Eduardo Galeano - The Memory of Fire Trilogy - Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind

The three hundred and twenty-five pounds of General William Shafter land on the eastern coast of Cuba. They come from cold northern climes where the general was busy killing Indians, and here they melt inside his overpowering wool uniform. Shafter sends his body up some steps to the back of a horse, and from there scans the horizon with a telescope.

He has come to command. As one of his officers, General Young, puts it, the insurgents are a lot of degenerates, no more capable of self-government than the savages of Africa. When the Spanish army begins to collapse before the patriots’ implacable assault, the United States decides to take charge of the freedom of Cuba. If they come in, no one will be able to get them out, Martí and Maceo had warned. And they come in.

Spain had declined to sell this island for a reasonable price, and the North American intervention found its pretext in the opportune explosion of the battleship Maine, sunk in Havana harbor with its many guns and crewmen.

The invading army invokes the protection of North American citizens and the rescue of their interests threatened by devastating war and economic disaster. But in private, the officers explain that they must prevent the emergence of a black republic off the coasts of Florida.

(114)

Ten Thousand Lynchings

In the name of the Negroes of the United States, Ida Wells protests to President McKinley that ten thousand lynchings have occurred in the past twenty years. If the government does not protect North American citizens within its borders, asks Ida Wells, by what right does it invoke that protection to invade other countries? Are not Negroes citizens? Or does the Constitution only guarantee them the right to be burned to death?

Mobs of fanatics, stirred up by press and pulpit, drag blacks from jails, tie them to trees, and burn them alive. Then the executioners celebrate in bars and broadcast their feats through the streets.

As a pretext, nigger-hunters use the rape of white women, in a country where a black woman’s violation by a white is considered normal, but in the great majority of cases the burned blacks are guilty of no greater crime than a bad reputation, suspicion of robbery, or insolence.

President McKinley promises to look into the matter

(12)

Teddy Roosevelt

Brandishing his Stetson, Teddy Roosevelt gallops at the head of his “Rough Riders”; and when he descends San Juan Hill he carries, crumpled in his hand, a Spanish flag. He will take all the glory for this battle which opens the way to Santiago de Cuba. Of the Cubans who also fought, no journalist will write a word.

Teddy believes in the grandeur of imperial destiny and in the power of his fists. He learned to box in New York, to save himself from beatings and humiliations he suffered as a sickly, asthmatic, and very myopic child. As an adult, he puts on the gloves with champions, hunts lions, lassos bulls, writes books, and roars speeches. On the printed page and from platforms he exalts the virtues of the strong races, born to rule, warlike races like his own, and proclaims that in nine out of ten cases there is no better Indian than a dead Indian (and the tenth, he says, must be more closely examined). A volunteer in all wars, he adores the supreme qualities of the soldier, who in the euphoria of battle feels himself in his heart to be a wolf, and despises soft generals who anguish over the loss of a couple of thousand men.

To make a quick end to the Cuban war, Teddy has proposed that a North American squadron should flatten Cadiz and Barcelona with its guns; but Spain, exhausted from so much warfare against the Cubans, surrenders in less than four months. From San Juan Hill, the victorious Teddy Roosevelt gallops at top speed to the governorship of New York State and on to the presidency of the United States. This fanatical devotee of a God who prefers gunpowder to incense takes a deep breath and writes: No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumph of war.

Within a few years, he will receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

(114 and 161)

This Fruit Is Falling

Ramón Emeterio Betances, long white beard, eyes of melancholy, is dying in Paris, in exile.

“I do not want a colony,” he says. “Not with Spain, nor with the United States.”

While the patriarch of Puerto Rico’s independence approaches death, General Miles’s soldiers sing as they land on the Guánica coast. With guns slung from shoulders and toothbrushes stuck in hats, the soldiers march before the impassive gaze of the peasants of sugarcane and coffee.

And Eugenio María de Hostos, who also wanted a fatherland, contemplates the hills of Puerto Rico from the deck of a ship, and feels sad and ashamed to see them pass from one master to another.

(141 and 192)

President McKinley Explains That the United States Should Keep the Philippines by Direct Order of God

I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight; and I am not ashamed to tell you, gentlemen, that I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night. And one night late it came to me this way — I don’t know how it was but it came; first, that we could not give [the Philippines] back to Spain — that would be cowardly and dishonorable; second, that we could not turn them over to France or Germany — our commercial rivals in the Orient — that would be bad business and discreditable; third, we could not leave them to themselves — they were unfit for self-government, and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain’s was; and fourth, that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow men for whom Christ also died. And then I went to bed, and went to sleep and slept soundly.

(168)

Mark Twain Proposes Changing the Flag

I lift my lamp beside the golden door. The Statue of Liberty welcomes innumerable pilgrims, Europeans in search of the Promised Land, while it is announced that the center of the world, which took millennia to shift from the Euphrates to the Thames, is now the Hudson River.

In full imperial euphoria, the United States celebrates the conquest of the Hawaiian islands, Samoa and the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and some little islands eloquently named the Ladrones (Thieves).* Now the Pacific and Caribbean are North American lakes, and the United Fruit Company is coming to birth; but novelist Mark Twain, the old spoilsport, proposes changing the national flag: the white stripes should be black, he says, and the stars should be skulls and crossbones.

Trade union leader Samuel Gompers demands recognition of Cuba’s independence and denounces those who throw freedom to the dogs at the moment of choosing between freedom and profit. For the great newspapers, on the other hand, the Cubans wanting independence are ingrates. Cuba is an occupied country. The United States flag, without black bars or skulls, flies in place of the Spanish flag. The invading forces have doubled in a year. The schools are teaching English; and the new history books speak of Washington and Jefferson and do not mention Maceo or Martí. There is no slavery any more; but in Havana cafes signs appear that warn: “Whites Only.” The market is opened without conditions to capital hungry for sugar and tobacco.