Cuban revolutions

The day after Valentine’s day in 1898, just three days after the first recorded death in an automobile accident on a public road, a US warship was sitting in the Havana harbor. For decades, the Cuban people had been fighting against the Spanish. They rose up in the Ten Years War, and then the Little War, and they had done so again in 1895 under the leadership of José Martí, a Cuban of Catalan descent, and they continued their struggle after his death under Máximo Gomez and Antonio Maceo. Martí’s politics are not that similar to my own, but he was certainly progressive for his era and notably opposed to the racism that was so common among many Americans of European extraction at the time. The Spanish were nothing less than genocidal in their defense of this remaining imperial possession, and increasingly the sympathies of the US public and media were with the revolutionaries as they fought a huge and growing Spanish military presence that became more and more brutal as it lost terrain and support.

A riot of pro Spanish groups in 1898 led the US to deploy the Maine, a warship that was commissioned just three years earlier, to Havana. The ship was there to indicate the willingness of the US to defend its interests, and perhaps the Cuban people, if needed. The Maine took nearly a decade to build and by the time she set sail, naval technology had rendered her somewhat obsolescent. Still, sitting in the Havana harbor she likely presented a serious concern. That was until she exploded, detonating tons of powder charges stored in the forward part of the ship and killing 261 of her crew.