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Authors: John Paul Rathbone
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Habana
H avana’s Prado is a magnificent shaded boulevard nearly a mile long that stretches from the city’s central park down to the sea. In the colonial era it was a fashion catwalk, the place to be seen, the women wearing white muslin, the men dressed in frock coats, linen trousers, and ties, all riding in volantes with a liveried black footman in high boots and silver spurs driving the horse-drawn carriages up front. Later, my grandmother remembered the evenings in the 1920s when men still promenaded up one side and women down the other, while orchestras played among the Prado’s open-air cafés and laurel trees.
At the end of 1898, though, when the occupying U.S. Army set up camp in Havana, the Prado became a tent city. Habaneros looked on with bemusement and some horror as U.S. soldiers pitched canvas, drove tent pegs into tree beds, and strung their laundry between the lampposts. General John Rutter Brooke described the city as a place of “desolation, starvation and anarchy.” The mast of the wrecked USS Maine could still be seen sticking out of the harbor water, and the remnants of the old reconcentrado dwellings, grim tenements, lined the city walls. Yet Havana had also escaped the worst of the fighting and even then was what it remains today, one of the Americas’ great capitals, a city of cobbled streets, graceful balconies, and grilled windows, the names of past sugar barons carved into massive stone lintels above studded wooden doors.
Cubans were humiliated on New Year’s Day 1899 when they saw the Spanish flag come down over the old fortress in the harbor and the U.S. flag take its place. “Neither a colony nor a free state, Cuba suffers all the disadvantages of the former and none of the advantages of the latter,” the old Autonomist newspaper El Nuevo País lamented. When the U.S. military governor moved into the former captain-general’s residence, they also wondered who their real enemy was and what progress really meant. At the same time, they marveled at the speed with which the occupying troops transformed the island.
In Havana, the first car arrived, then the first tramway, and the Mutual Incandescent Company turned on the city’s first electric streetlamps. Drains were dug and modern bathrooms installed in old Spanish homes. Public buildings were repaired, streets paved, dock facilities improved, and new telephone lines installed. The scruffy bathing huts and fishermen’s houses that lined the city seafront were razed, the ground leveled, and the beginnings of a seafront corniche, the famous Malecón, built in a broad sweep across the bay. Three-story houses rose in new suburbs to the west, and a capitol building was commissioned for a site outside the old city walls that had been used as a garbage dump in colonial times. Looking much like the White House in Washington, D.C., but thirteen feet taller, it cost $20 million to build—enriching at least one generation of politician-contractors—and squatted athwart the Prado, top-heavy with bronze and Italian marble.
It is hard now to imagine the wealth that sugar once created—especially as it has become such a mundane commodity. After the war, there may not have been the same fortunes to be made in Cuba as during the colonial years when the Condesa de Merlin said Havana life recalled les charmes de l’âge d’or . Still, there was great excitement in the United States about the island’s prospects. Cuba was variously depicted as “virgin land,” a “new California,” “a veritable Klondike of wealth.” The destruction of the war also created stupendous business opportunities, and American carpetbaggers, speculators, and investors descended on the island.
Old Cuban businesses struggled during what became known as the “second occupation.” Racked by malaria, Bernabé contemplated selling Senado to one of the foreign syndicates buying land around Camagüey for “$2 or $4 an acre, depending on the want of the
H avana’s Prado is a magnificent shaded boulevard nearly a mile long that stretches from the city’s central park down to the sea. In the colonial era it was a fashion catwalk, the place to be seen, the women wearing white muslin, the men dressed in frock coats, linen trousers, and ties, all riding in volantes with a liveried black footman in high boots and silver spurs driving the horse-drawn carriages up front. Later, my grandmother remembered the evenings in the 1920s when men still promenaded up one side and women down the other, while orchestras played among the Prado’s open-air cafés and laurel trees.
At the end of 1898, though, when the occupying U.S. Army set up camp in Havana, the Prado became a tent city. Habaneros looked on with bemusement and some horror as U.S. soldiers pitched canvas, drove tent pegs into tree beds, and strung their laundry between the lampposts. General John Rutter Brooke described the city as a place of “desolation, starvation and anarchy.” The mast of the wrecked USS Maine could still be seen sticking out of the harbor water, and the remnants of the old reconcentrado dwellings, grim tenements, lined the city walls. Yet Havana had also escaped the worst of the fighting and even then was what it remains today, one of the Americas’ great capitals, a city of cobbled streets, graceful balconies, and grilled windows, the names of past sugar barons carved into massive stone lintels above studded wooden doors.
Cubans were humiliated on New Year’s Day 1899 when they saw the Spanish flag come down over the old fortress in the harbor and the U.S. flag take its place. “Neither a colony nor a free state, Cuba suffers all the disadvantages of the former and none of the advantages of the latter,” the old Autonomist newspaper El Nuevo País lamented. When the U.S. military governor moved into the former captain-general’s residence, they also wondered who their real enemy was and what progress really meant. At the same time, they marveled at the speed with which the occupying troops transformed the island.
In Havana, the first car arrived, then the first tramway, and the Mutual Incandescent Company turned on the city’s first electric streetlamps. Drains were dug and modern bathrooms installed in old Spanish homes. Public buildings were repaired, streets paved, dock facilities improved, and new telephone lines installed. The scruffy bathing huts and fishermen’s houses that lined the city seafront were razed, the ground leveled, and the beginnings of a seafront corniche, the famous Malecón, built in a broad sweep across the bay. Three-story houses rose in new suburbs to the west, and a capitol building was commissioned for a site outside the old city walls that had been used as a garbage dump in colonial times. Looking much like the White House in Washington, D.C., but thirteen feet taller, it cost $20 million to build—enriching at least one generation of politician-contractors—and squatted athwart the Prado, top-heavy with bronze and Italian marble.
It is hard now to imagine the wealth that sugar once created—especially as it has become such a mundane commodity. After the war, there may not have been the same fortunes to be made in Cuba as during the colonial years when the Condesa de Merlin said Havana life recalled les charmes de l’âge d’or . Still, there was great excitement in the United States about the island’s prospects. Cuba was variously depicted as “virgin land,” a “new California,” “a veritable Klondike of wealth.” The destruction of the war also created stupendous business opportunities, and American carpetbaggers, speculators, and investors descended on the island.
Old Cuban businesses struggled during what became known as the “second occupation.” Racked by malaria, Bernabé contemplated selling Senado to one of the foreign syndicates buying land around Camagüey for “$2 or $4 an acre, depending on the want of the
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