William Marvel: In Praise of Doubt

My father spent the final years of his naval career on submarines and sub tenders, so the first home I remember with much clarity is Key West. Half a century before I lived there, the people of that city had erected a monument to the sailors who died on the USS Maine in Havana Harbor in 1898; Key West was that battleship's home port, and the survivors were sent to the naval hospital there. My most vivid recollections of the island include fire ants, the fear of barracudas, parental admonitions not to stand beneath coconut-laden palms, and that bronze statue of a 19th-century sailor. We lived in Sigsbee Park, named after the captain of the Maine.

In the early 1950s the explosion that sank the Maine was still attributed to sabotage undertaken by or on behalf of the Spanish colonial government of Cuba. Cuban peasants had been fighting their Spanish overlords for years by 1898, and American imperialists had been hoping to use such courageous peasant resistance as an excuse to intervene and appropriate Cuba for the United States. Accommodating American newspapers aided that jingoistic ambition with apocryphal tales of insults to U.S. citizens, hoping to enlist readers' sympathy for a war of "liberation."