Campaigning in Cuba

by George Kennan

While I was living at the Anglo-American Club and boarding on the pier of the Juragua Iron Company the deserted and half-dead city of Santiago was slowly awakening to life and activity. The empty streets filled gradually with American soldiers, paroled Spanish prisoners, and returning fugitives from Caney; shops that had long been shut and barred were thrown open under the assurance of protection given by the American flag; kerosene-lamps on brackets fastened to the walls of houses at the corners of the narrow streets were lighted at night so that pedestrians could get about without danger of tumbling into holes or falling over garbage-heaps; government transports suddenly made their appearance in the bay, and as many of them as could find accommodation at the piers began to discharge cargo; six-mule army wagons rumbled and rattled over the rough cobblestone pavements as they came in from the camps after supplies; hundreds of hungry and destitute Cubans were set at work cleaning the filthy streets; and in less than a week Santiago had assumed something like the appearance that it must have presented before the siege and capture. The thing that it needed most in the first fortnight after the surrender was a hotel, and a hotel it did not have. Newspaper correspondents, officers who had come into the city from the camps, and passengers landed from the steamers had no place to go for food or shelter, and many of them were forced to bivouac in the streets. Captain William Astor Chanler, for example, tied his saddle-horse to his leg one night and lay down to sleep on the pavement of the plaza in front of the old cathedral.

The urgent need of a hotel finally compelled the steward of the Anglo-American Club to throw open its twenty or more rooms to army officers, cable-operators, and newspaper correspondents who had no other place to stay, and to make an attempt, at least, to supply them with food. A few cases of canned meat and beans and a barrel of hard bread were obtained from the storehouse of the Red Cross; a cook and three or four negro waiters were hired; and before the end of the first week after the capture of the city the club was furnishing two meals a day to as many guests as its rooms would accommodate, and had become the most interesting and attractive place of social and intellectual entertainment to be found on the island. One might meet there, almost any night, English war correspondents who had campaigned in India, Egypt, and the Sudan; Cuban sympathizers from the United States who had served in the armies of Gomez and Garcia; old Indian fighters and ranch-men from our Western plains and mountains; wealthy New York club-men in the brown-linen uniform of Roosevelt's Rough Riders; naval officers from the fleet of Admiral Sampson; and speculators, coffee-planters, and merchant adventurers from all parts of the western hemisphere. One could hardly ask a question with regard to any part of the habitable globe or any event of modern times that somebody in the club could not answer with all the fullness of personal knowledge, and the conversation around the big library table in the evening was more interesting and entertaining than any talk that I had heard in months. But the evenings were not always given up wholly to conversation. Sometimes Mr. Cobleigh of the New York "World," who had a very good tenor voice, would seat himself at the piano and sing "White Wings," "Say au revoir, but not good-by," or "The Banks of the Wabash," and then Mr. Cox, resident manager of the Spanish-American iron-mines, would take Cobleigh's place at the instrument and lead the whole assembled company in "John Brown's Body," "My country, 't is of thee," and "The Star-Spangled Banner," until the soldiers of the Ninth Infantry, quartered in the old theater across the way, would join in the chorus, and a great wave of patriotic melody would roll down Gallo Street to the bay, and out over the tranquil water to the transports lying at anchor half a mile away. Sitting in that cheerful, comfortably furnished club-room under the soft glow of incandescent electric lights, and listening to the bright, animated conversation, the laughter, and the old familiar music, I found it almost impossible to realize that I was in the desperately defended and recently captured city of Santiago, where the whole population was in a state of semi-starvation, where thousands of sick or wounded were languishing in crowded hospitals and barracks, and where, within a few days, I had seen destitute and homeless Cubans dying of fever in the streets.

Miss Barton began the work of relieving the wide-spread distress and destitution in Santiago with characteristic promptness and energy. To feed twenty or thirty thousand people at once, with the limited facilities and the small working force at her command, and to do it systematically and economically, without wastefulness and without confusion, was a herculean task; but it was a task with which experience and training in many fields had made her familiar, and she set about it intelligently and met the difficulties of the situation with admirable tact and judgment. Her first step was to ask the ablest, most influential, and most respected citizens of Santiago to consult with her with regard to ways and means and to give her the benefit of their local knowledge and experience. The object of this was to secure the coöperation and support of the best elements of the population, and strengthen the working force of the Red Cross by adding to it a local contingent of volunteer assistants who were thoroughly acquainted with the city and its inhabitants and who would be able to detect and prevent fraud or imposition. There was danger, of course, that people who did not need food, or were not entitled to it, would seek to obtain it on false pretenses, and that others, who perhaps were really in distress, would try to get more food than they actually required in order that they might make a little money by selling the surplus. In anticipation of this danger, Miss Barton decided to put the distribution of food largely under local control. In the first place, a central committee of three was appointed to exercise general supervision over the whole work. The members of this committee were Mr. Ramsden, son of the British consul; Mr. Michelson, a wealthy and philanthropic merchant engaged in business in Santiago; and a prominent Cuban gentleman whose name I cannot now recall. This committee divided the city into thirty districts, and notified the residents of each district that they would be expected to elect or appoint a commissioner who should represent them in all dealings with the Red Cross, who should make all applications for relief in their behalf, and who should personally superintend the distribution of all food allotted to them on requisitions approved by the central committee. This scheme of organization and distribution was intelligently and judiciously devised, and it worked to the satisfaction of all. Every commissioner was instructed to make a requisition for food in writing, according to a prescribed form, stating the number and the names of heads of families needing relief in his district, the number of persons in each family, and the amount of food required for the district as a whole and for each family or individual in detail. The commissioner then appended to the requisition a certificate to the effect that the petitioners named therein were known to him and that he believed they were really in need of the quantities of food for which they respectively made application. The requisition then went to the central committee, and when approved by it was filled at the Red Cross warehouse and retained there as a voucher.

I heard it asserted in Santiago more than once that food issued by the Red Cross to people who were supposed to be starving had afterward been sold openly on the street by hucksters, and had even been carried on pack-mules in comparatively large quantities to suburban villages and sold there; but I doubt very much the truth of this assertion. Miss Barton caused an investigation to be made of several such cases of alleged fraud, and found in every instance that the food said to have been obtained from the Red Cross had really come from some other source, chiefly from soldiers and government transports, whose provisions, of course, could not be distinguished from ours after they had been taken out of the original packages. Be this, however, as it may, the checks upon fraud and imposition in the Red Cross scheme of distribution were as efficient as the nature of the circumstances would allow, and I doubt whether the loss through fraudulent applications or through collusion between commissioners and applicants amounted to one tenth of one per cent. The Red Cross furnished food in bulk to thirty-two thousand half-starved people in the first five days after Santiago surrendered, and in addition thereto fed ten thousand people every day in the soup-kitchens managed by Mr. Michelson. I do not wish to make any unjust or invidious comparisons, but I cannot refrain from saying, nevertheless, that I did not happen to see any United States quartermaster in Cuba who, in the short space of five days, had unloaded and stored fourteen hundred tons of cargo, given hot soup daily to ten thousand soldiers, and supplied an army of thirty-two thousand men with ten days' rations. It is a record, I think, of which Miss Barton has every reason to be proud.

But her beneficent work was not confined to the mere feeding of the hungry in Santiago. She sent large quantities of cereals, canned goods, and hospital supplies to our own soldiers in the camps on the adjacent hills; she furnished medicines and food for sick and wounded to the Spanish prison camp as well as to the Spanish army hospital, the civil hospital, and the children's hospital in the city; she directed Dr. Soyoso of her medical staff to open a clinic and dispensary, where five surgeons and two nurses gave medical or surgical aid to more than three thousand sick or sickening people every day; she sent hundreds of tons of ice from the schooner Morse to the hospitals, the camps, and the transports going North with sick and wounded soldiers; she put up tents to shelter fever-stricken Spanish prisoners from the tropical sunshine while they were waiting to be taken on board the vessels that were to carry them back to Spain; and in every way possible, and with all the facilities that she had, she tried to alleviate the suffering caused by neglect, incompetence, famine, and war.

CHAPTER XVII

MORRO CASTLE

In the course of the first week after I landed in Santiago, I made a number of interesting excursions to points in the vicinity of the harbor, for the purpose of ascertaining the real nature and strength of the Spanish fortifications and intrenchments. From the front of our army, after the battle of July 1-2, I had carefully examined, with a strong glass, the blockhouses and rifle-pits which defended the city on the land side; and from the bridge of the State of Texas, two weeks later, I had obtained a general idea of the appearance of Morro Castle and the batteries at the mouth of the harbor which protected the city from an attack by water; but I was not satisfied with this distant and superficial inspection. External appearances are often deceptive, and forts or earthworks that look very formidable and threatening from the front, and at a distance of half a mile, may prove to have little real strength when seen from the other side and at a distance of only a few yards. I wished, therefore, to get into these forts and batteries before any changes had been made in them, and before their guns had been removed or touched, so that I might see how strong they really were and how much damage had been done to them by the repeated bombardments to which they had been subjected.

The first excursion that I made was to Morro Castle and the fortifications at the entrance to the harbor. It was my intention to start at 4 a.m., so as to reach the castle before it should get uncomfortably hot; but as I had no alarm-clock, and as no one in the club ever thought of getting up before six, I very naturally overslept myself, and by the time I had dressed, eaten a hasty breakfast of oatmeal, hard bread, and tea, and filled my canteen with boiled water, it was after seven. The air ought to have been fresh and cool even then; but on the southeastern coast of Cuba the change from the damp chilliness of night to the torrid heat of the tropical day is very rapid, and if there is no land-breeze, the rays of the unclouded sun, even as early as seven o'clock in the morning, have a fierce, scorching intensity that is hardly less trying than the heat of noon. The only really cool part of the day is from four to six o'clock in the morning.

I put a can of baked beans and a-few crackers of hard bread into my haversack for lunch, threw the strap of my field-glass over my shoulder, took my canteen in my hand, and hurried down Gallo Street to the pier of the Juragua Iron Company, where I had engaged a colored Cuban fisherman to meet me with a sail-boat at 4 a.m. He had been waiting for me, patiently or impatiently, more than three hours; but he merely looked at me reproachfully, and pointed to the sun, as if to say, "You agreed to be here at daybreak, and now see where the sun is." I laid my head down sidewise on the palm of my hand, shut my eyes, snored vociferously, and explained to him in Russian that I had overslept myself. I was gratified to see that he understood my Russian perfectly. In communicating with Cubans and Spaniards I have always made it a practice to address them in Russian, for the obvious reason that, as they are foreigners, and Russian is a foreign tongue, they must necessarily understand that language a little better than they could possibly understand English. It may seem like an absurd idea, but I have no hesitation in saying that a skilful and judicious combination of Russian with the sign-language is a good deal more intelligible to a Cuban fisherman than either Pidgin-English or Volapük. Voltaire once cynically remarked that "paternosters will shave if said over a good razor." So Russian will convey a perfectly clear idea to a Cuban fisherman if accompanied by a sufficiently pictorial pantomime. I tried it repeatedly on my boatman, and became convinced that if I only spoke Russian a little more grammatically, and gesticulated the sign-language a little more fluently, I could explain to him the outlines of cosmic philosophy and instruct him in the doctrines of esoteric Buddhism. I never should have got to Morro Castle and back with him if I had not been able to draw diagrams in the air with both hands and my head simultaneously, and then explain them to him in colloquial Russian.