Ernesto Read online

  Studying a storm as it travelled along the horizon, Ernest walked along the sea. His eyes wandered along the fortifications of an ancient city, and he daydreamed about raids of buccaneers whom he had often read about as a boy—pirates like François “Peg Leg” le Clerc (1554), the “Exterminating Angel” Jacques de Sores (1555), or Sir Francis Drake, who sent terror into Spaniards’ hearts when he appeared in the spring of 1586 with twenty-three ships at the mouth of Havana’s harbor, only to shark-circle and turn away. Or the Dutchman Piet Heyn (1628), who had captured the Spanish treasure fleet in the Bay of Matanzas. Or the Englishman Henry Morgan (1662), who had taken the castle guarding Santiago Bay and plundered the city—stealing everything of value, including the church’s bells. Majestic renegades in square-rigged galleons with towering masts and puffing sails laid siege, lobbing cannonballs at the defenses of a forsaken Spanish fort. Ernest imagined the raiders as they leaped, blades in their teeth, seizing fortunes from marooned servants of the crown, from power assiduously amassed.116

  Later that evening along the Malecón, passersby, perhaps the Hemingways among them, stood agape as a cannonball hopped over the high wall of the fort and plunked to the bottom of the sea while mulatto soldiers in white powdered wigs, tricornes, and red petticoats, retired colors, extinguished torches, and executed an about-face with the setting sun. The Havana tradition owed its origin to the Seven Years’ War, when the British navy, encountering the weaknesses in Spain’s defenses, seized the city of Havana for ten months. When the English returned Havana in exchange for Florida in 1762, Spanish sentinels reinforced fortifications and implemented the cañonazo, a “canon blast” advising citizens to return within the city gates by curfew, a tradition upheld at nine o’clock every day to this day.117

  Ernest followed the wall to the seaport where the ledge along the water opened into the cobbled courtyard called the Plaza de Armas, a square containing Castillo de la Fuerza Real (the four-cornered Castle of the Royal Forces), formerly known as the Plaza de la Iglesia for the simple church there, Havana’s first. In that square, the Spanish army had lived for over a century and trained their army to protect the settlers. In 1829, they added El Templete to the square, a neoclassical temple to commemorate the city’s founding in 1519. At the base of the temple grew Havana’s most visited resident, a ceiba tree, a living shrine to thousands of believers from the Yoruba faith taken from their home to work the soil in the white man’s promised land. Following the locals’ example, Ernest touched the tree for good luck.

  Hibiscus, begonia, and jasmine sprouted from the garden island in the middle of the Plaza de Armas and emitted an intense bouquet. Around the flowers rose trunks of poplar, palm, and bamboo, reaching their branches over the square and lending it shade and sanctuary. In the twirling shadows of falling leaves stood a stone likeness of “the despot,” King Fernando VII, smiling confidently with his cape about his shoulders. Later, Cubans would remove his statue and replace it with that of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, the Cuban landowner who, on October 10, 1868, became a héroe nacional for his decision to free his slaves, setting the sparks in motion for Cuba’s long-desired war for freedom.118

  Wiping the sweat accumulating on his brow, Ernest sat on a bench in front of the statue of the Spanish king, and he observed the passersby with African features and many shades of mulatto skin. When the Spanish had been unable to enslave the natives, they abducted Africans from Angola, Zaire, Congo, Nigeria, Cameroon, Benin, Sierra Leone, and Ghana or purchased them from warring tribes, to use them in a lucrative tobacco and sugar trade.119 Shackled tightly together below the deck of ships, hundreds of seasick slaves endured agony, extreme heat, drownings, and death by disease during the two-to-three-month crossing of the Middle Passage. Historians estimate 11 million Africans survived the arduous crossing and enslavement in the Americas, while approximately 17.8 million (or three out of every five) died en route.120 Those Africans who survived mixed with each other, with native peoples, with other immigrants, and with their Spanish masters to become Criollos, or Creoles: mixed-race peoples born in America, recipients of discrimination from colonists reinforcing control of territory and resources.

  For centuries, Creoles and slaves arose in isolated rebellions, only to be put down again. After decades of illicit meetings, mountain militias on the move, funds elicited from dissidents abroad, and armies trained on the other side of the sea, slave-owners and slaves united in the fight against their Spanish oppressors. As the story goes, plantation owner Carlos Manuel de Céspedes rang the bell of his house in Bayamo, not to summon slaves to supper or to work the fields, but to announce that they were free. Céspedes then asked these freed men if they would join him in battle against the Spanish, and all present answered “¡Que sí!”121 When the rebel “mambí” forces surprised the Spanish colonial army and took Bayamo, Cuba’s national anthem, “La Bayamesa,” was born: “Run to battle, men of Bayamo. The motherland looks proudly to you. Do not fear a glorious death. Because to die for the motherland is to live. To live in chains is to live mired in shame and disgrace. From the bugle hear the sound. Run, brave ones, to battle!”122

  “There are things that never get to be what they’re supposed to be,” writes Manuel Pereiras García. Cuban writer Eliseo Alberto adds, “In Cuba the past never passes.”123 After three hundred fifty years of slavery and colonial rule, Cuba fought three separate wars for independence between 1868 and 1898, the last one ending the year before Ernest was born. Céspedes’s “grito de Yara” (“battle cry of Yara”) was a defining moment in the island’s history, for it was the spark inspiring mixed-race peoples of Cuban birth to rise up decisively against colonial rule, led by figures like Agramonte, Figueredo, Gutiérrez, Máximo Gómez, and Antonio Maceo.124 Of the forty-two thousand mambí resistance fighters, 80 to 90 percent descended from African slaves, and two generals, Antonio Maceo and Quintín Bandera, were Creole. Historians have often described the Cuban War of Independence as the largest slave rebellion in the New World.125 However, Cuba’s story of revolt started, not with Céspedes, José Martí, or even Fidel Castro, but with a defiant Taíno native chief named Hatuey, who was burned at the stake in 1512 for guerrilla attacks on Iberian explorers. From early in her history, uprisings became, lamentably, inseparable from the island’s identity.

  Ernest removed his jacket and tie and hung them beside him on the bench; he leaned back to behold the giant flamboyant tree rising behind him and spreading resplendent branches overhead. When the wind rushed through the plaza, the bright orange petals of her flowers detached, twirling as they fell to the cobbled ground. In the sedative splendor of the historic square, Ernest’s restless mind reeled as it took measure of the possibilities of an island whose stylish hotels would cost him only two American dollars per day.126

  A boy carrying a box of brushes raised his eyebrows and made a clicking sound with his mouth as he looked at Ernest’s shoes. Smiling kindly at him, Ernest extended a foot and watched as the boy ran his rag across. The boy was about a year older than Bumby. It was then that Ernest, with a faint smile glimmering beneath his clean mustache, noticed that he was being observed by natives assessing him at the edges of the square. Some still equated Americans with opportunity while others were always wary of the appetites that awakened predictably soon after foreign landings on their blinding white coasts. At the corner of the plaza, there were tables set out. When a waiter walked by carrying two Hatuey beers, Ernest looked at the cold bottles sweating in the sun, thinking he might like to try one that afternoon. What would Hatuey himself have had to say, if he had known about the beer that would later bear his name?

  Among new arrivals, Cuba had often been called “la manzana”—the apple from which they longed to take a bite.127 Even President Thomas Jefferson openly coveted the isle, admitting to his successor, James Madison, “I candidly confess that I have ever looked upon Cuba as the most interesting addition that can be made to our system of States,” after he failed to purchase it from Spain in 1808.
If we could acquire Cuba and Canada, Jefferson reasoned, “we should have such an empire for liberty as she has never surveyed since the creation.”128 In 1820, Thomas Jefferson pressed US War Secretary John Calhoun to just “take Cuba…at the first possible opportunity.”129

  After the Seminole Wars in Florida, suppressing unruly Indians and slaves there, General Andrew Jackson and President John Quincy Adams compelled Spain to cede these territories to the United States in 1819; four years later, Adams outlined a theory known as “la fruta madura” (“the ripe fruit”), which reasoned that the “ripe fruit” of Cuba, once separated from Spain by a passing storm, would not fall to the ground but gravitate toward the North American “bosom.”130 In 1823, President James Monroe further propagated the pursuit of manifest destiny in Latin America when he enacted the foreign policy known as the Monroe Doctrine, warning the nations of Europe to leave “America to the Americans”: any meddling by European countries in the Western Hemisphere would compel the United States to defend its interests.131

  As slavery ended in the United States, owners of large plantations—like John Quitman who became Governor of Mississippi—plotted to move operations south, supported by other politicians, such as John Henderson (a senator from Mississippi), and by journalists, like Laurence J. Sigur (an editor advocating in New Orleans Delta).132 Ambitions blazing, these Southern leaders creatively funded several private forays into Latin America, like those by Narciso López, William Crittenden, and William Walker, as well as public incursions like the Banana Wars denounced by Major General Smedley Butler. The longing for Latin American territories had not dissipated by the end of the nineteenth century, when Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt was rapidly increasing the United States’ fleet, acquiring territories, and advocating an open declaration of war against Spain, a leading global-economic competitor at that time.133 Having lived in the United States, José Martí prophesized of American expansionism, “I have lived in the monster; I know its guts. My sling is that of David”134—words uttered on the eve of his death, echoing on the lips of every cubano today, because their prediction came true.

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  Gracias,” said Ernest Hemingway as he paid for the shine; he gathered his jacket and crossed the plaza beneath the arid vines of a two-hundred-year-old banyan tree. Through its canopy, he could see the balcony window of his hotel room and that the shutters were open.

  After breakfast on the terrace the next morning, Pauline and Ernest came down into the lobby, met their driver, and circled the town by autocar. As they passed along the newly inaugurated Fifth Avenue, connecting the city center to the new developments along the sea, the driver pointed to Biltmore Yacht and Country Club, and showcased a two-thousand-acre estate where prospector John McEntee Bowman was building enticing vacation homes in the Playa, Miramar, Country Club Park, and Marianao districts in Spanish and neocolonial style. It was becoming increasingly fashionable for the wealthy families, like that of American chemicals tycoon Irénée du Pont,135 to own one, which a girl from the Pfeiffer family would have already known. Returning through Vedado, they passed Taganana Hill, where the soon-to-be celebrated Hotel Nacional was under construction.

  On a hill beside the sea, workers were digging a private swimming pool. In front of the hill were two columns, a monument inaugurated three years earlier, in 1925, to honor the soldiers who died in the event that sparked the Spanish-American War.136 With busts of William McKinley, the US president who declared war; General Leonard Wood, the second American governor of Cuba; and Theodore Roosevelt, the Maine memorial remembers the 226 men who died there on February 15, 1898, when their ship exploded.137 After the explosion, the wreckage of the sunken ship, with its mast protruding just above water, blocked Havana harbor and became a point of interest among sightseers until an act of Congress and the US Army Corps of Engineers removed it, repatriated the sailors’ remains, and dragged the wreck four miles out to sea in 1912.

  The last shots of the Spanish-American War had been fired one year before Ernest was born. During Lieutenant Colonel Teddy Roosevelt’s “splendid little” ten-week war, the Rough Riders took San Juan Hill, becoming the living embodiment of American expansionism. At the Treaty of Paris on December 10, 1898, Spain surrendered Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, Wake Island, and the Philippines to the United States (which also annexed Hawaii and Samoa during the conflict), but Cuba’s representatives were conspicuously absent. At the end of a thirty-year struggle for autonomy, Cuba found itself a protectorate in “America’s care,” for its future good.138

  One of Cuba’s most respected military leaders, General Máximo Gómez, nicknamed “the Fox” by his Spanish adversaries, declined an invitation to attend the ceremony where the American flag was to be raised over Castillo del Morro in Havana, writing in his diary on January 8, 1899: “Ours is the Cuban flag, the one for which so many tears and blood have been shed. We must remain united to bring to an end this unjustified military occupation.”139 The intervention and expansionism at the outset of the twentieth century ultimately led to a “century of mistrust” in Cuba and in Latin America.140

  The Platt Amendment to Cuba’s constitution, added on Christmas of 1901, granted the US military the right to intervene in Cuban affairs if necessary “for the preservation of Cuban independence” and to maintain bases on the island. American General John R. Brooke governed for a year, then turned his post over to General Leonard Wood, who continued American supervision of the transition to full democracy for three more years before an “election” occurred. In a neocolonial, neoconquistador manner, the new governor conceptualized his job in both racial and religious terms:

  It is our God-given mission, and the whole Christian World is watching to see if the great American republic is equal to the strain. We are dealing with a race that has steadily been going down for one hundred years and into which we have to infuse new life, new principles, and new methods of doing things.141

  Among the candidates for president during Cuba’s first election was Bartolomé Masó, a staunch opponent of US occupation and the Platt Amendment, until he withdrew under US pressure.142 His opponent, Estrada Palma, won the election by default. To quiet rising civil unrest, US troops returned in 1906, when Ernest was seven years old, and did not depart until he was turning ten. Until 1909, American governors William Howard Taft and Charles Edward Magoon ruled the protectorate, then relinquished power in 1913 to a marionette.

  “On to Cuba!” proclaimed the New York Journal when war against Spain had ended and US occupation ensued. “The war-ridden isle is expected to be a veritable Klondike of wealth,” “a new country,” a “virgin land,” and “the land of promise.”143 Soon there were dozens of homesteading companies, such as the Cuban Land and Steamship Company in 1899, reselling subdivided, marked-up land plots that they had snatched up cheaply right after the war: “Such a field of wealth has never before been opened. It may mean a fortune to you. It certainly means happiness, comfort, and competence to those who accept our offer…Why toil, starve, and freeze, when by at once taking advantage of this offer you can reap a golden harvest, and live a life of comparative ease.”144 After the Panic of 1893 and a depression until 1898, thousands of unfulfilled and unemployed Americans began arriving on the island that promoters described as the next frontier, the new California, a fruit farmer’s dream, the promised land, their destiny itself manifesting.145

  After decades of war, Cuba found itself in ruins and without the financial capital to recover. Bolstered by favorable legislation, speculators descended upon the island like vultures on a carcass and North American investments increased tenfold. By purchasing the land at rock-bottom prices, stakeholders created modern American mills, called latifundia,146 which would come to dominate the agricultural economy and push out small farmers dependent on antiquated equipment.147 In cahoots with American investors like United Fruit, Cuban-American Sugar, American Sugar Refining, and Milton Hershey (the “Chocolate King” who still has
a town named after him in Cuba), a new breed of dictators ascended to power: José Miguel Gómez (1908–1912), Mario García Menocal (1912–1920), Alfredo Zayas (1920–1924), who erected an opulent presidential palace in 1921, and culminating with Gerardo Machado (1924–1933) and Fulgencio Batista’s 1940 coup.

  During this time, illicit deals flourished and unprecedented riches flowed in, filling state’s coffers with loans from robber barons like J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, advancing $9 million and $100 million for “public works”148 and creating one of the most spectacular capitols that Latin America had ever seen, as Cuba miraculously emerged from the ashes after decades of war, resurrecting itself.149 While their governors were making deals, the other 99 percent of Cuba’s citizens remained in distant barrios marginales in thin-roofed solars,150 with dirt floors and crumbling walls, until they objected to not sharing in the profits extracted from the nation’s resources and land, to their abject conditions, and to the manufacturing infrastructures built to support foreign companies from public funds.151

  After World War I devastated the farms of European beet sugar, the value of Cuban cane sugar spiked, and landowners repositioned themselves to provide American buyers with much more of the lucrative crop.152 Those who cashed in on the gold mine of sugar tasted a period of opulence that rivaled American standards—in the words of American visitors to Cuba at that time: “Cubans spend money with both hands…and they could teach us Americans about the art of extravagance in the construction of beautiful houses and the purchase of jewelry, clothing from Paris, and large automobiles.”153