President Trump's fandango with Denmark and Venezuela eerily recalls journalist H.L.Mencken's account of how the naughty banana Republicans of the Spanish Main misbehaved on the eve of World War I, a scene he covered for The Baltimore Post in 1917, and turned into this New Yorker essay in 1942:
GORE IN THE CARIBBEES
No reporter of my generation, whatever his
genius, ever really rated spats and a walking-stick un-
til he had covered both a lynching and a revolution.
The first, by the ill-favor of the gods, I always missed,
usually by an inch. Once, in the charming town of
Springeld, Mo. the Paris & Gomorrah of the Ozarks,
I was at dinner at the time with the editor of the
Springfield Leader, along with my colleagues of
the Baltimore Sunpapers. When the alarm reached us
we abandoned our victuals instantly, and leaped and
galloped downtown to the jail. By the time we got
there, though it was in less than three minutes, the cops
had loaded the candidate—he was a white man—into
their hurry-wagon and made off for Kansas City, and
the lynching mob had been reduced to a hundred or so
half-grown youths, a couple of pedlars selling hot-dogs
and American flags, and a squawking herd of fasci-
nated but disappointed children.
I had rather better luck with revolutions, though I
covered only one, and that one I walked into by a sort
of accident. The year was 1917 and I was returning
from a whiff of World War I in a Spanish ship that had
sailed from La Corua, Spain, ten days before and it
was at the moment, somewhat in the maze of the
Bahamas hoping, eventually, to get to Havana but a
wireless reached it nevertheless, and that wireless was
directed to me and came from the paper in
Baltimore.
It said, in brief, that a revolution had broken out in Cuba,
that both sides were doing such rough lying that no one
north of the Straits of Florida could make out what it
was about, and that a series of succinct and illuminating
dispatches describing its issues and personalities would
be appreciated. I wirelessed back that the wishes of my
superiors were commands, and sent another wireless to a
friend in Havana, Captain Asmus Leonhard, marine
superintendent of the Munson Line, saying that I itched
to see him the instant my ship made port.
Captain Leonhard was a Dane of enormous knowledge
but parsimonious speech, and I had a high opinion of
his sagacity. He knew everyone worth knowing in Latin
America, and thousands who were not, and his estimates
of them seldom took more than three words. “A burglar,”
he would say, characterizing a general played up by all
the North American newspapers as the greatest trans-Rio
Grande hero since Bolivar, or “a goddam fraud,” alluding
to a new president of Colombia, El Salvador or Santo
Domingo, and that was all. His reply to my wireless was
in his usual manner. It said: “Sure.”
When the Spanish ship, after groping about for two
or three days in Exuma Sound, the North-East Provi-
dence Channel, the Tongue of Ocean and various other
strangely-named Bahaman waterways, finally made
Havana and passed the Morro, a smart young mulatto
in Captain Leonhard's launch put out from shore, took
me aboard his craft, and whisked me through the cus-
toms. The captain himself was waiting in front of the
Pasaje Hotel in the Prado, eating a plate of Spanish
bean-soup and simultaneously smoking a cigar.
“The issues in the revolution," he said, tackling the
business in hand at once, “are simple. Menocal,
who calls himself a Conservative, is president, and
Iosé Miguel Gomez, who used to be president and calls
himself a Liberal, wants to make a come-back. That is
the whole story. Iosé Miguel says that when Menocal
was reelected last year the so-called Liberals were
chased away from the so-called polls by the so-called
army. On the other hand, Menocal says that Iosé Miguel
is a porch-climber and ought to be chased out of the is-
land. Both are right."
It seemed clear enough, and I prepared to write a
dispatch at once, but Captain Leonhard suggested that
perhaps it might be a good idea for me to see Menocal
rst, and hear the oicial version in full. We were at the
palace in three minutes, and found it swarming with
dignitaries. Half of them were army officers in uniform,
with swords, and the other half were functionaries of
the secretariat. They pranced and roared all over the
place, and at intervals of a few seconds more ofcers
would dash up in motor-cars and muscle and whoop
their way into the president's oice. These last, ex-
plained Captain Leonhard, were couriers from the
front, for Iosé Miguel, having taken to the bush, was
even now surrounded down in Santa Clara province,
and there were high hopes that he would be nabbed
anon. Despite all the hurly-burly it took only minutes
for the captain to get me an audience with el presi-
dente. I found His Excellency calm and amiable. He
spoke English fluently, and was far from reticent. Iosé
Miguel, he said, was a end in human form who hoped
by his treasons to provoke American intervention, and
so upset the current freely-chosen &impeccably virtuous
government. This foul plot would fail. The gallant
Cuban army, which had never lost either a battle
or a war, had the traitor cornered, and within a few
days he would be chained up among the lizards in the
fortress of La Caba, waiting for the ring-squad and
trying in vain to make his peace with God.
So saying, el presidente bowed me out, at the same
time offering to put a motor-car and a secretary at my
disposal. It seemed a favorable time to write my dis-
patch, but Captain Leonhard stayed me. “First,” he said,
“you had better hear what the revolutionists have to
say.” “The revolutionists!” I exclaimed. “I thought they
were out in Santa Clara, surrounded by the army.”
“Some are,” said the captain, “but some ain’t. Let us
take a hack.” S0 we took a hack and were presently
worming our way down the narrow street called
Obispo. The captain called a halt in front of a bank, and
we got out. “I’ll wait here in the bank," he said, “and
you go upstairs to Room 309. Ask for Dr. i”and he
whispered a name. “Who is this Dr. —?” I whispered
back. “He is the head of the revolutionary junta,” re-
plied the captain. “Mention my name, and he will tell
you all about it.”
I followed orders, and was soon closeted with the
doctor—a very tall, very slim old man with a straggling
beard and skin the color of cement. While we gabbled
various persons rushed in and out of his office, most of
them carrying papers which they slapped upon his desk.
In a corner a young Cuban girl of considerable sight-
liness banged away at a typewriter. The doctor, like el
presidente, spoke excellent English, and appeared to
be in ebullient spirits. He had trustworthy agents, he
gave me to understand, in the palace, some of them in
high ofce. He knew what was going on in the Ameri-
can embassy. He got carbons of all official telegrams
from the front. The progress of events there, he said,
was extremely favorable to the cause of reform. Iosé
Miguel, though somewhat bulky for eld service, was
a military genius comparable to Ioffre or Hindenburg,
or even to Hannibal or Alexander, and would soon be
making monkeys of the generals of the army. As for
Menocal, he was a end in human form who hoped
to provoke American intervention, and thereby make
his corrupt and abominable regime secure.
All this naturally struck me as somewhat unusual,
though as a newspaper reporter I was supposed to be
incapable of surprise. Here, in the very heart and giz-
zard of Havana, within sight and hearing of thousands,
the revolutionists were maintaining what amounted to
open headquarters, and their boss wizard was talking
freely, and indeed in a loud voice, to a stranger whose
only introduction had been, so to speak, to ask for ]oe.
I ventured to inquire of the doctor if there were not
some danger that his gold-sh globe of a hideaway
would be discovered. “Not much,” he said. “The army
is hunting for us, but the army is so stupid as to be vir-
tually idiotic. The police know where we are, but they
believe we are going to win, and want to keep their jobs
afterward.” From this condence the doctor proceeded
to boasting. “In ten days,” he said, “we’ll have Menocal
jugged in La Cabaa. Shoot him? No; it would be too
expensive. The New York banks that run him have
plenty of money. If we let him live they will come
across.”
When I rejoined the captain downstairs I suggested
again that it was high time for me to begin composing
my dispatch, and this time he agreed. More, he hauled
me down to the cable ofce, only a block or two away,
and there left me. “If you get into trouble,” he said,
“call me up at the Pasaje. I'll be taking my nap, but
the clerk will wake me if you need me.” I found the
cable oice very comfortable and even luxurious. There
were plenty of desks and typewriters, and when I an-
nounced myself I was invited to make myself free of
them. Moreover, as I sat down and began to unlimber
my prose a large brass spittoon was wheeled up beside
me, apparently as a friendly concession to my nation-
ality. At other desks a number of other gentlemen
were in labor, and I recognized them at once as col-
leagues, for a newspaper reporter can always spot an-
other, just as a Freemason can spot a Freemason, or a
detective a detective. But I didn’t know any of them,
and fell to work without speaking to them.
When my dispatch was finished I took it to the window
, and was informed politely that it would have to be
submitted to the censor, who occupied, it appeared, a
room in the rear.
The censor turned out to be a young Cuban whose
English was quite as good as Menocal's or the doctor’s,
but unhappily he had rules to follow, and I soon found
that they were very onerous. While I palavered with him
several of the colleagues came up with copy in their
hands, and in two minutes an enormous debate was in
progress. He was sworn, I soon gathered, to cut out
everything even remotely resembling a fact. No names.
No dates. Worse, no conjectures, prognostications,
divinations. The colleagues, thus robbed of their habit-
ual provender and full of outrage, put up a dreadful up-
roar, but the censor stood his ground, and presently I
slipped away and called up Captain Leonhard. My re-
spect for his influence was higher than ever now, and it
had occurred to me that the revolutionists up the street
might have a private cable, and that if they had he
would undoubtedly be free of it. But when, in response
to his order, I met him in front of the Pasaje, he said
nothing about a cable, but heaved me instead into a
hack. In ten minutes we were aboard an American ship
just about to cast off from a wharf down in the region
of the customs-house, and he was introducing me to
one of the mates. “Tell him what to do,” he said,
“and he will do it.” I told the mate to le my dispatch
the instant his ship docked at Key West, he nodded si-
lently and put the copy into an inside pocket, and that
was that. Then the siren sounded and the captain and I
returned to the pier.
It all seemed so facile that I became somewhat un-
easy. Could the mate be trusted? The captain assured
me that he could. But what of the ship? Certainly it
did not look t for wrestling with the notorious swells
of the Straits of Florida. Its lines suggested that it had
started out in life as an excursion boat on the Hudson,
6%Gore in the Coribbees
and it was plainly in the last stages of decrepitude. I
knew that the run to Key West was rather more than a
hundred miles, and my guess, imparted to the captain,
was that no such craft could make it in less than forty-
eight hours. But the captain only laughed. “That old
hulk," he said, “is the fastest ship in the Caribbean. If
it doesn’t hit a log or break in two it will make Key
West in ve and a half hours.” He was right as usual,
for that night, just as I was turning in at the Pasaje I
received a cable from the Szmpaper saying that my trea-
tise on the revolution had begun to run, and was very
illuminating and high-toned stuff.
Thereafter, I unloaded all my dissertations in the
same manner. Every afternoon I would divert attention
by waiting on the censor and ling a dispatch so full of
contraband that I knew he would never send it, and
then I would go down to the wharf and look up the
mate. On the fourth day he was non est and I was in a
panic, for the captain had gone on a business trip into
Pinar del Rio and no one else could help me. But just
as the lines were being cast off I caught sight of a likely-
looking Americano standing at the gangway and
decided to throw myself upon his Christian charity.
He responded readily, and my dispatch went through
As usual. Thereafter, though the mate never showed up
again—I heard later that he was sick in Key West—-I al-
ways managed to find an accommodating passenger.
Meanwhile, the censor’s copy-hook accumulated a ne
crop of my rejected cablegrams, and mixed with them
were scores by the colleagues. Every time I went to the
cable ofce I found the whole corps raising hell, and
threatening all sorts of reprisals and revenges. But they
seldom got anything through save the communiqués
that issued from the palace at hourly intervals.
These communiqués were prepared by a large staff
of press-agents, and were not only couched in extremely
florid words but ran to great lengths. I had just come
from Berlin, where all that the German General Staff
had to say every day, though war was raging on two
fronts, was commonly put into no more than 300 words,
so this Latin exuberance rather astonished me. But the
stuff made gaudy reading, and I sent a lot of it to the
Sun paper by mail, for the entertainment &instruction
of the gentlemen of the copy-desk.
The Cuban mails, of course, were censored like the cable,
but the same Americano who carried my dispatch to
Key West was always willing to mail a few long
envelopes at the same place. Meanwhile, I hung about
the palace, and picked up enough off-record gossip to
give my dispatches a pleasant air of verisimilitude,
soothing to editors if not to readers. Also, I made daily
visits to the headquarters of the revolutionists, and
there got a lot of information, some of it sound, to the
same end. In three days, such is the quick grasp of the
reportorial mind, I knew all the ins and outs of the
revolution,‘ and in a week I was t to write a history of
Cuban politics from the days of Diego Velézquez. I
was, of course, younger then than I am now, and re-
porters today are not what they used to be, but into
that we need not go.
After a week it began to be plain, even on the evidence
supplied by the revolutionists, that the uprising was
making heavy weather of it, and when, a day or two
later, the palace press-agents announced, in 8,000 words,
that ]osé Miguel Gomez was about to be taken, I joined
the colleagues in believing it. We all demanded, of course,
to be let in on the final scene, and after a long series of
conferences, with speeches by Menocal, half a dozen high
army officers, all the press-agents and most of the
correspondents , it was so ordered.
According to both the palace and the revolutionists, the
front was down at Placetas in Santa Clara, 180 miles away,
but even in those days there were plenty of Fords in
Havana, and it was arranged that a fleet of them should
start out the next morning, loaded with correspondents,
typewriters and bottled beer.
Unhappily, the trip was never made, for at the precise
moment the order for it was being issued a dashing colo-
nel in Santa Clara was leading his men in a grand assault
upon José Miguel, and after ten minutes of terrific and
deafening yells the Cuban Hindenburg hoisted his
shirt upon the tip of his sword and surrendered.
He did not have to take his shirt o for the purpose: it was al-
ready hanging upon a guava bush, for he had been pre-
paring for a siesta in his hammock. Why he did not
know of the projected attack I could never find out, for
he was held incommunicado in La Cabana until I left
Cuba, and neither the palace nor the revolutionists
seemed willing to discuss the subject.
The palace press-agents, you may be sure, spit on
their hands when they heard the news, and turned out
a series of communiques perhaps unsurpassed in the
history of war.
Their hot, lascivious rhetoric was still flowing three o
r four days later, long after poor Jose Miguel was safely
jugged among the lizards and scorpions. I recall one canto
of five or six thousand words that included a minute autopsy
on the strategy and tactics of the final battle, written by a
gifted military pathologist on the staff of the victorious colonel.
He described every move in the stealthy approach to Jose
Miguel in the minutest detail, and pitched his analysis in
highly graphic and even blood-curdling terms. More
than once, it appeared, the whole operation was in dire
peril, and a false step might have wrecked it, and
thereby delivered Cuba to the wolves. Indeed, it might
have been baled at its very apex and apogee if only
José Miguel had had his shirt on. As it was, he could
not, according to Latin notions of decorum, lead his
men, and in consequence they skedaddled, and he him-
self was forced to yield his sword to the agents of the
New York banks.
The night of the victory was a great night in Havana,
and especially at the palace. President Menocal kept
open house in the most literal sense: his office door was
wide open and anyone was free to rush in and hug him.
Thousands did so, including scores of officers arriving
home from the front. Some of these officers were in-
dubitably Caucasians, but a great many were of darker
shades, including saddle-brown and coffin-black. As they
leaped out of their Fords in front of the palace the
bystanders fell upon them with patriotic gloats & gurgles,
and kissed them on both cheeks. Then they struggled up
the grand staircase to el presidente’s reception-room, and
were kissed again by the superior public there assembled
Finally, they leaped into the inner office, and fell to kissing
His Excellency and to being kissed by him. It was an
exhilarating show, but full of strangeness to a Nordic.
I observed two things especially. The first was that, for all
the uproar, no one was drunk. The other was that the cops
beat up no one. José Miguel was brought to Havana the next
morning, chained up in a hearse, and the palace press-agents
announced in a series of ten or fifteen communiques
that he would be tried during the afternoon, and shot
at sunrise the day following. The colleagues, robbed of
their chance to see his capture, now applied for permis-
sion to see him put to death, and somewhat to their sur-
prise it was granted readily. He was to be turned off, it
appeared, at 6 a.m. promptly, so they were asked to be
at the gate of La Cabana an hour earlier. Most of them
were on hand, but the sentry on watch refused to let
them in, and after half an hour’s wrangle a young
officer came out and said that the execution had been post-
poned until the next day.
But the next day it was put off again, and again the next,
and after three or four days no more colleagues showed
up at the gate. It was then announced by the palace literati
that President Menocal had commuted the sentence to solitary
confinement for life in a dungeon on the Cayos de las Doce
Leguas off the south coast, where the mosquitoes were.
as large as bullfrogs, along with confiscation of all the
culprit’s property, whether real, personal or mixed, and
the perpetual loss of his civil rights, such as they were.
But even this turned out to be only tall talk, for
President Menocal was a very humane man, and pretty
soon he reduced ]ose' Miguel's sentence to fifty years,
and then to fifteen, and then to six, and then to two.
Soon after that he wiped out the jugging altogether,
and substituted a fine first of $1,000,000, then of $250,-
000, and then of $50,000. The common belief was that
José Miguel was enormously rich, but this was found
to be an exaggeration. When I left Cuba he was still
protesting that the last and lowest fine was far beyond
his means, and in the end, I believe, he was let off with
the confiscation of his yacht, a small craft then laid up
with engine trouble. When he died in I921 he had re-
sumed his old place among the acknowledged heroes of
his country. Twenty years later Menocal joined him i
