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By CHARLES J. HANLEY
.c The Associated Press
AP Special
Correspondent
HAVANA (AP) -
The lightning and thunder of a huge explosion ripped through the still darkness,
shattering windows, knocking doors off hinges, sending the panicked people of
Havana streaming down toward the waterfront.
After the echoes died, the destruction of the USS Maine that February night
did one more thing as well: It propelled a new player, an assertive America,
onto the road to global power.
Today, 100 years later, the oily black waters of Havana harbor ebb and flow
over the spot where the U.S. battleship exploded and sank, claiming the lives of
267 crewmen. Tiny ferries chug past, as they did then. Rusting old freighters
ride at anchor.
And just as on the moonless night of Feb. 15, 1898, dark suspicions and
uncertainties still cling to the Maine.
At Havana's City Museum, Nora Benitez, a custodian of photographs, equipment
and other artifacts of the Maine, sets out the standard Cuban view: That the
warship was destroyed in a cold-blooded American conspiracy.
"The United States was behind the explosion,'' she insists. "We've
always known it was a pretext the United States used to intervene in Cuba.''
A Cuban naval historian, Gustavo Placer Cervera, more in touch with
technical analyses of what happened that night, subscribes to the "Rickover
report'' - the conclusion that the Maine explosion was probably an accident, not
sabotage.
But what's more important, says the retired navy commander, is that the U.S.
government "manipulated and used the explosion.
The mystery of the Maine, spark to the Spanish-American War, reaches back to
the 19th century. But on this 100th anniversary it's clear it will feed mistrust
between nations well into the 21st.
When the 319-foot-long warship, armed with 10-inch guns, sailed into Havana
harbor on Jan. 25, 1898, it was an unwelcome guest.
Spanish colonial authorities had been notified of its "friendly'' visit
only hours before. But trying to block it would have been dangerously
provocative. Relations were bad enough between Madrid and Washington.
The U.S. government was pressuring Spain to pull out of Cuba, where
guerrillas were fighting an independence war. Americans were outraged at Spanish
atrocities. Some in Washington - and Cuba - favored U.S. annexation of the sugar
island.
President William McKinley ordered the battleship to Havana to intimidate
hard-liners in the Spanish military who were resisting Spain's autonomy plan for
Cuba. These officers were furious. Ashore in Havana, the Maine's captain,
Charles D. Sigsbee, was handed an anti-American leaflet on which someone had
scrawled, "Watch out for your ship!''
On Feb. 15, most of the 328 enlisted crewmen retired after 9 p.m. to their
hammocks in the forward quarters. Twenty-two officers were in aft cabins or at
their posts.
At 9:40 p.m., those in the rear felt and then heard the explosion, a "bursting,
rending and crashing roar,'' as Sigsbee later called it. It was tremendous -
experts estimated 10,000 to 20,000 pounds of powder in forward ammunition
magazines blew up.
Towering flames shot into the sky, along with bits of metal deck, guns, men
and pieces of men. The forward third of the ship was transformed into mangled,
sunken wreckage. The aft settled to the muddy bottom.
Back in America, a sensationalist press decided a Spanish mine had destroyed
the ship - even though Spain wanted to avoid war at all costs. "The Warship
Maine Was Split In Two By An Enemy's Secret Infernal Machine!'' the New York
Journal screamed.
The U.S. Navy was not so sure.
It convened a court of inquiry in Havana, four officers who relied on what
the Maine's officers and Navy divers, working in primitive helmets in the inky
murk, could tell them.
The court focused on the hull's steel keel, bent upward in an inverted "V.''
Its report, on March 21, 1898, concluded there were two explosions: The
explosion of a mine beneath the hull that blew the keel upward, and the
resulting detonation of the powder stored above.
It said it had no evidence fixing responsibility. But for America's yellow
press and congressional jingoes, there was no question it was the "perfidious''
Spaniards. "Remember the Maine!'' was the slogan on millions of American
lips, emblazoned across shop windows, sung by children, printed on candies and
women's hair ribbons.
By late April, U.S. forces were at war with Spain, and in just three months
they seized the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico. America, suddenly, was an
Asian and Caribbean colonial power.
Cuban rebels, believing they were near victory and fearing U.S. annexation,
had not wanted American intervention. Now an independent Cuba came under U.S.
domination, in a relationship that didn't end until Fidel Castro's revolution
six decades later.
In 1911, because the sunken Maine was a navigation hazard, and 70 men's
remains were still trapped in the hulk, U.S. military engineers built a
cofferdam around the wreck, water was pumped out, remains were recovered, and
the rear two-thirds of the ship was refloated, towed to sea and sunk again.
The "dewatering'' allowed the Navy to photograph the wreckage in
detail, and a new court of inquiry was convened. It rejected the 1898 finding on
the inverted "V,'' saying that was caused by the internal explosion.
Instead, it focused on a hull bottom plate bent inward - damaged, the court
held, by an exploding external mine.
So the record stood for decades, until U.S. Adm. Hyman G. Rickover, "father
of the nuclear Navy,'' took an interest and put experts to work on the Maine
case, using more sophisticated analysis of the old photos.
Their 1976 report concluded the explosion was almost certainly caused by
spontaneous combustion of coal in a bunker abutting a powder magazine. Such coal
fires were commonplace in that day. They said a mine would have caused more
damage to the inward-bent plate.
But they acknowledged, "A simple explanation is not to be found.''
In 1995, Smithsonian Institution Press published a book, "Remembering
the Maine,'' by Peggy and Harold Samuels, pointing up flaws in the Rickover
analysis and concluding that Spanish fanatics had set off a mine. It cited no
new hard evidence, but uncorroborated reports of the time about plots against
the ship.
In Spain, opinion is also divided. The Spanish navy approvingly reprinted
the Rickover study, but a Spanish historical journal has pointed a finger at
Cuban saboteurs.
Most recently, the National Geographic Society commissioned a computer
modeling study of the coal-fire and mine theories, and found both feasible. "The
case remains open,'' National Geographic says in its February issue.
The 40-foot-high columns of Havana's Maine Monument rise forlornly over the
Malecon, the city's seaside boulevard. Broken beer bottles litter its derelict
fountain.
The pedestal on top has been bare since Castroites pulled down the "arrogant''
American eagle in 1961. A new plaque describes the dead sailors as victims of "imperialist
greed in its effort to take over the island of Cuba.''
"They pretended that intervention on behalf of Cuba was a big deal, but
it was just to take over Cuba's resources,'' said Benitez, the City Museum
curator.
Rickover, who died in 1986, concluded that with better investigative work in
1898, "war might have been avoided.'' Placer is not so sure.
The Havana scholar has labored long hours meticulously reviewing century-old
U.S. Navy orders and U.S. diplomatic messages. He says the war plans, the
inertia, all were headed toward collision with Spain.
"The explosion of the Maine only accelerated things,'' he said.
And what happened that windless tropical night 100 Februarys ago? When we
remember the Maine, what are we remembering?
"We'll never know,'' the Cuban historian said. "All we have are
hypotheses. We cannot prove them. We will never prove them.''
AP-NY-02-07-98 1222EST |