Fervor in Cuban boy's custody case recalls 100-year-old episode in interventionist journalism

By W. Joseph Campbell
Special to freedomforum.org

01.11.00

Printer-friendly page

	From the Fourth Estate journalism trade journal in 1897, showing Karl Decker, correspondent who led Cisneros jailbreak in Havana.

The fervor, intensity and weeks-long duration of the custody battle over Elián González, the 6-year-old Cuban refugee plucked from the sea in late November, recalls the fervor, intensity and duration of a Cuban case a little more than 100 years ago. That case ended in one of the most stunning examples ever of participatory journalism in the United States.

The struggle for custody of Elián, whose mother drowned in the attempt to flee Cuba, has ignited passions — or what the Miami Herald has called "mania" — on each side of the Florida straits. In the Little Havana section of Miami, the boy "is a martyr in the making," as supporters seek to block his return to his father in Cuba, The New York Times has reported. The Christian Science Monitor has likened the case to "a political football for the U.S.-Cuban cold war."

No less a "martyr in the making," no less a "political football," was 19-year-old Evangelina Cosio y Cisneros, whose jailing in Havana in 1897 became a cause célčbre in the New York Journal, the flagship of William Randolph Hearst and foremost example of the "yellow journalism" flourishing at the time.

"The Cuban girl martyr," as the Journal called her, was jailed for activities in a rebellion against Spanish rule — an uprising that led the next year to the Spanish-American War. Spain's military authorities, who sought unsuccessfully to quell the island-wide insurgency, accused Cisneros of luring an officer into a would-be lethal trap. The Journal said Cisneros, the daughter of an insurgent leader, was "guilty of no crime save that of having in her veins the best blood in Cuba."

The Cisneros case was memorable and instructive in two respects: One was the intensity of the campaign the Journal orchestrated in late summer 1897 to advocate the woman's release; the other was how the Journal ultimately secured her freedom that fall.

The Journal, indulging in hyperbole, reported that Cisneros faced 20 years at forced labor on the Spanish penal colony of Ceuta, off the North African coast. It was not clear at the time whether such a sentence had been ordered, but Cisneros, "the fair young Cuban girl," was certainly in jail and the Journal was unrestrained in its a wide-ranging effort for her release.

The newspaper prevailed upon prominent American women — including Julia Ward Howe; the widow of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and the mother of incumbent U.S. President William McKinley — to write open appeals for Cisneros' release, appeals that the Journal spread across its front page.

"The Whole Country Rising to the Rescue," it exclaimed in a banner headline above a story that described how more than 10,000 American women had signed the Journal's petitions, calling for her freedom. The number eventually topped 15,000.

"The Spanish government has been made to realize that it must release Miss Cisneros," the Journal declared in an editorial. "Spain dare not play the savage with this helpless girl."

As the weeks went by without resolution, the newspaper's overheated campaign cooled; its coverage lost intensity.

But suddenly, on a Friday morning in October 1897, the Journal broke the stunning news that Cisneros was out of prison and on her way to the United States. These initial reports, however, did not clearly explain how she had won her freedom.

That disclosure came a couple of days later: It was the Journal that had sprung Cisneros from jail. The Journal's correspondent, Karl Decker, with help from two accomplices, had pried open the bars of her cell and led her across rooftops to a safe house in Havana.

After a few days, she boarded a steamer to New York, wearing men's clothing as a disguise. As she walked aboard the ship, she was said to have blown cigar smoke into the face of a Spanish customs agent.

(Decker, one historian has said, never received the bonus Hearst promised him for leading the jailbreak.)

The Journal — ever eager to characterize itself as the exemplar of "the journalism that acts" — was unrestrained in congratulating itself. "An American Newspaper Accomplished at a Single Stroke What the Red Tape of Diplomacy Failed Utterly to Bring About in Many Months," read one of its headlines, four decks deep.

The illegality of the jailbreak was of no consequence, the newspaper said. "The Journal violated Spanish law in breaking into the foul jail ... and helping the martyr prisoner out," it said. "It is happy in that knowledge. It would like to violate some more Spanish laws of the same sort."

Some historians say the mania surrounding Cisneros contributed to the war between the United States and Spain in 1898. But it's hard to see how: While the story certainly stirred passions nationwide, it never won sustained front-page attention in other New York dailies, hesitant as they were to follow a Hearst-led campaign. And the story all but faded from the Journal by late October 1897, after Cisneros received a tumultuous welcome in New York City and a presidential reception at the White House.

War between the United States and Spain began in April 1898, two months after the destruction of the U.S. battleship Maine in Havana Harbor.

The Cisneros case lives on in American journalism history, if only as a reminder of the unabashed audacity of the yellow press at the close of the 19th Century. It also lives on, modestly, in the literary world: White Rose, a historical novel based on the Cisneros escape, published last fall by William Morrow & Co.