On Captivity: A Spanish Soldier's Experience in a Havana Prison, 1896-1898

ATLANTIC CROSSINGS

Rafe Blaufarb, Series Editor

ON CAPTIVITY

A Spanish Soldier's Experience in a Havana Prison, 1896–1898

MANUEL CIGES APARICIO

TRANSLATED AND EDITED BY D. J. WALKER

WITH A FOREWORD BY

CHRISTOPHER SCHMIDT-NOWARA

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

Copyright © 2012

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Originally published as Del cautiverio. Madrid: Editorial España, 1930.

Typeface: Granjon

Cover illustration: Viaje de Retorn. Rastro que deixan los vapors, al tornar de Cuba y Filipinas(Return Voyage. Wake left by steamships upon their return from Cuba and the Philippines). (La Campana de Gracia, March 26, 1898.) Cover design: Todd Lape/Lape Designs

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Subsidy provided by the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain's Ministry of Culture and United States Universities.

Ciges Aparicio, Manuel, 1873–1936.

[Del cautiverio. English]

On captivity : a Spanish soldier's experience in a Havana prison, 1896–1898 / Manuel

Ciges Aparicio; translated and edited by D.J. Walker.

p. cm. — (Atlantic crossings)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8173-1769-0 (trade cloth : alk. paper) —

ISBN 978-0-8173-8622-1 (ebook)

1. Ciges Aparicio, Manuel, 1873–1936. 2. Prisoners' writings, Spanish. 3. Spanish—Cuba. I. Walker, D. J. II. Title.

PQ6605.I5D413 2012

863'.62—dc23

2012011883

In Memoriam

Margaret Edna Walker

Contents

Foreword by Christopher Schmidt-Nowara

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I

Part II

Part III

Appendix: Manuel Ciges Aparicio's Intercepted Letter to Henri Rochefort, Editor of L'Intransigeant

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Foreword

The Cuban War of Independence (1895–98) and the subsequent U.S. intervention in 1898 together formed a pivotal moment in world history: centuries of Spanish rule in the Americas came to an end, Cuba was on the verge of claiming its hard-won independence, and the United States suddenly emerged as a military power of global dimensions. Professor D. J. Walker has carried out an important scholarly endeavor by translating the remarkable account of Manuel Ciges Aparicio, On Captivity, which throws new light on these events. Ciges recounts in detail his experience as a Spanish soldier and as a prisoner jailed for writing a supposedly subversive letter intercepted by the Spanish army. Ciges's work, heretofore hard to find, will introduce the reader to vivid examples of the war's brutality; it will also suggest the historical legacies of the conflict, whose themes have resurfaced in the twenty-first century with surprising vehemence.

Cuba was one of Spain's two remaining American colonies after the Spanish American revolutions of the 1820s. Puerto Rico was the other. A variety of factors determined the degree of Puerto Rican and Cuban loyalty to Spain, but the most central was the plantation revolution that overtook both islands in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In Cuba the changes wrought by the twin trades of sugar and slavery were more far-reaching. When Spain for the first time deregulated the slave trade to its colonies in 1789, planters and merchants in Cuba responded by building the biggest slave society in Spanish American history.¹ Slavery proved durable because of its ardent defenders, but when Cuban patriots led by Carlos Manuel de Céspedes rose up against Spanish rule in 1868, beginning a war that would last until 1878, they set in motion its demise. By the time the War of Independence broke out in 1895, the struggle against colonialism and against slavery (finally abolished in 1886) and its legacies were intertwined in Cuba. Cubans were fighting not only for independence but also for equality.

Ciges as observer allows us insight into Spain's efforts to keep its grip on its colony, a place of fabulous wealth for Spaniards on both sides of the Atlantic and one that most considered part of the national territory, one reason why the government and army fought with such fury. Among the invaluable contents of his work is his encounter with the reconcentrados at Mariel, this cursed and nightmarish place. The reconcentrados were Cuban rural dwellers gathered into concentration camps as part of the counterinsurgency policy implemented by the Spanish military commander General Valeriano Weyler, a soldier with broad colonial experience in Cuba and the Philippines. His goal was to isolate the insurgents in the countryside by emptying it of people and resources. While he weakened the Cuban forces, he also wreaked great suffering upon Cuban civilians. One historian has recently estimated that some 10 percent of the population perished in the camps.²

Ciges was a keen and often sympathetic observer, but his obvious blind spots are also revealing. Most notably, as Professor Walker shows, the author expressed contempt for the Afro-Cuban prisoners he encountered.³ Here was a central point of conflict between Spaniards and Cubans. Over the many years of struggle, the Cuban independence movement had come to articulate a vision of nationality in which political equality would transcend the colonial legacies of slavery and legal discrimination. José Martí, leader of the Partido revolucionario cubano, eloquently voiced the aspirations of many Cubans when he spoke of the fraternal unity brought about by the wars against Spain. Historians have recently shown that although Cubans were not as successful as they hoped to be in erasing racial discrimination, the aspiration to overcome it remained a potent force in Cuban political life after 1898, shaping, for example, resistance to American efforts to limit the franchise in the 1901 constitution. Spain, in contrast, consistently alienated large segments of the colonial population by upholding slavery and by aggressively deploying images of race war in its efforts to quell the insurgency and win support among white Cubans. That our narrator could write in such a truculent tone about his fellow prisoner because of his color and origins shows us how great a distance had opened between Cuban patriots and even those Spaniards critical of their government's counterinsurgency.⁴

On Captivity opens a window onto Cuba and Spain during the conflict over colonialism and independence; at the same time, it serves as a mirror for the present day, as the reader inevitably sees reflections of the counterinsurgency of the 1890s in the twenty-first-century actions carried out by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan. Part of the reason is that the struggles, though separated by more than a century, are not unconnected. When the United States went to war against Spain in 1898 and then annexed Puerto Rico and the Philippines, it carried out its own brutal counterinsurgency against Filipino nationalists. Moreover, historians have returned to the U.S. intervention and annexations of the era because they see in them the origins of the country's peculiar form of global expansion, the so-called empire of bases.⁵ The most notorious of these installations, which now girdle the planet, is in Cuba itself, Guantánamo naval base, leased from the independent but not fully sovereign Cuban government when the American occupation came to an end in 1902. Ciges's account helps us to see these connections and to think about the displacements and forms of cruelty—some intended, others unforeseen and often unreported—that the quest for overseas domination have unleashed.

Christopher Schmidt-Nowara

Professor of History

Prince of Asturias Chair in Spanish Culture and Civilization

Tufts University

Acknowledgments

I want to thank fine arts photographer Harriet Blum for taking time from her primary work to photograph the illustrations used in this book. I am also greatly indebted to my typist, Sylvia A. Macey. As always, I wish to thank John T. O'Connor for his careful reading of my translation and his encouragement throughout its preparation in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Finally, I am grateful to the heirs of Manuel Ciges Aparicio for their gracious permission to publish this edition.

Introduction

Infinite dolor ought to be the sole title for these pages. Infinite dolor. Because the dolor of confinement in prison is the harshest, the most devastating of grievous sorrows, the sorrow that destroys intelligence, dries up the soul and leaves upon it marks that will never be effaced.

—José Martí, El presidio político en Cuba (1871)

Manuel Ciges Aparicio's On Captivity, composed at the turn of the twentieth century, recounts the Spanish author's experiences as a prisoner in Havana from 1896 to 1898. Ciges was serving as a soldier in the Spanish army when he was arrested and accused of treason, presumably—as he indicated in his account—for having written an article for publication in a Paris newspaper critical of Spanish general Valeriano Weyler's conduct of the Spanish-Cuban-American War. The first written version of his ordeal appeared in a Spanish newspaper in 1899, only one year after the author was released as part of a general pardon. One more version appeared in a newspaper before the 1903 publication in book form. The author personally corrected the 1903 edition for the last edition (1930) produced during his lifetime. The book was not published again until 1985, more than fifty years later.¹ In the immediate aftermath of the Spanish-Cuban-American War, Ciges's narrative was highly regarded in Spain, although only a relatively small number of Spaniards were literate (56.2 percent in 1900).² Subsequent political developments, including the suppression of works by certain authors, among them Ciges, who had opposed the Falangist Party, founded in 1933 and dedicated to the overthrow of the Second Republic, contributed to its disappearance from the lists of works considered important for an understanding of the War of Cuban Independence and Spain's role in combating the loss of its colonies.

Other accounts of life in prison have become famous, read by students in particular because they were written by talented writers, and because they reflect a significant response to historical circumstances that are still considered relevant. Silvio Pellico's My Ten Years' Imprisonment (Le mie prigioni) (1832) and Dostoevsky's House of the Dead (1861–62) are sometimes mentioned in connection with Ciges's book. Both works were popular and, in fact, constituted each author's main claim to fame during his lifetime. While they describe many of the same abuses Ciges wrote about, they are quite different in their principal themes. Pellico recounts his steadfast efforts to accept the ways of Providence while he was imprisoned first in Italy, then for nine years in the Spielberg fortress in Moravia. Dostoevsky, who spent four years in a convict prison in Siberia, did not write a first-person account of his experiences; rather, he presented the reader with a manuscript—purportedly written by an inmate in a Siberian prison, a wife murderer, not a political prisoner—that he claimed to have come upon by accident. Dostoevsky wanted, above all, to convince readers of how ineffective the punishment meted out to prisoners was in bringing about reform or repentance and how unbridgeable was the gulf between peasants and gentry in midcentury Russia. Both books contain a message of hope: Pellico's account portrays the triumph of Christian charity over hate and resentment, while Dostoevsky's narrator finds solace in the religious nature of the Russian peasant. Ciges's account, as the reader will discover, offers no such hopes.

A work whose content describes prison conditions and is strictly contemporary with Ciges's ordeal was written by a Cuban insurrectionist/revolutionary, Pablo de la Concepción y Hernández. This account is of great interest since its author describes his imprisonment by the Spanish government in El Morro prison in Havana followed by his incarceration in the castle of Acho in Ceuta. Entitled Cuban Prisoners and Deportees, 1895–1898, in the War of Independence (Prisioneros y deportados cubanos 1895–1898 en la Guerra de Independencia), it was published in Havana in 1932. Like the works of Pellico and Dostoevsky, this book offers hope in the midst of despair brought about by appalling conditions. Some of the illuminating differences between the ways in which the Cuban Pablo de la Concepción and the Spaniard Ciges experienced their time in Spanish prisons will be discussed in the course of this introduction and in the endnotes.

Two modern works may be read alongside Ciges's account for insights afforded by comparison. The first is Reinaldo Arenas's Before Night Falls (Antes que anochezca). Arenas was imprisoned in El Morro fortress some seventy-eight years after Ciges spent twenty-two and one-half months in the nearby prison of La Cabaña. The pages Arenas devoted to his time in prison constitute a compelling narrative that spares the reader no details concerning the cruelty, material filth, and sexual practices of the prisoners.³ In 2002 Dulce Chacón published La voz dormida (The Sleeping Voice), a work based on the histories of real men and women who opposed Franco's 1936 insurrection. Parts of the work take place in Ventas prison in Madrid where the women whose lives it chronicles were confined for anti-Franco activities. Chacón's novelized account provides further evidence, if such were needed, to demonstrate the validity of José Martí's epigraph to this introduction.

An accurate rendering of what it is really like to be incarcerated, whether in a nineteenth-century prison or in the unreconstructed prisons of some modern states, makes for undeniably grim reading—or viewing, as the photos of prisoners at Abu Ghraib released in 2004 demonstrate—not least because some of the most revolting and dehumanizing features of imprisonment never change. Historical relevance and good writing compensate readers for the painful passages that must be included in the interest of veracity. It is also the case that unjustly imprisoned men and women who undergo persecution by states unaccountable to external laws will find an audience in any period of history.

* * *

A few pages into his narrative, before he was arrested and imprisoned, Ciges described what he saw in the barracks at Mariel, which were inhabited by reconcentrados—men, women, and children displaced from the countryside into towns and cities in order to deprive the insurgents of help in the form of food, shelter, and intelligence. His account is disturbing yet indispensable reading for anyone who has not registered the horrors of war as ordinary civilians experience them. It is arguably the most graphic description of the sheer misery endured by Cubans left to die of starvation and sickness penned by the many witnesses to the devastation brought about by General Valeriano Weyler's edict of October 21, 1896.⁴

It is Ciges's ability to graphically re-create what he saw in this and other scenes in his narrative that lends such power to his work. His story acquaints the reader with the political environment the author wished to depict but, above all, Ciges brings to life the conscripts, volunteers, substitutes, guerrilleros, members of disciplinary battalions, an anarchist, and a ñáñigo who were incarcerated in La Cabaña with him. The author's detailed descriptions of the prison, the guards, and the squalid living conditions of the prisoners further enable the reader to visualize the specific reality Ciges wished to convey.

How the reader perceives the narrator's character and apparent reliability as a witness is crucial in any account of prison life. How does Ciges represent himself in his account? But first, who was Manuel Ciges Aparicio?

* * *

Manuel Ciges Aparicio was born in 1873 in Enguera, a town in southwestern Spain where his father had a business dealing in fabrics. Ciges was five years old when his father died. When his mother remarried, the family moved to Extremadura. Although Ciges remained close to his mother throughout her life, the intense enmity he felt toward his stepfather led him to leave home at an early age. He enlisted in the army at twenty and served in the short-lived war in Melilla in 1893. This conflict with some Rif tribe was ultimately provoked by Spanish expansionist designs in northern Morocco. Unable to evade service in Cuba after the second War of Independence began in February 1895, Ciges embarked for the island in August 1896. By early January 1897 he had been arrested and accused of treason. A general amnesty after the war freed him in May 1899, allowing him to resume work as a journalist, the profession he had chosen while he was still in the army.

Despite a lingering tendency toward a self-conscious modernism—evident in several of the earlier passages of his account—Ciges was clearly linked to the Generation of 1898 writers by age and a preoccupation with the economic, social, and political problems besetting Spain.⁵ He was the only one of that generation to serve in Cuba, and his witness there as a freethinker and political skeptic during the war constitutes a valuable addition to their diverse body of work.

After his release in 1899, Ciges wrote for several newspapers in Spain and in France, where he lived on and off as a political exile.⁶ He worked as a translator and wrote several works of fiction as well. Sympathetic to socialism in his youth, he later became convinced that liberal republicanism was the best path for Spain. He sought political office as a republican and was serving as governor-general in the province of Ávila when the insurrection headed by General Francisco Franco erupted on July 18, 1936. Ciges was detained in his home on July 19, jailed, and executed without trial by unidentified groups in a saca (raid) on August 4, 1936.⁷

American readers may discern similarities between Ciges and the muckrakers of the late 1890s and early twentieth century in the United States. Like Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, and their comrades, Ciges was determined to uncover the abuses he observed in institutions that adversely affected the lives of workers in particular. While he was serving as a soldier and before embarking to Cuba, Ciges was ordered to guard anarchist prisoners confined in Montjuic prison in Barcelona. He became acquainted with the workers' movement through those prisoners and even appears to have joined in an unrealized revolutionary plot to raise a battalion against the government at that location.⁸ Again like the muckrakers, he owed a debt to Émile Zola, whose novels of social criticism inspired many contemporaries to follow his example; Ciges explicitly refers to Zola's Rome (1896) in the account of his imprisonment in La Cabaña. In his journalism and in his fiction Ciges leveled his sights on the army, prisons, foreign-owned mining concerns and the Spanish capitalists who colluded with them, the Catholic Church, and political corruption on the national and local level. Like his fellow Spanish journalist and novelist Blasco Ibáñez, he spent much time in jail and in exile for exposing in print the abuses he observed. Unlike Blasco and the American muckrakers, Ciges paid for his ideas and actions with his life.

* * *

Ciges was a young man with ideals and aspirations for social and political justice when he was arrested and taken to La Cabaña prison. As he tells the reader, he emerged a man stripped of his youthful illusions and hopes. Without describing here the process that led him to his later state of mind—his narrative does precisely that—it is useful to review the situation in Cuba in 1895 and his first reactions to it. In the early spring of 1895, Cuba, long regarded as Spain's most valuable colony—the pearl of the Antilles—embarked on the final violent severing of its ties to the motherland. For four centuries Cuba had played an increasingly significant role in the Atlantic colonial system. When the Haitian revolution (1791–1803) effectively removed that sugar colony from competition in the Antilles, Cuba's sugar plantations prospered greatly. Colony and metropole alike reaped benefits from Cuba's continued colonial status. Nevertheless, in the course of the nineteenth century a number of factors combined to convince many inhabitants of the island that annexation to the United States or independence was desirable. After the abolition of slavery in 1886, it was no longer advantageous for wealthy plantation owners to maintain relations with the Peninsula now that Spain's former role in helping to preserve slavery in Cuba was moot. Increasingly, independence appeared to be the solution to Cubans' desire for control over their economy, including greater expansion in the markets of the United States and elsewhere. There was, as well, a pressing need for administrative reform, which was not forthcoming from Spain. By the mid-1890s significant numbers of Cubans were prepared to renew the fight for independence since autonomy was plainly not an option for the Spanish administration or for many Creoles.

The insurrection that began in the spring of 1895 was orchestrated by Cubans in exile, principal among them José Martí, who selected Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo to command the soldiers of the insurgency. Martí was killed at the outset of the conflict, but the war continued, with the Spaniards in the western part of the island working mightily to prevent the insurgents in the eastern part from advancing toward Havana. When General Weyler replaced Martínez Campos in 1896 as captain general in command of Spanish forces, the insurgents seemed to have the upper hand. Weyler took immediate steps to counter their push to the west, the most drastic being the establishment of concentration camps.⁹

Eight months before Ciges was sent to Cuba, he wrote an article urging autonomy for the island. It was an unpopular and even risky position to take at the time. In recognition of possible reprisals, the author signed his article with a pseudonym. Pro Autonomía was published in El País on January 1, 1896, and signed Escipión.¹⁰ The insurgents' rejection of autonomy as the war dragged on—including the kind of administrative autonomy that Ciges favored in his article—along with the possibility of U.S. intervention, among other factors, eventually led Ciges to favor independence for the colony.

When Ciges arrived in Cuba in August 1896 and witnessed the destruction and death described in the opening pages of his narrative, including the harrowing description of the barracks filled with dying reconcentración victims in Mariel, he apparently resolved to write an article exposing Weyler's policy and its consequences. In On Captivity, Ciges implies that he sent his article to a Parisian newspaper, L'Intransigeant, that it was brought to Weyler's attention, and that the general ordered Ciges's arrest and detention for treason. In fact, the article never reached Paris, but rather was intercepted and shown to the general, who then acted against its author. Sylvia Truxa's research clearly establishes that the article Ciges hints was published in L'Intransigeant did not see the light of day in that or any other pro-Cuban independence newspaper in 1896 or 1897.¹¹

Truxa discovered the evidence for her assertions in the personal dossier of Manuel Ciges Aparicio stored in the General Military Archives in Segovia. Among other materials, the dossier contains two letters written by Ciges. The first, dated December 14, 1896, was sent to his friend Juan Vives (whose real name was Mario Vittorio Divizzia), who was under surveillance by the Spanish military because he had enlisted under a false name and nationality. The letter was intercepted. Although Ciges had signed the letter with a pseudonym, circumstantial evidence allowed the military to identify him as its author. The letter clearly indicated that Vives/Divizzia was a liaison between Ciges and Henri Rochefort, director of L'Intransigeant. In the letter Ciges noted that he had written an article for the Parisian paper. As a result of his connection to Vives/Divizzia, the letter/article that he subsequently sent (via Tampa) to Rochefort, undated but probably written at the end of December 1896 and certainly before January 5, 1897, was intercepted and shown to General Weyler. The telegram Weyler sent in response to its contents—the blue paper Ciges mentioned in his account but never saw for himself—was sent on January 6, 1897, and led to Ciges's arrest on that very day and to his detention in La Cabaña the following day. I have included the text of the letter (and my translation of it) as an appendix.

Truxa writes that the military authorities put Ciges in solitary confinement at the outset not because he had published an article critical of Weyler in a Parisian newspaper, but because he was suspected of having contact with insurrectionists. As much as a year later, military authorities were ignorant of any specific information about the contents of the intercepted correspondence or its final destination; in fact, authorities at his military trial acted on the belief that it was a question of a personal letter, not an article meant for the press, a misinterpretation that—as Truxa points out—saved Ciges's life. Ultimately, Ciges was charged not with treason but with injuria al ejército (injurious affront to the army), a crime punishable by twenty-eight months and one day of correctional imprisonment. He was credited with nine months and three weeks of the preventive imprisonment he had already completed. His last five and one-half months of imprisonment took place in Barcelona, not in Cuba. By Ciges's own account, he was pardoned after serving twenty-eight months at the beginning of May 1899.¹²

* * *

The Castillo de los Tres Reyes del Morro, begun in 1589 and completed in 1630, and the Fortaleza de San Carlos de la Cabaña, begun in 1762 and finished in 1774, now comprise the Parque Histórico Militar Morro-Cabaña (Military Historical Park—Morro-Cabaña). Today book fairs, conferences, and exhibitions take place on the nearly adjoining grounds of the two former prisons at the eastern entrance to Havana Bay where for hundreds of years prisoners suffered and died. According to Ciges, when he entered La Cabaña the majority of the military prisoners were soldiers brought to fight in Cuba from Spanish prisons and penitentiaries (part II, chapter III). The total number of prisoners numbered about fifteen hundred men.¹³

The gallery of prisoner portraits that Ciges presents begins with a Spanish soldier sent to fight in Cuba from one of the disciplinary brigades. He ended up in La Cabaña because he stabbed the sergeant in his company. Other reasons for confining military personnel included drunkenness, desertion, insubordination, and other, often minor offenses or infractions. Pablo de la Concepción referred to a Spanish captain who guarded him in El Morro; guard duty was the soldier's punishment for having twice fallen into the hands of insurgent general Máximo Gómez.¹⁴ Ciges noted that when the Spaniards left Cuba there were prisoners who had been held in La Cabaña for four years but were never informed of the charges against them.

Ciges's representations of his fellow prisoners generally require little or no explanation. There are two exceptions. The reader may wonder at the portrait of the ñáñigo with whom Ciges shared a cell for a few hours at the beginning of his captivity. Ñáñigos were members of secret male mutual-aid societies. Though they were for the most part black, white men were admitted as well in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Unlike the Cuban insurgent Pablo de la Concepción, who deeply admired the mulatto separatist Juan Gualberto Gómez and expressed respect for black insurgents and some ñañigos as well, Ciges conveyed the scorn and repugnance felt by many Spaniards for blacks at the time; he referred, for example, to the stench (tufillo) that the black man exuded, so typical, he wrote, of members of his race.¹⁵ Pablo de la Concepción noted that twenty-one ñañigos were imprisoned at Acho castle in Ceuta when he was confined there. At first, he says, they were treated poorly, but as their guards came to know them, their treatment improved. They all survived, and when they left the prison they sang a song that persuaded the author that their spirits had not been broken because their inner resources were superior to their misfortune.¹⁶

Ciges's description of the ñáñigo who briefly shared his cell depicts a black man whose speech reflected a newly arrived African's difficulty in pronouncing r's in certain positions (an l was often substituted for the r) and the Castilian c before i and e (pronounced as an s rather than as th). Blacks on the Spanish stage during this period (1895–98) were similarly represented as speaking Castilian imperfectly, and were deliberately depicted as comical because of this perceived failure.¹⁷ Any attempt to translate the black man's speech in Ciges's account by transferring his use of l instead of r into English would result in his sounding more Chinese than African. It would also be misleading to translate his speech as if he were a stereotypical nineteenth-century Negro from the American South, but it is important to realize that for a Spanish audience the effect caused by his mispronunciation would have been similar to that experienced by a white American on reading or hearing the speech of a fictional or stage Negro. It signaled inferiority even when, ostensibly, it was meant to be humorous.

Ciges devotes considerable space to the anarchist inmate whom he refers to as B. This man explains that he has been sent to La Cabaña because of his suspected complicity in an anarchist plot to blow up the Governor-General's Palace in Havana. Cecilio Alonso reviews the information concerning an alleged plot to carry out such an act in the winter of 1897 as reported by contemporary newspapers such as La Lucha in Havana and La Correspondencia de España, La Époco, and El Liberal in Spain.¹⁸ Alonso does not attempt to identify the anarchist in Ciges's text, although he provides the names of the suspects provided by the newspapers he cites. It is possible that Ciges's portrayal of B is not strictly based on the real life of one of the anarchists involved in the plot. Rather, it seems intended as a satirical take on his subject's approach to life, which the author finds more comical than threatening. B is engaging and colorful, but his anarchist acts are poorly conceived and ineffective. On the other hand, B's rather ambiguous position on the insurrection does reflect the lack of consensus among anarchists in Europe and in the Americas regarding the political, social, and economic validity of the revolt against Spain as weighed against anarchist principles. In accord with those principles, there was no reason to expect justice for workers from a Cuban government any more than justice had been served by the Spanish regime. Yet, for some anarchists who did support the struggle, the overthrow of an oppressive regime could be viewed as a hopeful step toward the eventual establishment of justice.¹⁹

Ciges's principal concern in his narrative is the lack of control in his prison, which led to the countenancing of alcohol, gambling, weapons, fighting, and sexual predation. What Ciges initially considered a criminal abdication of control specifically in La Cabaña he came to understand