The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba - Chanel Cleeton Page 0,119
Hearst. “They won’t let press boats through.”
A gleam enters Hearst’s eyes at the challenge presented. “Surely, we have something that might entice them.”
In the end, our party settles on bananas as a bribe, heartily accepted even as we are warned that the bombardment on Morro Castle will begin at eight in the morning.
We leave the Sylvia and board a cutter. We sail outside of the battle lines and watch as eight American ships begin firing on the fortified castle from a couple thousand yards away, Spain returning fire from the shore, shells flying past. The noise is thunderous, the sky filling with smoke.
“Sail closer,” Hearst calls out to his crew. “We want the cameramen to be able to get better angles.”
The crew follows Hearst’s command.
“They’re saying we’re too close to the battlefield,” a crew member shouts.
“Don’t worry about that. Just stay where you are.”
A shell lands dangerously close to us, just a hundred feet away in the water.
“We need to get out of the way,” the man shouts back. “The Americans are telling us we’re directly in the line of fire.”
For a moment, I almost think Hearst is going to argue with the man, but he nods, allowing us to pull back slightly.
The tide of war has firmly shifted, and the Spanish fleet races along the coast, their decks on fire as the American navy pursues them. We follow behind the navy at a greater distance than before, a flotilla of newspaper boats behind us.
We all watch in shock as sailors leap overboard from the burning Spanish ships, trying to head for the shore.
“Go after them,” Hearst shouts, bending over.
When he rights himself, his trousers are rolled above the knees.
It shouldn’t surprise me anymore, nothing he does should, but I gape at the sight of Hearst jumping from the cutter, brandishing a revolver in one hand.
“Surely, he isn’t going to—”
“Stop,” Hearst shouts at the sailors attempting to escape through the shore, and miraculously, they do.
Hearst grabs a man and pulls him onto the cutter, and then another, and another, taking the Spanish sailors prisoner as though it is the most natural thing in the world and as if we are not here to report on the war, but rather to wage it.
When the cutter is filled with sailors, we return to the Sylvia, where the sailors are photographed and interviewed. In all, Hearst has captured seventeen of them.
For as much as we’ve written about their actions in Cuba, as close as we’ve been to the Junta, seeing the Spanish sailors places a human face to the stories we’ve told, and I almost feel sorry for how dazed they look by the entire proceedings, as we explain to them that we aren’t, in fact, members of the American navy, but newspaper reporters from New York City who have taken them prisoner.
Hundreds of their compatriots have died today, but their shocked expressions are also due to the blow we all watch unfold before our very eyes:
The Americans have just destroyed the Spanish fleet.
* * *
—
The siege on Santiago continues, but the more time I spend here, the more I’m convinced I’m following the wrong part of the story.
I approach Hearst the next afternoon after the bombardment of Morro Castle.
“We’re going to set sail for Baltimore,” Hearst tells me. “We’ll stop by Siboney and pick Creelman up—they say he’s recovering nicely from his injuries—and then we’re heading home.”
Now that the Spanish fleet has been destroyed, the end of the war feels like a foregone conclusion, and it’s clear Hearst’s sights are already on to the next story.
“There’s a cutter headed for Havana,” I say. “Some journalists are going to interview the Spanish officials there. I’d like to join them. I think it’s a good opportunity. I can catch a steamer back to the United States from the city.”
“Why Havana?”
Ever since I have been in Cuba, my days have been filled with guns and fighting, with the men’s side of the war. But war isn’t just waged on the battlefield, and I want to see the other side. What role have the women played? I saw them briefly walking from El Caney, but their stories have been largely forgotten.
“When I wrote the story of Evangelina Cisneros’s life, it felt like there were pieces missing. She took me inside Recogidas, she told me about the other women there, about her life there, but we showed so little of that to our readers.”
He shoots me a faintly incredulous look. “You want to write about Evangelina?”