Poetry and the Camp: Epiphanic Witness and Ecstatic Cry in the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1895–98

BENEDICT ANDERSON POINTED out that nations write their “biographies” through a peculiar inversion of genealogy—namely, by a series of deaths, not births. And not ordinary deaths: “exemplary suicides, poignant martyrdoms, assassinations, executions, wars, and holocausts”—deaths, as he put it, of a “special kind” (206). That death is such a lively issue within nationalist “imaginings,” Anderson argued, bespeaks a close affinity with religious modes of thought. For nations, too, transform the facts of fatality and finitude into matters of transcendence and continuity, beyond the earthly body and biological time of any given citizen or generation. The “mystery of re-generation” (11), Anderson called it. Nations as such have the capacity to evoke love and kinship between the dead, the living, and the yet unborn despite their lack of “natural” (i.e., blood) ties. And who is more exemplary and beloved than the nation’s heroes and the martyred dead? Those who died “special” deaths?

Cuba’s “biography” as a nation evidences precisely this genealogical proclivity, let alone its theological substratum. For its “birth” as a nation, like so many others, is narrated in terms of epic battles and heroic deaths for the nation’s independence. Indeed, the national epic bore within it the promise to surmount not only Spanish colonialism but death itself: “fear not a glorious death, for to die for the patria is to live,” reassured the national anthem, La Bayamesa. The apocryphal tale that the anthem’s author (Perucho Figueredo) sang it aloud as he breathed his last breath before a firing squad rendered such verse all the more seductive. And his was but one “poignant martyrdom” amid countless others. The patria accrued its quota of fallen warriors like the “Bronze Titan” Antonio Maceo and the Christlike martyr José Martí, lovingly known as the nation’s “Apostle.” Yet so, too, were these wars catastrophic—not least in the last three years (1895–98), when as many as two hundred thousand Cubans perished. At least as many Cubans were left infirm, jobless, homeless, penniless, or exiled by a war so ferocious and a denouement so tragic: the economy and its infrastructure were reduced to rubble and ash; agricultural fields and orchards barren; wells spoiled; livestock systematically slaughtered; families irrevocably torn apart; and, by war’s end, Cuba left in the hands of a new imperial sovereign—namely, the United States.¹

No other figure more viscerally embodied this catastrophe than did the reconcentrado. Meaning literally “he or she who has been reconcentrated,” reconcentrado was the name used to refer to any of the hundreds of thousands of Cuban civilians forcibly interned in what Spain called “camps of reconcentration.” Between the years 1896 and 1898 as many as two hundred thousand were strategically let to die in these crudely improvised and scarcely provisioned camps. Life was nowhere more precarious: for every guerrilla soldier who fell in combat as many as twenty reconcentrados died in the camps (Tone 210–19). And whereas the guerrilla soldier (the mambí) would live on in Cuban history and culture as an icon of martial prowess and “sublime abnegation,” reconcentrados had little else to their credit than sickly, emaciated bodies and unceremonious mass graves.

This article explores how Americans and Cubans came to poetic terms with the exceptional violence and “special” death that was so-called “reconcentration.” In the 1890s, after all, one could not yet speak of “genocide” or “crimes against humanity” in the morally and legally salient sense that one does today, nor was there any self-conscious theory or “art of the unrepresentable” to consult (Friedlander). In this essay, thus, I strive to make sense of the representational strategies that Americans and Cubans employed in order to articulate so peculiar an atrocity at a time when a metonym like Auschwitz—and all that it stands for ethically, intellectually, and artistically—had no salience. What symbols, tropes, analogies, and techniques were at their disposal? Which did they choose? And what could poetic expressivity have to offer under such circumstances?

Thanks to historians like Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring, Francisco Pérez Guzmán, and Lawrence Tone, we understand the juridical, military, and demographic vicissitudes of reconcentration as a war policy. We know far less, however, about its aesthetic (and ethical) vicissitudes. Other scholars have assessed how Cuba and the war were depicted in American oratory, journalism, historiography, and political cartoons (Miller; Pérez, Cuba; Pérez, War). But an inquiry that critically scrutinizes the (poetic) representability of the reconcentrado and the camps has yet to be realized. Whether the case of Cuba was structurally analogous to that of the Nazi Holocaust is not, accordingly, what is at stake.² It suffices for us that Cubans and Americans alike chose to refer to the event as “inconceivable,” “unimaginable,” “unspeakable,” and “indescribable.” For the truth is that “reconcentration” was neither conventional combat nor savage slaughter, but something else besides. And it is to this “something else” that, poetically at least, this essay attends.

I situate the essay theoretically in terms of the existent criticism on trauma, representation, and power, and argue for an aesthetic that awakens us not only to the “face” of the Other (as Emmanuel Levinas and Judith Butler have argued) but also to his or her “cry” (grito) and “liberatory power” (as Enrique Dussel might argue). After laying out the theoretical stakes, I tease out the ways in which the idiosyncrasies of “reconcentration” repeatedly elided or exceeded the American as well as Cuban poet’s expressive grasp. This is not, however, to say that the reconcentrado’s misery is any less palpable to the interpellated reader. As I argue, the reconcentrado’s misery and abject vulnerability are precisely what render the violence of Americans “humanitarian” and that of Cubans “decorous” or “redemptive.” And this proves more scandalous than one may expect. For such poetry disavowed collateral responsibility for the reconcentrado’s dispossessed agony, and in so doing transfigured the reconcentrado into an alibi for—rather than a critique of—violence.

The (Un)Sacrificeable

Arguably no other virtue is as hallowed in nationalist rhetoric as is sacrifice. The rhetoric of Cuba Libre abounded in it. In fact, spilt blood was the metonym in the sacri-ficium, the “making sacred,” of the patria. The independentista newspaper, La república, stipulated that true Cubans were “those who have shed their blood in combat after having been despoiled of what they owned, those who have sacrificed on the altar of the patria their family, their positions, and their possessions” (Pérez, Structure 81). Sacrificial bloodshed was, accordingly, more than a mere material consequence of war. It was a constituent of the war’s symbolic economy, that which endowed the notion of patria with an aura of sacredness. Indebted to Catholic, Lucumí, and Palo Monte mythoi and to the ritual slaughter of “clean” animals, Cubans understood it well: sacrifice was what expiated sin, cleansed the defiled, healed the sick, or blessed the accursed (D. Brown; Guerra; Hubert and Mauss).

This sacral notion took on mythical proportions in the epic of Cuba Libre, with its litany of storied martyrs and heroes like the “Father of the Nation” Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, the “Bronze Titan” Antonio Maceo, the “Apostle” José Marti, and the “Mother of the Nation” Mariana Grajales, whose eleven sons all fought (and all but two died) in the wars for liberation. Even the rank and file mambises (independence soldiers) would enjoy honorary tributes, however generic or anonymous. Chief Delegate José Martí referred to those who had fallen as “warriors of independence” whose “memory shall forever be blessed” (344), whereas Generalísimo Máximo Gómez eulogized his soldiers as the “apotheosis of humanity,” never to be forgotten before the “sacrosanct altar” of History (285). Whether dead or alive, and however impoverished or mutilated by the war, the mambí and his loved ones at least enjoyed the solace that he, as soldier, fought the good war and, if dead, died honorably.

But not all of the wars’ dead could be so reverently narrated and memorialized. In point of fact mambí soldiers accounted for only one in every twenty Cuban fatalities. No other event explains this disparity better than the peculiar disaster that was “reconcentration.” As a military strategy, the Spanish army laid waste to the Cuban countryside and forcibly interned hundreds of thousands of Cuban civilians into “camps of reconcentration.” There, living in squalor and poorly fed, as many as two hundred thousand reconcentrados, as they came to be known, died by starvation and disease. Beriberi, dysentery, malaria, yellow fever, tuberculosis, and typhoid ravaged their bodies, not least children under six years of age, as mass graves became an everyday expedient of the war (Pérez Guzmán). It was hoped that this morbid spectacle would compel the clandestine Cuban rebels to surrender. But no surrender came, only more misery and hundreds of thousands living under the sentence of death—a death that could only perversely be described as “sublime” or “sacrificial.”

The nationalist epic and the transcendental connotations of sacrifice could not easily, if at all, account for such “special” deaths. As a modality or technique of violence that was neither conventional combat nor senseless slaughter, so-called reconcentration did not coincide with normative senses of “civilized” and “savage” violence—let alone what constituted the “heroic” and the sacred. It killed en masse without modern weaponry and, technically, without shedding blood. Whatever it was, those who were taken did not “shed their blood in combat” and, thereby, teetered at the thresholds of the sacrificial motif and nationalist honoraria. They bore no arms and were interned in a space conspicuous for its absence of war, conventionally conceived. Nor were they subject to trials or formal executions, for they were not criminals. Spanish war decrees (bandos) called on the “rural inhabitants” of Cuba to “reconcentrate” themselves (reconcentrarse) in the nearest fortified town or city so as to “prevent resolute dangers to the honorable inhabitants of this Island [that is, Cuba]” (Pérez Guzmán 217; emphasis added). Dying of hunger and disease and under the pretext of a humanitarian measure, how could the deaths of “honorable” subjects count as murder or as capital punishment? No rifle or artillery fire, no bayonets or garrotes, no iconic torture devices—only undernourishment and pathogens to blame.

And how could one speak of martyrs and martyrdom? Derived from the Greek word for “witness” (martis), martyr and martyrdom were terms coined by the early Christian church to refer to those believers who, facing tortuous deaths at the hands of Roman authorities, refused to renounce their faith. Yet it would seem quite misled to refer to the reconcentrado dead as having “borne witness” to something sacred. They were not known to have defiantly professed their faith in Cuba Libre, nor were they known to have faced their drawn-out (bloodless) deaths with “sublime resignation.” Did their deaths constitute, thus, the “scandal of a meaningless death”—to borrow Giorgio Agamben’s phrase?³ Agamben, in Remnants of Auschwitz (2002), has taken care to critique the will to make sense of the senseless. He quotes Bruno Bettelheim, a Dachau survivor, on the matter—“By calling the victims of the Nazis ‘martyrs,’ we falsify their fate”—as well as Primo Levi, Auschwitz survivor: “What is terrifying is that it [the ‘extermination’] was senseless” (26–30). Let us be clear, however, that reconcentrado deaths and “living-deaths” were not senseless per se. It may have been “senseless” that one particular family or child suffered as they did and that others were spared, but their internment as a whole was a calculated war measure with punitive and preemptive objectives. The fact that Cuba’s “rural inhabitants” were targeted was no coincidence: no other class of Cubans was better situated to serve as auxiliaries (i.e., nurses, cooks, spies, etc.) to the Liberation Army and rebel cause. And serve many did, whether voluntarily or by the force of circumstance. Hence, whether or not they had ever aided and abetted a Cuban mambí, their “living-deaths” as reconcentrados were far from senseless or inconsequential to Spanish as well as Cuban war officiates.

But their fates as the “living-dead” of the camps situated them a far cry from constituting martyrs or “sacrificial offerings” to the patria. Reconcentrados were unarmed civilians who died anonymously and silently, with no heroic deeds or dicta to their credit. Their deaths may have been “tragic” but were hardly exemplary or sacral. Had sacrifice thereby “lost all rights and dignity,” as Jean-Luc Nancy said of the victims of the Shoah (34)? And if so, with what representational tact and facility could or should such an atrocity be named and narrated—let alone poeticized?

Theodor Adorno is renowned for having asserted that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” In the essay “Commitment,” he worried that any aesthetic “stylization” of brutality in the world might elicit enjoyment or remove something of the “horror” that the account putatively represents. He worried, more specifically, that any such renderings would make it easier for spectators to “play along with the culture that gave birth to murder” (Adorno, “Commitment” 312). So serious is the risk of doing injustice to the victims and their reality that intellectuals have invoked reverent silence as the most fitting ethic to embrace (Lang; Steiner). Elie Weisel’s “Plea for the Dead” quotes an ancient proverb to this end: “Those who know do not speak; those who speak do not know” (197). Yet, as Adorno himself reckoned, any art that was to eschew “the problem of suffering” could not “stand upright before justice” (“Commitment” 313). In his Frankfurt lectures of 1965, he clarified that “it could equally well be said, on the other hand, that one must write poems [after Auschwitz], in keeping with Hegel’s statement in Aesthetics that as long as there is an awareness of suffering among humans there must also be art as the objective form of that awareness” (Metaphysics 110).

Whichever way we strive for that art, one thing is certain: nearly all reconcentrados were illiterate peasants, such that testimonial memoirs (and even oral histories) are exceedingly rare.⁴ What we have are accounts by those who, as Primo Levi put it, “speak in their stead, by proxy” (83–84). It serves us well, thus, to recall Gayatri Spivak’s thesis that the portrayal of an Other bears within it the choice of and need for a proxy—and not unusually a heroic or paternalistic one. Judith Butler, too, has stressed that our “responsiveness” to others is prefigured by those normative regimes that render this or that act legible as unjust and this or that life as “grievable.” How we “frame” others, Butler has argued, should “awaken” us to the “precariousness” of life, to our ineradicable vulnerability to injury and loss as well as our interdependency on each other’s labor and welfare. Pace Emmanuel Levinas, she has argued that the (human) face constitutes an ethical proxy for “injurability” and the sacred commandment not to kill (Precarious 131–35). “Giving face” to others as such renders their life all the more dignified, their loss all the more grievous, and our responsibility for them all the more earnest. But, as Butler has clarified, there are techniques by which the face can be “effaced.” Indeed, effacement may occur by means of representation. The face of others may be conveyed to me as that of a “menacing Other” or, for that matter, as an overjoyed Other such that the loss and agony that comes with war and atrocity are pushed, as it were, “out of the frame” (Frames 54).

But an ethics and aesthetics that sought only to vocalize agony and “awaken” us to the commandment not to kill would not suffice. To do so would be to “efface,” so to speak, the utopian desire and historical project known by the name Cuba Libre. It is noteworthy, after all, that Cubans referred to their wars as a “revolution” and narrated the birth of their nation in terms of gritos (war cries)—from the Grito de Yara (1868) to the Grito de Baire (1895). Liberation philosopher Enrique Dussel has argued that the face of the other reveals a “people” (pueblo), not a singular traumatized subject. The people are the “social bloc of the oppressed,” and the “ugliness” of their weathered faces is a “provocation” and “populist beauty” that cries out for Justice. For Dussel, thus, the ethico-aesthetic proxy to which one must attend is not the “face” inasmuch as the “cry” (el grito). For the latter bespeaks not merely sentient trauma—the guttural “Ahh!”—but also “liberatory power”—the defiant ¡Basta!, for instance, of the Zapatistas. As Dussel has conceptualized it, the “cry” bespeaks not so much “I suffer” as “We have been wronged!” It is a “lament of protest” that has been uttered by a collective political actor who lives precariously, no doubt, but who can, at the right “critical conjunctures,” rebel against wretchedness.⁵

Given the context of both atrocity and revolutionary war, abject violence and emancipatory desire, what is called for is a poetics and criticism attentive to both the precariousness and rebelliousness of the Other. Neither alone would suffice: not an aesthetics of “bare life” and unrepresentable excess, nor one of redemptive violence and heroic deaths. To this end I propose a criticism attuned to the “epiphany of the face” and the “ecstasy of the cry”—or, especially, to their (in)commensurabilities. Such are the theoretic criteria by which I scrutinize how the poetic witness spoke in the reconcentrado’s stead, and to what effect.

A War for Humanity

Americans’ sympathies for “Cuba Libre” were quite robust. Between the years 1896 and 1898 no other foreign policy issue garnered as many headlines or as many congressional sessions as did the so-called “Cuban Question.” What was not likely expected, however, was that this question would entail so curious a corollary, namely the question as to how one was to suitably account for what otherwise went by the artless euphemism “reconcentration.” The emaciated body of the reconcentrado did not speak for itself, after all. It could just as well bespeak or constitute “evidence” of a naturally induced famine, not a “crime against humanity.” A story had to be told and images conjured in order for that body to “speak” and the event to constitute a morally heinous crime. And such a story could not be only that of the “inconceivable” or the “indescribable.” The New York World conceded in early 1896: “No pen can fitly describe the awful scene of devastation and misery the island now presents” (Wilkerson 38). And many times over did this trope of indescribability echo. Two years later, Vermont senator Redfield Proctor testified to Congress: “It is not within the narrow limits of my vocabulary to portray it. . . . What I saw I cannot tell so that others can see it. It must be seen with one’s own eyes to be realized.”⁶ Yet Americans did not defer to that unrepresentable excess. Their outcry was as lively as was the issue at hand urgent, and many turned to poetry in order to conjure the “indescribable” to representational life.⁷

Abraham Merrill’s “Viva Cuba Libre” was one such poetic exploit:

We see here the eloquence and formal rigor that characterized late Victorian poetry. We also sense the author’s faith in poetic expressivity as especially suited to evoke imagery and move readers. It is clear to the reader, in particular, that Cubans suffer and suffer unjustly—or, more exactly, that they are powerless. Tearful, prostrate, and starving, they cry aloud a “pleading shriek” for a liberty they may desire but cannot, evidently, themselves secure. Nor is it any mystery to whom that “shriek” is addressed:

As screaming eagle, the United States is that formidable and revered animal that answers the plea—and Spain, a hideous scavenger. Potent and intelligible metaphors, no doubt. But the fact that Merrill alluded to fire, a carnage that smokes, is not pure metaphor. For “reconcentration” was a larger military strategy that sought to deprive the Cuban Liberation Army of its most valuable resources, namely the peasantry and all that could sustain life in the countryside. Hence the Spaniards not only forcibly interned peasants but also scorched the earth and left it barren (Tone 193–224). That Merrill would call on a word like “holocaust,” thus, is noteworthy. In his day it was synonymous with “massacre,” yet not without a richer biblical and cultural sense. As many critics have noted, holocaust is the term used to refer those “wholly burnt offerings” that one ritually sacrifices to atone for sins—as in the book of Leviticus (Agamben, Remnants 28–31). Indeed, the word victim is derived from the Latin victima, “sacrificial animal.” But only perversely could one equate reconcentrado misery and deaths with atonement, and here there was no “slaughter,” properly put.

That said, animal figurations did have a power to evocatively convey the reconcentrado’s status as killable with impunity—as more akin to livestock or game, that is, than to a sacrificial lamb. J. R. Martin’s “A Call from Cuba,” for instance, depicted the reconcentrado as emaciated humanoid:

The fact that reconcentrados are said to be “herded” all the more tellingly conveyed their status as nonhumans—or, more precisely, as docile and defenseless animals. And again, we see an emphasis on Cubans as powerless. Martin’s verse does rehumanize the reconcentrado as “our neighbor,” hardly an idle phrase to a predominantly Christian audience. Many other lay poets, in fact, drew on the biblical trope of loving thy Neighbor in order to attest to the moral summons that Cubans’ distraught state amounted to. Cubans, thus, were likened to the robbed, beaten, half-naked man on the Jericho road and Americans, accordingly, to the “Good Samaritan.” Yet, very much unlike Jesus’s parable and the ethic it espouses, Cubans were neither generic nor reviled neighbors. Remember that the Samaritan is “Good” only insofar as he defies the customary hostility between Jew and Samaritan, which is why to the lawyer’s query, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus’s answer was, in effect: your enemy (Luke 10:25–37).

But the Cuban poetically rendered as Neighbor accorded with the logic of sameness and enmity, not difference and amity. In other words, that Americans deemed Cubans worthy victims did not rely solely on the “vividness” or “eloquence” with which the poet accounted for suffering itself; so, too, did it rely on the identity of the sufferer. In this regard, no other poetic name for Cuba was more routinely employed than was “Fair Cuba,” an appellation that simultaneously whitened and feminized, if not eroticized, Cuba—and, thereby, Cubans. Other poetic appellations included “Queen of the Indies,” that “peerless maiden,” or that “beautiful isle, besieged and besmirched by the Spaniards so vile” (Witherbee 495, 626)—accounts that resonate deeply with melodrama. Frank L. Brace’s “Free Cuba” illustrated this nicely:

What else could a portrait of Cuba as damsel in distress call forth if not the need for a heroic proxy, in these cases nearly always symbolized by figures of martial (not merely national) significance: eagles, Uncle Sam, or the “gallant sons of Columbia”? And what else could Spain thereby constitute but a dastardly villain? That the lion was Spain’s national symbol proved as such irresistible to many poetic commentators:

It was ironic, of course, that an outcry for the sake of a dehumanized victim would rely on portrayals of a dehumanized foe, but the more pressing issue herein is that Spain, poetically rendered a ravenous lion—or, for that matter, a bloodthirsty “butcher”—does not convey the fact that reconcentration’s violence was neither purely gratuitous nor “savage,” as it were. Rather, reoncentration strategically endangered and callously let die a select stratum of the Cuban polity, a war policy that was enacted in accord with the dictates of law, bureaucracy, and economic productivity. Hannah Arendt’s phrase, “administrative massacres organized by the state apparatus,” would be most apropos (294).

As noted, however, a notion like “the banality of evil”—or, for that matter, Agamben’s “bare life” (see Agamben, Homo Sacer)—may lead us astray. I say this because not all of Cuba was a “camp,” just as not all Cubans were “devoured,” as it were, by the ravenous lion. In this respect, we ought to sound out this poetry’s most conspicuous silence, namely the mambises, the independence soldiers and multiracial army of Cuba Libre.⁸ Indeed, even when poetically present, they are corporeally absent—as in Lillian Metcalf’s “Cuba Libre”:

As with so many of her poetic kin, Metcalf’s title could be read as deferential to Cuba’s revolutionary cry, but her verse is anything but deferential to Cuba’s revolutionary capacity. Cuba’s “sons” (her soldiers) are dead and her “fair daughters” powerless, the proverbial damsel in distress. Over and again Cuba is but the site of an atrocity and the Cuban people its “overpowered” victims—victims that, even when poetically “given voice,” merely recite an American idiom in which Cubans “wait in dull anguish” their imminent death or cry aloud for the “sons of Columbia” to come to their rescue. Titles alone spoke volumes: “Set Cuba Free,” “Cuba Shall Be Free,” “To the Rescue,” “Cuba’s Cry Is Heard.”⁹

And this was no idle trope, as the closing stanza of George Woodberry’s “The Islands of the Sea” eerily spells out:

Here we note that it is American “toil” and “sorrows” that set Cuba free. Granted, the US Army that set foot on Cuban soil was a majority volunteer force. And, as Louis Pérez Jr. has conceded, there is no reason to doubt the “authenticity” with which everyday Americans believed their war was a war to end Old World tyranny (War 24). But one wonders whether any such “authenticity” matters insofar as it erased the three years of war prior to the tellingly named “Spanish-American War”—a name that itself enacts precisely this erasure. Before America’s “bravest” set foot on the island, that is, Cuba’s “bravest” had waged a three-year guerrilla war that brought the largest expeditionary force in European history to a stalemate and Madrid to near bankruptcy. Were it not for the “toil” and bloodshed of Cubans, in other words, America’s “splendid little war” would have been neither splendid nor little.

Americans, however, seized credit, poetically and otherwise, for Cuba Libre. And what this meant, more exactly, was that Cubans were called on to be “jubilant,” yes, but also “grateful.” For insofar as Americans were discursively framed as Cuba’s noncompulsory saviors, what else could Cubans be but morally indebted to them? And what else could a skeptic or dissident to US military rule in Cuba be but morally inept or worse?¹⁰

And here we see the truest value of the reconcentrado in a larger narrative of America’s “war for humanity.” For, however stirring was the war slogan “Remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain!” a war predicated on that plot alone would have resounded with petty vengeance and disproportional violence. With a multitude of meek reconcentrados at the heart of poetic renditions, by contrast, the war could be narrated in far grander terms—as in the closing stanza of Frank Brace’s “Free Cuba”:

¡Viva Cuba Libre!

The cruelest of ironies is that Cubans evidenced strikingly similar tendencies. They, too, villainized their enemy, with most accounts fixated on Valeriano Weyler, the Spanish General assigned to Cuba to wage war “without scruples.” Nearly all accounts animalized Weyler in ways that would not likely surprise: as a crow, symbol of death; as a serpent, symbol of evil in all its biblical connotations; or as “jackal,” a scavenger and symbol of piracy. And not unlike Americans did Cubans call on historical analogy: Weyler was likened to or said to surpass in cruelty Herod, the Roman client ruler of Judea who ordered the slaying of all infant boys in Bethlehem; or Nero, the infamous Roman Emperor who tortured so many Christians that early apocryphal writings named him the Antichrist.¹¹

But Weyler’s infamy was perhaps all the more evocatively conveyed in the portrayals of his victims. A poem titled “Good Riddance” avowed:

It was commonplace for poets to stress children’s frailty and the agony of mothers in particular: for peasant women and their children were the camps’ most typical internees, and children under the age of six their least likely survivors. Many commentaries thereby mocked Weyler and official decrees, which tried to discursively render “reconcentration” a humanitarian measure. Hence, against a euphemism like pacificar (to pacify), Cuban verse employed quite extensively the verb exterminar (to exterminate).

Cuban poetry also had the tendency to rely on pseudonyms, not least “Filibustero Laborante” (Rebel Worker). While this choice may reflect the risks of identifying oneself openly in times of war, there is an equally salient sense in which it consciously rendered the war a People’s War with revolutionary connotations. The figure of the laborante (especially the rebellious tobacco worker) symbolized Cuba Libre’s promise for economic justice. These workers, concentrated in Ybor City and the Keys of Florida, were the war’s “revolutionary treasury” and those who radicalized José Martí’s oratory vis-à-vis labor reforms and collective welfare (Foner). Other than their rallies and strikes, each month these workers donated a tenth of their salary to the cause, not least for buying arms to send to the Liberation Army. And that army was itself a symbol of racial justice. It was, after all, an anomaly in the nineteenth century: as many as 60 percent of its noncommissioned officers (i.e., sergeants) and 40 percent of its commissioned officers (captains, colonels, and so on) were men of color (Ferrer 3). In fact, by the 1890s the mulatto brigadier general Antonio Maceo and his brother, Major General José Maceo, enjoyed a multiracial loyalty and esteem across the island and in exile communities that, as Ada Ferrer has said, “in the United States would have been rare in local contexts and unthinkable at the national level” (5). That most of the Afro-Cuban mambises were the formerly enslaved rendered the narrative (and utopian impulses) of Cuba Libre all the more seductive and potent. Yet probably on no other count was the American literary or political imaginary farther off the mark. Neither racial equality nor economic justice ever emerged as a motif in Americans’ literary advocacy for Cuba Libre—which is to say, never was the ecstasy of the (Cuban) cry heard.

That said, not unlike Americans, Cubans drew copiously on generic categories such as the “defenseless woman” or the “innocent child” in ways that bore witness not so much to the reconcentrado’s misery inasmuch as to her saviors’ virility. In other words, the reconcentrado only ever constituted a victim whose abject suffering attested not only to the Spaniards’ wickedness but also to the Cuban mambises’ valor. This is why if the reconcentrado “speaks,” it is as a feminized or infantilized victim whose misery merely reiterates the revolutionary slogan: “¡Viva Cuba Libre!” One need only recall that if Weyler was a latter-day Herod or Nero, his victims were on a poetic par with Christian martyrs. “Martyr,” we recall, is derived from the Greek martis (witness), the word used in early Christian texts to refer to those persecuted for their faith. Yet only perversely could one say that reconcentrados faced their deaths as a matter of prophetic witness or transcendental resignation.

Instead, the reconcentrado, as literary figure, served to endorse—not subvert—an iconography and mythology in which the ethos and identity of the “revolutionary” were so intimately tethered to the patriotic as well as to the martial and the manly. Cubans were especially prone to taunt and mock Weyler’s stature: at five feet tall, Weyler was a military anomaly. Hence, he was known not only as the “Butcher” but also as the “sinister dwarf.” Little wonder, thus, that Weyler would be so routinely emasculated as a coward who shied away from combat—as illustrated in a poem titled “For Weyler’s Album”:

For all his regalia and titles, the “Marquess of Tenerife” was no noble war hero, says the poem. His “foes” were not the Spartanesque mambises, and his victories anything but glorious: his was a predatory (not epic) violence with morally heinous (not admirable) victories. Against the figure of a cowardly Weyler, accordingly, poetic portrayals put forth that of the virile and patriotic mambí, usually by recourse to the symbols of the “torch” and the “machete.” Cubans had waged their war on the colonial economy, and no other strategy was more effective than their incendiary war on the colony’s most lucrative resource, namely the sugar plantations. Such a strategy did lend itself to characterizations of the mambí as an arsonist or saboteur more so than a “warrior,” an opportunity that colonial authorities did not squander. But the burning of a commodity with historical and institutional ties to slavery and imperialism also had lively, if not theological, connotations. Little wonder, thus, that the torch became that “sacred totem” which was said to “purify” the island of its social sins. The island’s sugarcane became, thereby, that burnt offering to the saints and gods of justice:

The machete, by contrast, was that phallic symbol all the more endowed to convey the martial prowess and audacity of Cuba’s mambises against their better armed and more numerous foes:

The most iconic and memorialized “event” from the wars was, after all, the famous machete charge: mambises on horseback, wielding their machetes in the air and crying out “¡Viva Cuba Libre!” as they charged into enemy lines, artillery and Mauser rifles be damned! Were it not for the context, it was tantamount to suicide or insanity. But within the context of a revolutionary war, it was interpreted as sacrificial and valiant. Indeed, within the context of a revolutionary war, what once symbolized slavery and drudgery or toil now symbolized liberation.

But the truth is machete charges were relatively rare, a tactic of last resort (Tone 126–37). Commanders knew to use them sparingly, precisely because they were suicidal. In reality Cubans waged their war most effectively by “enlisting” the mosquito. When asked by a war correspondent who his best generals were, Commander Máximo Gómez famously replied: “June, July, and August”—that is to say: the rainy season and the epidemic of yellow fever it wrought on Iberian soldiers (Roig, Cuba 34–35). Yet the mosquito was a far cry from a symbol of audacity or virility. This is not to say that the machete was an unambiguous symbol, for it could (and did) serve to code the mambises, a disproportionately Afro-Cuban army, as “savages.” But vis-à-vis the “butchery” of Weyler and reconcentration, the mambí’s violence was poetically coded “ethical” and “valiant.”

There were parodic poems, too. The Mexican poet Manuel Acuña’s celebrated “Nocturno a Rosario,” an ode and farewell to an impossible love, was put to satirical use in the hands of Cuba Libre’s muses. One such parody, titled “Nocturno a Weyler,” read:

We see in these closing stanzas that the poem still very much constitutes a farewell, as it were, yet in this version it is the Spanish quinto (conscript) who, as poetic narrator, bids his farewell to Weyler—and, by extension, to the war. The impossibility to which the poem attests is the impossibility of the Spaniards to vanquish the Republic in Arms. But it does so comically. With this poem the awe and solemnity of the epic or romance is subordinated to the ridiculing laughter of parody and the comical. With its capacity to lower the lofty and bring levity to gravity, the comical can be a mighty tactic and a balm. But one wonders where this leaves the reconcentrado and reconcentration.

The Cuban poet Plácido’s “Plegaria a Dios” (Plea to God) was also appropriated. In a parody under the same title, “Plea to God,” it is Weyler himself who prays aloud for mercy:

Here again we see the aristocratic pomposity of Weyler set against his unseemly cowardliness, just as we see the Spaniard’s fear and trembling set against the mambí’s assumed, if not providential, vigor. And no other mambí ranked as more virile and epic than did the “Bronze Titan” Antonio Maceo, who withstood twenty-six wounds and fought in over six hundred battles. But the choice of poems is peculiar. Plácido, who wrote his poem while in jail and on trial for allegedly taking part in a conspiracy of slaves and free men of color, is said to have recited his “Plea” as he faced his firing squad in 1844. That fact, coupled with the poem’s eloquence and sincerity, made it one of Cuba’s most celebrated. But it also makes it a martyr’s poem: Plácido, the Afro-Cuban poet, could be said to have died for something honorable, namely freedom and racial justice. To confer that dignity, even if parodically, onto Weyler seems suspect. Moreover, if anyone should have been trembling with fright and pleading to God, it was the reconcentrado. One wonders, in fact, why she or he was not rendered the poetic narrator. Perhaps because the reconcentrado defied the trope of martyrdom? To wit: perhaps the best choice at the contemporary poets’ disposal would have been to appropriate Acuña’s “Nocturno” to articulate a tragic ode to the impossible: not an impossible love, but the impossibility to attribute the dignity of “sacrifice” to the camps and their dead.

Poetic Alibi; or, Can the Reconcentrado Speak?

However tentatively, we can conclude that Cuba Libre’s muses, whatever their nationality, did not tend to reconcentration or the reconcentrado as a sober call to experiment with poetic expressivity itself. It cannot be doubted that poetry was taken seriously. Nearly without fail, the poems were exquisitely executed in terms of (neo)classical formulas for rhyme, meter, and composition—albeit, as for the Cuban pieces we have cited, lost in English translation. The poetic witness was not, however, shaken by the atrocity to the extent that she or he asked whether any such “elegant” formula and prose sufficed—let alone befit the morbid spectacle to which it referred. There can be no doubt that they bore witness to the event as morally heinous. Yet, in so doing, the poets and their poems did not find their way past melodrama and the nationalist romance. Their horror or outrage at the inhumanity of the Other habitually served as “evidence” of the humanity (and virility) of the Self—let alone the sublimity of the Patria, as extension of the Self. Violence was never truly subjected to a poetic interrogation that kept at bay—let alone critiqued—moralized schemata such as perpetrator and victim, war and humanitarianism, atrocity and revolution.

To be clear, the scandal was not so much that poetry was called on to rouse war morale, as if one could so readily dismiss the ethical plausibility of a “just war,” let alone an anticolonialist war. Rather, the truest scandal was that this poetry extravagantly elaborated on an innocence that never was. One need only consider the fact that Americans, at least those herein cited, never situated their outcry at Spanish “atrocities” in relation to their own nation’s history of violence—not least Native American wars and the reservation system or racialized slavery and the plantation. It is no small irony that General Weyler would later (in 1910) chronicle his years of service in Cuba and stipulate that General Sherman’s “March to Atlanta” in the American Civil War and the US Army’s strategy against the Plains Indians were precedents to his “system of war.” Nor did he miss the opportunity to point out, quite glibly, that those who most censured him—namely, the British and the Americans—subsequently “copied” him in South Africa and in the Philippines, where hundreds of thousands perished in concentration camps (Weyler 11). And while these same Americans poetically marveled at their “war for humanity,” they did not censure their navy’s blockade of Cuba—a blockade that has been credited for as many as half the reconcentrado dead.¹² So whereas they poetically tended to the “epiphany of the face,” such a criterion (and its sentiment) did not foster a self-reflexive critique inasmuch as morally certify a war that ended in occupation.

Cubans, too, partook in disavowals, whatever their poetic fealty to the “ecstasy of the cry.” As they reveled poetically at their “sacred” torches and “redeeming” machetes, they never meaningfully reckoned with the effects of their incendiary war, a strategy that left Cuba’s peasantry and agricultural laborers unemployed and fleeing to towns and cities that could neither employ nor feed them. Nor, as they morally decried the reconcentrado’s misery, did they critically reflect on the coercive measures undertaken by the Liberation Army in order to “enlist” the peasantry (not least, peasant women), measures that thereby rendered them targets of choice for reconcentration. Needless to say, the Republic in Arms was not thereby on a par with Weyler and Madrid when it comes to matters of responsibility for the reconcentrado dead. But these less than “sublime” attributes render the epic of Cuba Libre a more ethically troublesome affair than it was (and is) poetically portrayed.

Whatever else this comparative analysis has revealed (or concealed), thus, it is clear that the problematic of how to critically theorize—or poetically rouse—the “epiphany of the face” in relation to the “ecstasy of the cry” is no easy endeavor. What we find is that poets fetishized the one over the other, rather than stage a creative, if agonistic, dialogue (or dialectic?). Either way, it suffices to say that we, whether as critics or poets, ought to be weary of either precariousness or liberatory power as our sole criterion for reckoning with violence and its representational woes.

Notes

References