Memoir of My Youth in Cuba: A Soldier in the Spanish Army during the Separatist War, 1895–1898

MEMOIR OF MY YOUTH IN CUBA

ATLANTIC CROSSINGS

Rafe Blaufarb, Series Editor

Gabriel Paquette, Area Editor

MEMOIR OF MY YOUTH IN CUBA

A Soldier in the Spanish Army during the Separatist War, 1895–1898

Josep Conangla

Edited by Joaquín Roy

Translated by D. J. Walker

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Translation copyright © 2017 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Adobe Caslon Pro

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cover image: Portrait of Josep Conangla; courtesy of the Conangla family

Cover design: David Nees

∞

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-5892-1

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9076-1

In Memoriam

Christopher Schmidt-Nowara (1966–2015)

—D. J. Walker

In memory of Domingo Cabrerizo Frías,

my maternal grandfather,

who also endured this Cuban experience.

—Joaquín Roy

Contents

List of Illustrations

Translator’s Note

Acknowledgments

Introduction: A Biographical Sketch of Josep Conangla i Fontanilles

Joaquín Roy

1. From Cartagena to Sancti Spíritus

2. The War in Aguacate

3. The Death of Maceo and the Transfer to Havana

4. In the Cuban Capital

5. The Maine and the Disaster

6. Peace and the Return

Appendix

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

1. Sunday morning mass in the field

2. Church converted into Spanish hospital

3. Scribes and orderlies of the 2nd Batallion of the Regiment of Cuba

4. Relief station in Havana

5. The End. What We Left Behind / What We Got Back

Translator’s Note

The translator has added the illustrations, bracketed explanations within the text, bracketed notes, and the index.

Acknowledgments

Portions of this introduction reproduce in Spanish a part of my book originally published in Catalan on the Catalan presence in Cuba, titled Catalunya a Cuba (Barcelona: Editorial Barcino/Fundació Jaume I, 1988, 196 pp.), the introduction to my edition of La Constitució de L’Havana i altres escrits (Barcelona: Edicions de La Magrana/Diputació de Barcelona, 1986, 329 pp.), and successive variants of a study concerning the relationship between the poetry of Josep Conangla and his memoir on the War in Cuba, published in the Revista de Catalunya, No. 19 (May 1988), pp. 151–63; Actes del Colloqui d’Estudis Catalans a Nord-America (Barcelona: North American Catalan Society/Publications de l’Abadia de Montserrat, 1988), pp. 201–18; III. Jornades d’Estudis Catalano-Americans (Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, 1990), pp. 197–208; and Revista Iberoamericana, Nos. 146–47 (January–June 1989), pp. 129–59. I want to express my gratitude to all the members of the Conangla family—Jordi Carulla, Josep María Fradera, Ramón Goicoechea, Josep Gomis, Pere Grases, Albert Manent, Ambler H. Moss, and Enric Ucelay de Cal—for their support in the preparation of this edition as well as for their constant support in respect to the above-mentioned publications. I am grateful for the contributions of Rodrigo Garza, José María Hernández, and Kevin Taracido during the process of annotating the text of this Memoir, and later for the corrections of Guillermo Cabrera Leiva and Manuel Mariñas.

This English translation is based on Josep Conangla y Fontanilles’s Memorias de mi juventud en Cuba. Un soldado español en la guerra separatista (1895–1898) (Barcelona: Ediciones Península, 1998). The original manuscript, along with most other works by Conangla, is permanently deposited at the National Archives of Catalonia (Carrer Jaume I, 33–51, 08195, Sant Cugat del Vallès, Barcelona, Spain, ancsala@gencat.cat, phone [34] 93 589 77 88).

Joaquín Roy

Introduction

A Biographical Sketch of Josep Conangla i Fontanilles

Joaquín Roy

Appointment with the Disaster of 1898

Josep Conangla arrived in Cuba for the first time as a recruit toward the end of 1895. A fortunate survivor of the war, he was repatriated to Spain in December 1898, but in 1905 he immigrated to Cuba, where he resided until his death in 1964. These two biographical details were shared by thousands of Spaniards who found themselves obliged by the war, by economic or political necessities, or by preference, to move to the island during the last century. Conangla’s biography is emblematic of the two nations.

The event that marked Conangla’s life took place on February 24, 1895, when the definitive Cuban War of Independence began, a conflict that led the Spanish government to send thousands of recruits to Cuba who were untrained, poorly equipped, demoralized, and poorly led. All of them were victims of Spain’s blindness as a colonial power unable to accept the irremissible end of empire, an outcome obscured since 1824 by the illusion of a political bond with Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.

Even today the numbers are hard to pin down. In his masterful and lucid book¹ on relations between Spain and Cuba, Moreno Fraginals, basing himself on the synthesis and interpretation of diverse sources, calculated that between 1895 and 1898, 220,285 soldiers were transported to the island in addition to the troops mobilized within Cuba. Dramatically and accurately, he called this army the largest to cross the Atlantic before the US mobilization brought about by World War II. Conangla was to be one of the last of 112,921 soldiers and officers transported to Cuba in 1895 alone. In 1896, more than 80,000 arrived on the island. Moreno reckons that between 1887 and 1899, 345,698 commanders, officers and soldiers were sent to Cuba (to take part in the successive conflicts), but only 146,683 are confirmed to have returned to Spain. The Cuban historian reasonably concludes that the difference (an elevated figure of 200,000) cannot correspond to the number of dead, disappeared, or deserters.² Rather, he suspects that thousands of soldiers went into hiding to avoid repatriation, and that they gladly preferred to stay in a country they did not consider hostile.³ In addition, Moreno Fraginals calls attention to the global panorama of the assimilation of Spanish soldiers in Cuba, which is even more spectacular. In the thirty years spanning 1868 to 1898 (the War of Thirty Years), almost half a million civilians and more than half a million soldiers arrived in Cuba. If repatriations and deaths are added up, the conclusion is that Cuba received 700,000 Spanish immigrants, precisely in the bloodiest period of the wars of independence.

As for the economic sector, from May 4, 1895, to June 30, 1898, an impoverished Spain spent almost 2 billion pesetas⁴ on that war adventure. Thus was Canovas’s promise of remaining in Cuba "down to the last man and the last peseta" fulfilled.

Josep Conangla arrived in Cuba for the first time in 1895 as a Spanish soldier. Fortunate, in contrast to many less fortunate soldiers, he survived yellow fever, he was allowed to serve as a bureaucrat exempted from combat because of his elevated cultural level, and at the end of the war, he was repatriated to Spain. But the island had marked him emotionally, and a few years later he returned to Cuba to adopt it as his new country. There he built a solid body of work, encompassing journalism and essays; in addition, he transformed himself into the protagonist and symbol of Catalan nationalism. Among his unedited works, the chronicle of the experiences he lived through during the war stands out.

On December 27, 1958, in Havana, Conangla, elderly by now—stooped, his vision dimmed—put his signature to one volume of his projected memoir. After decades of residence in Cuba, he had already satisfied the great debt to his adopted country, yet he decided to leave proof of his sincere affection for Cuba by transcribing his recollections in what apparently was to be the first volume of his intended autobiography, titled Memoir of My Youth in Cuba during the Separatist War (1895–1898).⁵

He gathered together his recollected experiences of sixty years earlier as a member of the Spanish expeditionary force in that disastrous war. At nearly the same moment, a former Cuban sergeant by the name of Fulgencio Batista was readying a plane in order to flee to the Dominican Republic. He was abandoning the presidency of the Republic just as the followers of Fidel Castro began their triumphal entrance into the Cuban capital. In this way a crucial new stage in Cuban history and inter-American relations began, besides leading to obvious consequences in the future relationship between Cuba and Spain. From then on, nothing would be the same.

There are numerous clues for understanding Conangla’s ideological evolution buried in the pages of his text, which remained unedited until now. The myopia of the Spanish government is evident in its failure to understand the inevitable end of the remains of the colonial empire, the rot in the governmental power base, and the impotence of the progressive and nationalist Catalan sectors in opposing the state of national disaster. Conangla saw his life as a student and journalist in Catalonia cut off in 1895 when he was conscripted to go to Cuba, and this event marked him for life. When he returned to Spain after the 1898 defeat, he had already decided to return to Cuba, this time voluntarily and perhaps definitively. Possessed of a nearly unequaled intellectual sensibility, young Conangla preferred to declare himself a tabula rasa and begin a new life in Havana rather than remain in Spain immobilized by the increasing frustration that threatened the intellectual and political milieus of Barcelona at the turn of the century.

Josep Conangla i Fontanilles was born on September 15, 1875, in Montblanc, in the region of the Conca de Barberà, in the province of Tarragona. His house was located in the place known as cal fuster coix on the street where the chapel of Santa Tecla was situated. His father was Antoni Conangla i Balcells (1824–1895), a native of Santa Coloma de Queralt, and a practicing notary and lawyer in the region. He was a man of exquisite culture and strong character, who taught Josep his first letters and instilled in him the conscience of a Spartan. Always act honorably, my son . . . !⁶ was the advice that Conangla transcribes in a margin of his memoir as the only message he received when he went to Cuba for the first time as a recruit in the 1895–1898 war. His father died while Conangla was serving in Cuba. The official denial of permission to go to Montblanc on this occasion marked Conangla for life. His mother was Dolors Fontanilles i Voltas (1847–1913).

Building upon the foundation his father had provided, Conangla continued his studies in the Colegio Provincial and in the Instituto de Segunda Enseñanza de Tarragona (1885–1890), where he earned his baccalaureate in Letras y Ciencias. Then, in Barcelona, he prepared to begin the course of Filosofía y Letras, and he even managed to complete two years in the Facultad de Derecho in 1891–1893. Logically, his professional career was to be focused on law, probably alternating a practice with his incipient political activity and the cultivation of literature. But this plan was cut short when he was called up.

At the end of 1894, it seemed that Conangla had evaded military service thanks to the high number he obtained in the lottery. He did not have to make use of the insurance policy that his father—in accord with the common practice at the time—had purchased for him in case he might be called up. But on February 24 of the following year, the so-called Grito de Baire was proclaimed. At this signal, the Revolución Libertadora abandoned the superficial truce guaranteed by the Paz de Zanjón (February 11, 1878) that had ended the Ten Years War.

This conflict had begun on October 10, 1868, with the Grito de Yara, a proclamation of independence issued by Carlos Manuel de Céspedes at La Demajagua, his sugar plantation in Oriente Province. After he freed his slaves and incorporated them into the liberation army, he denounced arbitrary government, unjust taxes, corruption, the exclusion of Cubans from administrative positions, and the absence of freedom of religion and association. Under the civil leadership of Céspedes, military operations for the independence movement were directed by the Dominican, Máximo Gómez, who organized the rebel forces to wage guerrilla warfare. In 1871, the independence fighters had been confined to Oriente Province. Gómez suggested an offensive in the western part of the island, an operation supported by the mulatto leader Antonio Maceo (The Bronze Titan). His impressive military victories had converted Maceo into a hero with great prestige. He became the focus of envy on the part of more moderate elements in the rebellion, who feared that Maceo would try to imitate the example of Haiti and proclaim a republic headed by himself.⁷

Gómez’s plans were abandoned. Céspedes was removed from office in 1873. He took refuge in Oriente Province and fell in combat before the Spanish forces on February 27, 1874. Gómez continued the fight, but petty internal quarrels and the lack of support by exiles in the United States led to his resignation in 1876. The war officially ended two years later. Yet, while the greater part of the military leadership accepted this compromise, Maceo directly rejected Arsenio Martínez Campos’s peace proposal and decided to continue the fight with the Protesta de Baraguá. Backed by the Cuban leadership, he decided that he would go abroad to collect funds. With authorization provided by Martínez Campos, Maceo left Cuba on the cruiser Fernando el Católico en route to Jamaica, and from there he sailed to New York on May 30, 1879. The so-called Guerra Chiquita (1879–1880) was launched in Santiago de Cuba on the twenty-sixth of August. In Kingston, its supreme commander, Calixto García, explained to Maceo that in order to prevent the appearance of racial conflict in the war of independence, it was best that he not become the head of the military sector. Nevertheless, with the aid of his brother Marcos and several friends, Maceo prepared an expedition that was to join the rebels. On August 3, shortly after landing, Calixto García was taken prisoner.

Tired of fighting, many Cubans, whether moderate or radical in their ideas for attaining independence, resolved to bet on the new formula of autonomy that revitalized solutions proposed in the first half of the nineteenth century. Autonomy was to serve as an alternative to drastic calls for annexation (converting Cuba into a part of the United States) or to a weak policy for reform without specific solutions. Members of the new Partido Liberal Autonomista sought to achieve the highest possible level of political and economic liberalization, while maintaining basic ties to Spain. This plan did not achieve its goal, and the indecision of autonomist leaders left the way clear for Cuban sectors demanding independence to take the lead in deciding the future of the island. The leader who began to stand out in this connection was José Martí (1853–1895), who, after years of exile, prison, and disagreements with Gómez and Maceo, founded the Partido Revolucionario Cubano in the United States and from that country proclaimed his plans for independence. But at the outset of hostilities, Martí died in combat and leadership passed to Maceo and Gómez.

The new insurrection was to dispel once and for all the mirage that was all that remained of the Spanish Empire, and it provoked the North American intervention in 1898. Conangla and thousands of men classified in the excedente de cupo [men exempted from military service because they obtained a high number in the lottery] were called up to take the place in the Peninsula of men who had been sent with urgency to Cuba. From his initial destination of Vilafranca del Penedès, he was later transferred to Cartagena and incorporated into the Regimiento de Infantería España número 46. Five months later, the order came down to organize an expeditionary battalion to be sent to Cuba.

His state of mind is reflected in the first pages of his Memoir. After dashed hopes—based as much on pacifist sentiment as on strong patriotism, in accord with one’s ideology—that the war would end soon, the order to embark for Conangla and thousands of recruits was like a hammer blow. Conangla transformed the memory of that traumatic journey into the theme of his best lyric and prose essay pages. In the text of his Memoir, the experience serves as a prologue to the narration of events in Cuba. He retained the last images of Cartagena in his mind and depicted them in a passage dedicated to the day of departure. Attentive readers of his poems would have noted that the version of events in poetry was present in his best collections, Elegía de la guerra⁸ and El meu pare y Eternal.⁹ One of them, translated by the author and inserted into his Memoir, reflects that moment:

I have the unforgettable picture

forever vivid in my mind:

the disorderly multitudes

that were circling the port.

. . .

Everything came to an end.

Hoarse cries

shouted out frenetically.

Then, only silhouettes

increasingly dim,

of a fluttering of handkerchiefs

moving in the distance.¹⁰

On December 11, 1895, the steamship San Francisco finally arrived in the Bay of Cienfuegos. There began a cruel experience for Conangla, who, in the port of Tunas de Zaza, confirmed the harsh reality of Cuba. These first impressions remained fixed in his mind. Bogus patriotism and the repressive politics of reconcentration could not prevent malaria, colonial myopia, guerrilla actions, and the final blow from the United States from coming together to produce the disaster of 1898.

A Modernist Poet

In Barcelona in 1904, Joan Maragall answered a letter from young Conangla, back from Cuba following the 1898 disaster. Conangla had asked him for a few words to use as a prologue to his poetic work. The leader of Catalan modernism clearly saw that the sentiments of the repatriated recruit (who recounted his passage through the war in poetry) needed a very different mode of expression in order to convey the events that underlay the images: Many things that you have felt are too wounding to express with the holy serenity of poetry . . . and others that you have felt too much with your head prevent them from emerging with the spontaneity of song.¹¹

Sixty years later the once young poet, now elderly, would build the bridge that Maragall had suggested, that is, the transition between urgent, intimate experiences (in his poems) and critical reflection on his recollections (in his essays). His Memoir, unedited until now, more than a chronicle of the war, is an amplification and commentary on the historical context of the poems. The inclusion of some poems (originally written and published in Catalan) round out its testimonial value while casting a new light on the author’s poetic esthetic.

Conangla was admired for his work on nationalism but was not well known for his poetry. The preservation of his unedited Memoir on the Cuban War sheds necessary light on his first poems, collected in Elegía, El meu pare, and Eternal. The remainder of his poetry is dispersed in dozens of newspapers and magazines in Cuba and Spain.

Elegía is his most consistent and compact poetic work, as much for its monographic theme, its autobiographical aspect, the sincerity and rigor of its language, as for its color and sonority—all within the most mature modernist tradition. The provisional title was Odes del cor. The subtitle of its first and only edition is Impressions de la Guerra de Cuba. It is divided into three parts: Impresiones, Recuerdos, and Reflexiones. Some of the poems it contained were published in contemporary magazines. The complete book of poetry was presented to the public complemented by a few words from Francesc Pi i Sunyer, president of Catalunya Federal, on May 20, 1904.

If Latin American literary modernism is often circumscribed by the appearance of Azul (1888) and the death of Rubén Darío (1906)—although these limits are arbitrary—Catalan literary modernism¹² for practical reasons is also limited by the Exposición Universal of Barcelona in 1888 and the death of Joan Maragall in 1911, or it may be said to extend from 1881 up to the consecration of noucentism¹³ in 1906. Modernism in Latin America and in Catalonia was related, but it was the product of two distinct societies. In Catalonia there were not only esthetic, but also ideological underpinnings. Like the assumptions underlying Castilian modernism, modernisme shared a universe tangential to the ideology of regeneration in 1898.¹⁴ It was a reaction against the literature of the Restoration and against naturalism. It rejected everything old and obsessively defended the active role of the young. Its greatest support came from the Barcelona bourgeoisie, but it began as a movement of artistic ferment and it identified with the Catalan nationalism that precisely at that time gathered new impetus (for some critics, a foundational impetus).¹⁵ Modernisme was diffused through magazines such as L’Avenç¹⁶ and Joventut,¹⁷ with a great variety of criteria regarding esthetic assumptions. It recognized Joan Maragall and Santiago Rusiñol as leaders and substituted the Festes Modernistes for the traditional Juegos Florales. Josep Conangla was formed in this environment.

Despite its limited circulation, Elegía was well received in the culture and literature pages of the daily newspapers and magazines of the time.¹⁸ The critics and poets Carles Rahola and Antoni Rovira i Virgili discovered affinities with the work of Emili Guanyabens¹⁹ and Ignasi Iglesias²⁰ (in addition to Maragall).²¹ Rovira drew attention to the evolution of Conangla’s poetry found within the book itself: Compare the verses that form the principal body of the book written in Cuba six years ago with the introduction and the ‘Ofrenda’ written a few months ago.²² Bo y Singla wrote in El Pacto: Other colonial wars have dispensed honors and wealth. Our friend has offered a bouquet of poems. He has not sung the honor of victory nor has he wept over defeats that were perhaps deserved.²³ Carles Rahola (using the pseudonym Panida) affirmed in El Autonomista that: [. . .] there is a love and hate that beat their wings unceasingly, leaving behind a luminous wake and a red trail: love of fraternity, love of kindness; hatred of war, of evil, of everything that signifies slavery, depression of the human personality, unhappiness; hatred of hatred.²⁴ The Galician poet Curros Enríquez in a note published in the prestigious Diario de la Marina wrote that: [. . .] deep inspiration and a tender affection for all things Cuban pulsates in his work.²⁵ Antonio Andreu Cabestany urged him to: [. . .] persevere, persevere, for the cause of justice and reason will gain much.²⁶ Joan Maragall in the above-mentioned letter²⁷ that served as an introduction to his book of poetry wrote: I am not at all surprised at his decision to see the sequence of moments his spirit endured—that will surely remain as the most intense in his life—fixed in a book (p. 6). In a few lines he summed up the content of the poems and intuited their origin: The danger to one’s own existence, the most blessed loving bonds painfully truncated, the sentiment felt toward one’s country exalted by a forced removal from it, humanitarian instincts brutally contradicted, the flower of youth crushed, what then is there in you that does not suffer, that doesn’t cry out, that doesn’t weep, that doesn’t hope? (p. 6).

Witness to a War

This first volume of his Memoir (which was the last, since Conangla lacked the strength to organize the