor if Santiago surrendered, Capitan General Ramon  Blanco ordered Admiral Pascual Cervera’s squadron to fight their way out. Blanco said: “If we should lose the squadron without fighting, the moral effect would be terrible, both in Spain and abroad. ” 

It was a suicidal order. Several days after the Maine disaster, Admiral Cervera wrote to Segismundo Bermejo, the Navy Minister: “ We owe to our country  not only our life but our belief..I ask myself if it is right for me to keep silent and make myself an accomplice in adventures which will cause the total ruin of Spain”. Three days later, he wrote to Bermejo with a sober statement: “What we may reasonably expect is defeat, which may be glorious, but all the same defeat,which will cause us to lose the island in the worst possible manner”. 

On receiving the fateful order from Havana, Cervera recalled his officers and sailors who had been in Santiago’s trenches, to ready the ships for the encounter with the powerful American battle fleet. Not a single officer or sailor fit for duty missed the roll call. They realized the suicidal odds and did not fail. Over three hundred of them  fought and died that morning;  Admiral Cervera was, sharing with his sailors their supreme  and honorable sacrifice. 

On July 3, 1898, at nine o’clock Sunday morning, navigating to their doom, the Spanish ships approached the narrow channel between El Morro and La Socapa. À gentle breeze, a sunny day, a quiet sea, out they came to meet their fate.  Leading the way was the Admiral’s flagship, the Maria Teresa, followed by Vizcaya, Cristobal Colon, Oquendo and at the rear the destroyers Pluton and Furor.

Maria Teresa’s Captain Victor Concas wrote: “From outside the conning tower… I asked for permission from the Admiral and with that I gave the order to fire. The bugle gave the order to begin the battle. My bugles were the last of those which history tells were sounded in Granada, it was the signal that the history of four centuries of greatness was ended.”

After several weeks on blockade duty, the Americans were going about their Sunday routines when the guards saw the Spaniards moving out into the Santiago channel ready to do battle. The alarm gongs sounded for action. Up went the signal flag. “Enemy ships are coming out” a half-hour before Admiral Sampson, on the cruiser New York, had left the fleet for a meeting with army general William Shafter at Siboney beach. Upon hearing the roaring guns, he ordered New York back to join the fight.

Maria Teresa came out at full speed and received the brunt of the U.S. Navy guns. It caught fire and ran aground. The Oquendo was badly damaged and also went ashore. Vizcaya was severely hit by the shells of five American ships and veered toward the beach, where it exploded. The two destroyers were swiftly sunk.

But Colon, the best of the Spanish cruises, turned away until it ran out of her good quality coal. Colon lost speed and was shelled by Oregon, Brooklyn, New York and Texas. By 1:15 p.m.  She headed toward the coast near the Turquino River and struck her colors. Three hundred and twenty-three Spanish officers and sailors were killed and 151 wounded. The Americans lost one sailor dead  and one was wounded.

For Spain, the war in Cuba was lost. The long, painful agony of her decrepit empire was over. With her navy sunk, the army isolated in the island and neither cash nor credit to keep on the fight, Madrid needed a negotiated settlement. It came quickly. On July 16, Santiago capitulated, and peace negotiations began in Paris, where on December 10, Spain signed a treaty transferring possession of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines to the United States.

This war marked a historical shift in U.S. foreign policy. Sometimes reluctantly, the young democracy began to break away from isolationism and into the international arena. Over the next 50 years, the United States would have fought and won two World Wars, and by the end of the Twentieth Century have achieved superpower status and world hegemony as the standard bearer of capitalism, individual freedom, human rights and private property, without parallel in the history of the human race.