1898: U.S. fleet bombing on Santiago de Cuba

The naval bombing to Santiago de Cuba on May 31, 1898, 125 years ago, as part of the warlike actions of the Spanish-Cuban-American war, is a real evidence of the first actions in the Island of the Yankee intervention, which frustrated the Marti's ideal of achieving the independence with the 1895-1898 conflict.

The U.S. troops had as first target the Spanish ship Cristobal Colon, without hitting it; the projectiles exploded in civilian targets with great noise and commotion for the city, which had not been attacked by sea since the time of the corsairs and pirates, so many inhabitants tried to get out of the reach of the aggression at any cost.

The bombardments had no major military results, although they sowed fear among the civilian population. Testimonies have continued to our days through the discovery of unexploded shells, found in the vicinity of Santiago de Cuba.

There is a revelation on those naval cannons, contributed by an observer of the war of the Russian tsar before the General Staff of that country, whose pseudonym is known as "Ermalov", as he signed in his report to the emperor of the Kremlin on what he saw in Cuba and that was made public in 1899 by the Russian court.

The agent in question wrote that "(...) The war began with a blockade of Havana and a sector of the northern coast of Cuba, from Cardenas to Bahia Honda, as well as with the capture of Spanish merchant ships although (...) all these cannonades made it clear that the naval artillery is useless and impotent to silence the coastal artillery.

It seems that the first option for the invasion of the American army would be through the western region to take Havana and the port of Mariel, but espionage could show the difficulties of a landing in these heavily defended regions.

The effectiveness of those defenses was proven during the night of June 13, 1898 by the crew of the USS Montgomery, when it got too close to the 10 huge pieces of 305, 280 and 150 mm that defended the Loma de Taganana, where the Hotel Nacional stands today, and had to retreat, hit by the Spanish fire.

On the contrary, the military situation in the region of Santiago de Cuba was different and assured the invaders greater possibilities of success, since it was poorly defended by obsolete naval batteries, some of them made of bronze from the 18th century, which also contrasted with the presence of the main forces of the Liberation Army that surrounded the city from the mountainous foothills and assured the American landing.

In addition, with the entry and bottling up of the antiquated and inferior Spanish Squadron of Admiral Pascual Cervera in the bay of Santiago de Cuba, its destruction meant a shot at the target for the United States fleet when they went out to the open sea, thus assuring the defeat of the naval and land forces of the colonialist forces in that region, as it happened later on.

To this day, there are testimonies of archeological findings of unexploded shells found in the vicinity of Santiago de Cuba, which bring to mind that the salvos with which the U.S. government started its first imperialist war were also fired in that region.