War and Genocide in Cuba, 1895-1898. By John Lawrence Tone. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Pp. xi + 338. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $35.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-8078-3006-2. Histories of 1898 vis-à-vis Cuba have long followed nationalist standpoints. Understandably, historians of Cuba have emphasized Cuban agency, arguing in many cases that separatists largely defeated Spain before the United States’ intervention; Spanish historians have viewed events as disastrous dénouement to a nineteenth century fraught with disorder and decline. To U.S. historians 1898 often signaled an anomalous and brief imperial opening of the “American Century” in which the decisive actions of a rising power— the “splendid little war”—rendered lesser nations’ impact on final outcomes minimal at best, beneath sustained attention at worst. Hispanist John Tone has written a highly accessible, explicitly revisionist narrative military history of Cuba’s War of Independence, based on secondary literature and primary research in archival collections in Cuba, Spain, and the United States. The book exemplifies emergent transnational scholarship that has begun to meet the challenge raised during the 1998 centennial for a new historiography drawing on Cuban, Spanish, and U.S. perspectives.1 1 See Louis A. Pérez, Jr. The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and Historiography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). Tone asserts that the received U.S. historiography “with the Cubans left out” (xii, 289) always faced challenges such as that posed by labor historian Philip Foner’s Spanish-Cuban-American War.2 2 Philip S. Foner, The Spanish-Cuban-American War and the Birth of American Imperialism 2 vols. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972); see also Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Louis A. Pérez, Jr. Cuba Between Empires, 1878-1902 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989). But quite apart from critiques that Foner’s work rather uncritically repeated Cuban nationalist claims, such scholarly corrections made little impact in popular understandings of the conflict. Early on Tone warns the reader to “expect a tragedy” (9) as he deftly describes the motivations, trajectory, and grim effects of a cruel late-nineteenth century total war on civilians and combatants. His treatment includes a reckoning of the Spanish army’s notorious counterinsurgency “reconcentration” policy whereby rural inhabitants were forcibly relocated by both insurgent depredations and colonial troops to Spanish-controlled towns—a tactic that introduced the term “concentration camp” to the twentieth century’s lexicon—together with careful scrutiny of political developments in the colony and metropolis. Tone eschews the “thirty years war” periodization of independence from the Ten Years’ War (1868-1878), arguing that such an approach foredooms the intervening decade’s politics and social developments to irrelevance (25-6) even though tactical innovation was slight between the two wars in spite of technological changes. Nevertheless, within the narrative key parsed details of the earlier conflict appear in biographic chapters about important leaders. His stark descriptions of prevailing social conditions in both Cuba and Spain, military institutions, and of the ghastly mortality rate inflicted by tropical diseases are told with verve and pathos. For Tone, war in Cuba foreshadowed twentieth-century decolonization wars of national liberation. An armed separatist insurgency prefigured Mao’s dictum that the objective of guerrilla strategy is to pit few against many, while the tactic pursued is to pit many against few. Ultimately, the colonial metropolis sent a large conscript army of 190,000 backed by some 60,000 native auxiliaries against the poorly armed rebels, outnumbered ten to one. He finds that total Spanish combat casualties numbered 4,032 deaths and 10,956 wounded. Fully twenty-two percent of the Spanish colonial army in Cuba, over 41,000 soldiers, however, died from tropical diseases (9-10, 97). Such statistics are lower than many estimates, but higher than the recent figure of 37,721 by a Cuban military historian.3 3 Raúl Izquierdo Canosa, Viaje sin regreso (Havana: Ediciones Verde Olivo, 2001). By 1896, faced with an island-wide insurgency after the invasion of sugar-rich western Cuba, the Spanish military placed general Weyler in charge. He executed, but did not single-handedly plan, the forcible reconcentration of the rural populace—figuratively draining the sea in which the insurgent fish swam—a “sound strategy” (209), but with an appalling and fearful cost. Using fragmentary evidence, Tone revises the death-toll of reconcentration, down from oft-cited claims of hundreds of thousands made by Weyler’s many enemies, but up from some recent estimates, to arrive at a conservative number of 170,000. This figure, even if lower than many, is frightful in its implications: fully ten percent of Cuba’s population at the time. In essence, Tone claims that through such policies Weyler squelched the insurrection in western Cuba, killed Maceo by December 1896, and all-but-defeated the Liberation Army by 1897, even while his actions increased the likelihood of intervention by the United States. Thus the mambises had no chance of overcoming Spain without significant help, and even though reconcentration was rescinded in late 1897, Tone indicates mortality rates actually continued to rise. A clear extrapolation is that the conflict’s prolongation would have proved even more calamitous. For Tone, the war turned on events internal to Spain that resuscitated the Liberation Army’s flagging fortunes. These included “the unforeseeable actions” of an anarchist’s assassination of the conservative Spanish prime minister. In emphasizing the implications of this political murder, Tone is in agreement with assessments by Richard Gott and Benedict Anderson.4 4 Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (New York: Verso, 2005); Richard Gott, Cuba: A New History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); both works draw on Frank Fernández, Cuban Anarchism: The History of a Movement translated by Charles Bufe (Tucson: See Sharp Press, 2001). It introduces unexpected nuance, individual agency, and plenty of hinge factors to the story, but also suggests a return to conspiratorial explanations for historical events. The outcomes included Weyler’s recall and the belated extension of autonomy to the Cuban colony, which was rejected by an emboldened Liberation Army capitalizing on apparent Spanish weakness to regain strength as impending U.S. intervention neared. Tone minimizes the Cuban role in the U.S. phase of 1898—supported by much evidence to be sure, but also much received historiography. This, along with claims that the U.S. intervention’s desired humanitarian outcome of bringing the war to an end sooner, together with desires to avenge the Maine explosion—both constituting “the real texture of a great and tragic historical moment” that allowed U.S. imperialist “jingoes” to “have their way under the guise of a humanitarian mission” (248-49)—may, however, become derailed and vulgarized into the long-standing, dearly-held U.S. doctrinal construct that such humanitarian intervention itself is the primary lesson of 1898. The book contains a few factual errors, although they do not detract from Tone’s principal arguments. The author convincingly emphasizes that the May 19, 1895 death of Martí “had about it the odor of suicide” (55), but in order to lend weight to this incontrovertible feature of Martí’s fate claims that he rode into battle armed with only a pistol. Martí’s premonitions, even obsession, with sacrifice and death hardly require an evidentiary support of what he chose to arm himself with, and a Winchester, purportedly his, reposes in a Santiago de Cuba museum. Similarly, in describing the landing of the U.S. Marines at Guantánamo, Tone writes their weapons included “a Gatling gun, and modern Krags [magazine rifles]” (275). This conflates the marines’ equipment with that of the U.S. Army Fifth Corps near Santiago: The marines in Cuba had model 1895 Colt machine guns and 6-millimeter Lee rifles. A typo in which the Guerra Chiquita “in May 1879 inspired no one, and by August it was all over” (180) should read “by August 1880.” These minor editing problems could easily be corrected when the book comes out in a paperback edition, which it surely warrants. Its tragic story is not only an original and well researched contribution to Cuban, Spanish, comparative colonial, and military histories, but is engagingly written, humane, and judicious in its appraisals of a complex and contested history. It deserves to be widely read and its implications debated. David C. Carlson, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 5