Cuba in War Time

Richard Harding Davis arrived in Cuba in 1896 as a war correspondent, and what he found there changed American journalism. This book is his electrifying firsthand account of the island's war for independence from Spanish rule. Davis takes readers into the heart of the conflict: the fortified camps where Spanish soldiers held their ground, the countryside where Cuban insurgents fought with almost nothing, and the towns filled with pacíficos, civilians torn from their homes and herded into concentration camps by Spanish forces. He describes the landscape with a novelist's eye, the brutal logic of military occupation, and the human cost of empire. Illustrated by Frederic Remington, whose drawings bring the violence vividly to life, this account helped stir American public opinion toward intervention. This is journalism that reads like literature, dispatched from a place where the rules of civilized warfare had been suspended. Davis witnessed a colonial war in all its desperation and moral complexity, and he reported it with the precision and flair that made him the most famous war correspondent of his generation.