![]() ![]() Making a call to arms before Congress, President William McKinley said of the policy of reconcentración: “It was not civilized warfare. By the time the USS Maine sank in Havana harbor in February 1898, the United States was already primed to go to war. newspapers reported on Spain’s brutality, Americans shipped millions of pounds of cornmeal, potatoes, peas, rice, beans, quinine, condensed milk, and other staples to the starving peasants, with railways offering to carry the goods to coastal ports free of charge. With that shift, a new institution came into being, and the phrase “concentration camps” entered the world. But it was not until the technology of barbed wire and automatic weapons that a small guard force could impose mass detention. Forced labor had existed for centuries around the world, and the parallel institutions of Native American reservations and Spanish missions set the stage for relocating vulnerable residents away from their homes and forcing them to stay elsewhere. No mass executions were necessary horrific living conditions and lack of food eventually took the lives of some 150,000 people. “If he cannot make successful war upon the insurgents,” wrote The New York Times in 1896, “he can make war upon the unarmed population of Cuba.”Ĭivilians were forced, on penalty of death, to move into these encampments, and within a year the island held tens of thousands of dead or dying reconcentrados, who were lionized as martyrs in U.S. Spain recalled Martínez Campos, and in his place sent general Valeriano Weyler, nicknamed “the Butcher.” There was little doubt about what the results would be. ![]() “I cannot,” he wrote, “as the representative of a civilized nation, be the first to give the example of cruelty and intransigence.” He wrote to Spain and offered to surrender his post rather than impose the measures he had laid out as necessary. And so Martínez Campos could not bring himself to launch the process of reconcentración against an enemy he saw as honorable. To isolate rebels from the peasants who sometimes fed or sheltered them, he thought, it would be necessary to relocate hundreds of thousands of rural inhabitants into Spanish-held cities behind barbed wire, a strategy he called reconcentración.īut the rebels had shown mercy to the Spanish wounded and had returned prisoners of war unharmed. After years of fighting with Cuban rebels, Arsenio Martínez Campos, the governor-general of the island, wrote to the Spanish prime minister in 1895 to say that he believed the only path to victory lay in inflicting new cruelties on civilians and fighters alike. The earliest modern experiment in detaining groups of civilians without trial was launched by two generals: one who refused to bring camps into the world, and one who did not.īattles had raged off and on for decades over Cuba’s desire for independence from Spain. Before the first prisoner entered the Soviet Gulag, before “Arbeit macht frei” appeared on the gates of Auschwitz, before the 20th century had even begun, concentration camps found their first home in the cities and towns of Cuba. ![]()
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