The Maine, the Romney and the Threads of Conspiracy in Cuba

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.7.2.0200
• Published date: 01 December 2015
• Date: 01 December 2015
• Pages: 200-211
• Author: Paul Ryer
• Subject Matter: Cuba,history,conspiracy,narrative,empire

InternatIonal Journal of Cuban StudIeS 7.2 WInter 2015

ACADEMIC ARTICLES

THE MAINE, THE ROMNEY AND THE

THREADS OF CONSPIRACY IN CUBA

Paul Ryer

University of California, Riverside, USA

Abstract

What constitutes a conspiracy, and what are the stakes of popular theories of conspiracy?

This article addresses these questions through an ethno-historical examination of

narratives about conspiracies endured and posited by Cuban people. Long before the

Revolution in 1959, continuing through the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, numerous

assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, and onward to recent claims of biological

warfare orchestrated by the government of the US, conspiracy theories have circulated

widely in Cuba and its diasporic enclaves. Drawing on ethnographic and historical

data, the article embeds present-day narratives of conspiracy in the longer-run history

of Cuban conspiracy theories such as those initially presented in the case of the USS

Maine and its nineteenth-century precursors, notably including the stationing of the

HMS Romney in Havana harbour, and the so-called conspiracy of La Escalera in 1844. It

argues, ultimately, that these tales are always morality tales, counterposing nefarious

agents of an illegitimate external power to the imagined community of those (including

the narrator’s self and audience) thus disenfranchised. In that sense, then, the truth

value of any particular account of conspiracy is irrelevant to the larger truth of Empire.

Keywords: Cuba, history, conspiracy, narrative, empire

‘Americans’, Joan Didion writes, reporting on an incredulous, baffled critique of

US society by the Cuban exile enclave in Miami, are ‘a people who could live and

die without ever understanding those nuances of conspiracy and allegiance on

which, in the Cuban view, the world turn[s]’ (Didion 1987: 78). Similarly within

the Republic of Cuba itself; hardly a day seems to pass in Havana without some

story of intrigue and machination, whether over the death of Che, the delayed

arrival of the monthly egg ration or as a quite possibly related explanation of the