Campaigning in Cuba

by George Kennan

The surface of the bay, as we pushed off from the pier, was almost as smooth and glassy as an expanse of oil; and although my negro boatman whistled persuasively for a breeze, after the manner of sailors, and even ejaculated something that sounded suspiciously like "Come up 'leven!" as he bent to his clumsy oars, he could not coax the Cuban Æolus to unloose the faintest zephyr from the cave of the winds in the high blue mountains north of the city. He finally suspended his whistling to save his breath, wiped his sweaty face on his shirt-sleeve, and made a few cursory remarks in Spanish to relieve his mind and express his unfavorable opinion of the weather. I shared his feelings, even if I could not adopt his language, and, pantomimically wringing the perspiration out of my front hair, I remarked in Russian that it was zharko (hot). Encouraged by what he took for sympathetic and responsive profanity on my side, he scowled fiercely and exclaimed, "Mucha sol—damn!" whereupon we smiled reciprocally and felt much cooler.

We crept slowly down the eastern side of the bay, past the conical hill crowned with a cubical blockhouse which marks the southern boundary of the city, around the end of the long iron trestle of the Juragua Iron Company, past the flat-topped mesa on which stands the harbor signal-station, and finally into the narrow neck of the Santiago water-bottle which Hobson vainly tried to cork with the collier Merrimac. From this point of view we could see, between the steep bluffs which form the entrance to the bay, a narrow strip of blue, sunlit ocean, and on its left the massive gray bastions of Morro Castle, projecting in a series of huge steps, like ledges or terraces of natural rock, from the crest of the eastern promontory.

All the maps of Santiago harbor that I have seen show another castle, called Socapa, nearly opposite Morro on the western side of the channel; but I have never been able to discover it. If it still exists, it must be in ruins and so overgrown with vegetation as to be completely hidden. The only fortification I could find on that side of the bay is the so-called "western battery," a recently constructed earthwork situated on the crest of the long, flat-topped hill which forms the outer coast-line. This earthwork could never have been known as a "castle"; it is at least three hundred yards west of the point indicated on the map as the site of Socapa, and it cannot be seen at all from the channel, or even from the highest parapet of Morro. Unless Socapa Castle, therefore, is so small and inconspicuous as to have escaped my notice, it must have fallen into ruins or been destroyed. There is no castle on the western side of the entrance now that can be seen from the water, from the Estrella battery, or from Morro.

After passing Cayo Smith, the sunken collier Merrimac, and the dismantled wreck of the Reina Mercedes, we turned abruptly to the left, opposite the Estrella battery, and entered a deep, sheltered cove, directly behind the Morro promontory and almost under the massive walls of the castle itself. Landing at a little wooden pier on the northern side of the miniature bay, I walked up to the road leading to the Estrella battery, and there stopped and looked about me. The cove was completely shut in by high hills, and the only road or path leading out of it, so far as I could see, was the one on which I stood. This began, apparently, at the Estrella battery, ran around the head of the cove, and then, turning to the right, climbed the almost precipitous side of the Morro promontory, in a long, steep slant, to a height of one hundred and fifty feet. There it made another turn which carried it out of sight behind a buttress of rock under the northwestern corner of the castle. Near the mouth of the cove, on my right, rose the white, crenellated, half-ruined wall of the Estrella battery—a dilapidated open stone fort of the eighteenth century, which contained no guns, and which, judging from its appearance, had long been abandoned. It occupied, however, a very strong position, and if the Spaniards had had any energy or enterprise they would have put it in repair and mounted in it a modern mortar which lay on a couple of skids near the pier, and two or three small rapid-fire guns which they might have obtained from one of Admiral Cervera's cruisers. Antiquated and obsolete as it was, it might then have been of some use.

Near the head of the cove was an old ordnance storehouse, or magazine, which proved upon examination to contain nothing more interesting than a few ancient gun-carriages, a lot of solid six-inch projectiles, an assortment of rammers and spongers for muzzle-loading cannon, and a few wooden boxes of brass-jacketed cartridges for Remington rifles. Three long smooth-bore iron culverins lay on the ground between this magazine and the pier, but they had not been fired, apparently, in a century, and were so eaten and pitted by rust that I could not find on them any trace of inscription or date. There was nothing really useful, effective, or modern, either in the Estrella battery or in the magazine, except the Remington rifle-cartridges and the unmounted mortar.

Finding nothing else of interest in the vicinity of the cove, I started up the road that led to the front or western face of Morro Castle. I call it a "road" by courtesy, because it did show some signs of labor and engineering skill; but it was broken every few yards into rude steps by transverse ledges of tough, intractable rock, and how any wheeled vehicle could ever have been drawn up it I cannot imagine. The fringe of plants, bushes, and low trees that bordered this road was bright with flowers, among which I noticed the white spider-lily (apparently a variety of Cleome pungens), the so-called "Cuban rose" (a flower that flaunts the scarlet and yellow of the Spanish flag and looks a little like Potentilla la Vésuve), and a beautiful climbing vine with large violet blossoms which resembled in shape and color the butterfly-pea (Centrosema).

In and out among these plants and bushes ran nimble lizards of at least half a dozen different kinds: lizards that carried their tails curled up over their backs like pug-dogs; lizards that amused themselves by pushing out a whitish, crescent-shaped protuberance from under their throats and then drawing it in again; lizards that changed color while I watched them; and big gray iguanas, two or three feet in length, which, although perfectly harmless, looked ugly and malevolent enough to be classed with Cuban land-crabs and tarantulas. I saw no animals except these lizards, and no birds except the soaring vultures, which are never absent from Cuban skies, and which hang in clouds over every battle-field, fort, city, and village on the island.

The road from the head, of the Estrella cove to the crest of the Morro promontory forks at a distance of seventy-five or one hundred yards from the cable-house, one branch of it turning to the left and climbing a steep grade to the summit of the ridge east of the castle, where stand the lighthouse and the barracks, while the other branch goes straight on in a rising slant to a rocky buttress situated almost perpendicularly over the point where the southern shore of the cove intersects the eastern margin of the harbor channel. Turning to the left around this buttress, it runs horizontally southward along a shelf-like cornice in the face of the precipice until it reaches a spacious terrace, or esplanade, cut out of the solid rock, at a height of one hundred and fifty feet above the water. This terrace, which is on the western face of the castle and directly under its lower bastions, seems to have been intended originally for a gun-platform, but there is nothing there now to indicate that guns were ever mounted on it. It has no parapet, or battlement, and is merely a wide, empty shelf of rock, overhanging the narrow entrance to the harbor, and overhung, in turn, by the walls of the fortress. In the mountain-side back of it are four or five quadrangular apertures, which look from a distance like square port-holes, or embrasures, for heavy cannon, but which prove upon closer examination to be doors leading to huge subterranean chambers, designed, I presume, for the safekeeping of ammunition and explosives. At the time when I went through them they contained nothing more dangerous than condemned shovels and pickaxes, empty bottles, old tin cans, metal lamps, dirty straw hats, discarded hammocks, and cast-off shoes. I found nothing in the shape of ammunition except two or three dozen spherical iron cannon-balls, which lay scattered over the rocky floor of the esplanade, as if the soldiers of the garrison had been accustomed to play croquet with them there, just to pass away the time in the intervals between Admiral Sampson's bombardments.

After looking about the esplanade and exploring the dim recesses of the gloomy ammunition-vaults, I climbed a crooked flight of disintegrating stone steps and entered, between two massive quadrangular bastions,[6] the lower story—if I may so call it—of the castle proper. As seen from the ocean outside of the harbor, this ancient fortress appears to consist of three huge cubes of gray masonry, superimposed one upon another in such a manner as to present in profile the outline of three rocky terraces; but whether this profile view gives anything like a correct idea of the real shape of the building I am unable to say. From the time when I entered the gateway at the head of the flight of stone steps that led up from the esplanade, I was lost in a jumbled aggregation of intercommunicating corridors, bastions, grated cells, stairways, small interior courtyards, and huge, gloomy chambers, which I could not mentally group or combine so as to reduce them to intelligible order or bring them into anything like architectural harmony. The almost complete absence of windows made it impossible to orient one's self by glancing occasionally at some object of known position outside; the frequent turns in the passages and changes of level in the floors were very confusing; the small courtyards which admitted light to the interior afforded no outlook, and I simply roamed from bastion to bastion and from corridor to corridor, without knowing where I was, or what relation the place in which I stood bore to the castle as a whole. Now and then I would ascend a flight of stone steps at the side of a courtyard and come out unexpectedly upon what seemed to be a flat roof, from which I could see the entrance to the harbor and the white walls of the Estrella battery hundreds of feet below; but as soon as I went back into the maze of passages, chambers, and bastions on that level, I lost all sense of direction, and five minutes later I could not tell whether I was on the northern side of the castle or the southern side, nor whether I was in the second of the three cubes of masonry or the third.

The most surprising thing about the castle, to me, was its lack of offensive power. Its massive stone walls gave it, of course, a certain capacity for endurance, and even for resistance of a passive kind; but it was almost as incapable of inflicting injury on an enemy as a Dutch dike or a hillock of the mound-builders would be. Until I reached what, for want of a better name, I shall have to call the roof of the uppermost cube, I did not find anywhere a single round of ammunition, nor a gun of any caliber, nor a casemate intended for a gun, nor an embrasure from which a gun could have been fired. So far as architectural adaptation to the conditions of modern warfare is concerned, it was as harmless as an old Norman keep, and might have been planned and built two centuries before guns were used or gunpowder invented. I have been unable to ascertain the date of its erection; but the city of Santiago was founded by Diego Velasquez in 1514, and all the evidence furnished by the castle itself would seem to indicate that it dates back to the sixteenth, or at latest to the seventeenth, century. There is certainly nothing in its plan or in its appearance to show that the engineers who designed it were acquainted even with the art of fortification as developed in the seventeenth century by Vauban. It is simply an old feudal castle, with moat, drawbridge, and portcullis, built after the model of medieval strongholds before heavy siege-ordnance came into general use. The idea that it could have done any serious damage to Admiral Sampson's fleet seems absolutely ludicrous when one has explored the interior of it and taken stock of its antiquated, not to say obsolete and useless, armament.