1. A Current Lesson from the History of the Surrender of Santiago de Cuba

I’ll start with the lessons, because perhaps many potential readers dismiss the topic because “it’s not current and is too far away.” Nothing could be less true: we are what we are, at worst, as a direct consequence of the 19th century. And that was a decidedly Masonic century, in which the Saxons, primarily, and France as well, exercised a veritable “protectorate” over us by order of Freemasonry and thanks to its infiltrators.

From the revolutionary constitution of 1812, to the secessions of the American Viceroyalties, passing through the Riego Mutiny, the also very significant betrayal of many sailors, the embrace of Morillo and Bolívar, the Masonic pantomime of the Battle of Ayacucho (Ricardo de la Cierva dixit), the hundreds of liberal-progressive pronouncements, the disentailments and sales to foreign capital, and, finally, the Betrayal of ’98.

Betrayal from power, from the Head of State and the Government, coupled with direct and/or minimally concealed aggression through third parties. And this, practically identical, is happening today: the US is using one of its ally and a region or neighbor of ours. Not so long ago, ETA-Basque Country, today Morocco, in collusion with an equally liberal-Bourbon-corrupt political regime, to play the role of mambises and Tagalogs waging a war against us that the Yankees, Freemasons par excellence, direct and exploit as the executive arm of the Globalist Plutocracy. Also include here any similar cases you recall that have occurred throughout history throughout the Hispanic world.

That’s why it’s so important to understand our often dramatic history, so as not to repeat it and suffer through it.

 Let’s now look at the very strange circumstances surrounding the Surrender of Santiago de Cuba on these same dates 127 years ago.

2.- Background in Santiago de Cuba: The English attacks on Santiago in the 18th century

 During the War of Jenkins’ Ear or the Asiento (1739-1748), Vice Admiral Edward Vernon, accompanied by General Welworth, with a very powerful fleet and an army of 4,000 men, including some 400 Virginia volunteers under the command of Lawrence Washington (half-brother of the later first US president), carried out numerous attacks in the Caribbean.

He even made a first attempt to occupy Santiago de Cuba in June 1740, after landing at the then-uninhabited Guantánamo and being forced to retreat to Jamaica due to local reaction and disease. After failing miserably the following year against Blas de Lezo in Cartagena de Indias (attacked three times between March 1940 and May 1941), in July 1741 Vernon and Welworth returned to Guantanamo with 20 warships and 40 transports (3,400 soldiers disembarked, including the remains of Washington’s regiment, which with the black auxiliaries from Jamaica reached about 5,000), to conquer Santiago and all of Cuba, establishing a colony they called Cumberland.

Once again, local forces (350 soldiers, about 700 militia, and many volunteers), the terrain, the heat, tropical rains, and disease forced them to re-embark five months later, when the number of sick soldiers numbered 2,260 (3,445 casualties, including the dead).

Cuban sources report that there was even an initial “round robin” among English sailors to force a retreat. The term “round robin,” which some believe comes from the French (ruban rond, round loop), refers to the act of signing petitions jointly in a way that prevents the proponent of the document from being identified, seeking to conceal the order in which it was signed and the responsibility of the ringleader for the near-mutiny.

Originally, their names/signatures were included on the document in a non-hierarchical circle. It was a type of joint petition adopted by English sailors petitioning their superiors, evidence of which exists as early as 1731.

Seven years later (1748), at the end of the War of the Asiento, Admiral Charles Knowles attempted to force his way into the port with his most powerful ships at the forefront, but within half an hour, he had to tow the lead ship away, suffering great damage and casualties (100 dead and 200 wounded on the first two ships alone).

The following day, the landing attempt of 3,000 men was also aborted. These were the historical precedents of the English attacks on Santiago de Cuba: the impossibility of forcing the port, the occupation of Guantánamo, and very difficult terrain and weather, which impeded progress by land and caused many casualties due to disease. This experience was vividly remembered by both the spanish and the saxons, both english and american.

There was another precedent that demonstrates, once again, the false myths of “Spanish inferiority” of all kinds and the “unsurpassed capabilities” of the US. In 1881, Carlos Finlay, a Spanish doctor born in Puerto Príncipe (present-day Camagüey, Cuba), discovered that the fertilized female Aedes aegypti mosquito was the transmitter of Yellow Fever, which was decimating the island’s population, and established its prevention and treatment.

That same year in the US, his proposal was met with disbelief, disdain, and mockery. After the Yankee occupation of Cuba, its authorities asked him for help, which he gave, and ultimately tried to steal his discovery. His merits were not internationally recognized until 1954, at the 14th International Congress on the History of Medicine in Italy. However, despite being nominated seven times for the Nobel Prize, he was never awarded it.

An anecdote and other facts: In the 1960s, the Spanish tonic water “Finley” was marketed with great success. This fizzy drink contains quinine, an alkaloid from the South American cinchona tree, an important remedy for treating yellow fever and malaria. Yellow fever was brought to America by the African slave trade, something that even the black legend dares to attribute to Spain.

 It caused epidemics that were a death sentence for thousands of Europeans and Native Americans. It was one of the main excuses the Yankees used to claim damages and commercial losses from Spain, as well as their withdrawal from the island.

A very important aspect to keep in mind is that the war was resolved in Santiago because Cervera’s fleet took refuge there, contrary to orders to proceed primarily to Puerto Rico. It remained in its port for eight weeks, six of which were spent without an enemy in sight and with false excuses of not having coal, provisions, or being blockaded. In this regard, the handwritten testimony of his Minister of the Navy, Ramón Auñón (Light on the War of 98, Nin Section. Santiago de Cuba; SND, 2023), is essential, as it underlines the above.

Auñón also refutes Cervera’s fallacy about the lack of coal for his boilers, pointing out that he refused entry to several coal ships in Santiago, even though he had plenty of coal to successfully leave Santiago and head for another port on the island.

 He does the same with the argument of a lack of food supplies, demonstrating with data that there was more than enough, as shown by the fact that after the fall of the city, a large quantity of food was sold: “according to the ‘Times’ correspondent in Santiago, when the Americans seized the warehouses, they found enough food to last four to six weeks” (The political year 1898, by Ferran Soldevila, Madrid, 1899); and this is confirmed by the “Reserved Vote of the President of the Council of War in the Case for the Surrender of Santiago”, General Marcelo Azcárra: “…the desire to fight and the good spirit that animated the garrison are evident, even though it still had a million Mauser cartridges and food supplies for about 15 days, in addition to the livestock of the various weapons and institutes that could be used to feed the troops”

In 1898, the Americans followed in their attack on Santiago almost the same footsteps as their English cousins and some of their predecessors a hundred years earlier. With Spain having a modern, extremely numerous, and well-seasoned army in Cuba, and General Valeriano Weyller having practically suppressed the Mambi insurrection, provoked and sustained by the Yankees, it was to be expected that the results, at least on the ground, would have been the same.

This was not the case. Let’s see why.

3. Sagasta’s pacifist haste

The 1,545 American casualties against  El Caney and Las Lomas on July 1 were 223 dead (22 officers), 1,243 wounded, and 79 missing.

The Mambises lost about 100 men. The Commander-in-Chief of the US Army’s 5th Corps, Major General William Rufus “Pecos Bill” Shafter, “The Ignorant,” a 63-year-old Freemason, suffered from gout and was extremely overweight (140 kg).

During the attack on July 1, he remained bedridden with tropical fever, declining command. Major General Joseph Wheeler, his deputy and commander of the dismounted cavalry division, also remained bedridden until noon, being replaced during that time by General Sumner; and, for the same reason, General Samuel B. M. Young was replaced by Colonel Leonard Wood.

 Later, in view of the tough Spanish defense that lasted an entire day, the numerous casualties arriving in the rearguard, and the multitude of sick people already in their ranks, he asked his President for permission to withdraw five miles to his starting positions.

A revealing piece of information is provided by the writings of Captain Clark, Commander of the battleship Oregon (Auñón, Op. Cit., Clark Annex): “On Sunday, July 3, 1898, many discouraged officers sat at the breakfast table in the Oregon’s saloon, which lay opposite Santiago; for the officer of the morning watch had brought them news from a press boat that had just called the ship to report that the army had suffered heavy losses off the city, and that the outlook was very discouraging”.

This is confirmed by the fact that on July 3, Theodore Roosevelt (of the “Rough Riders”), before the end of Cervera’s Fleet was certified, wrote to Senator Henry Cabot Lodge: “Tell the President, for heaven’s sake, to send us every regiment and, above all, every battery possible; so far we have won at great cost, but the Spanish are fighting very hard and we are very close to a terrible military disaster; we must receive help, thousands of men, batteries, food and ammunition” (Massachusetts Historical Society. Collection Online. Letter from T. Roosevelt to Henry Cabot Lodge, July 3; also Hugh Thomas, in “Cuba. The Fight for Freedom”, Vintage Spanish,  New York, 2013).

It was denied, but only the misnamed naval disaster of July 3—in reality, a self-grounding of the Spanish fleet, after a sought-after, extremely slow sortie in broad daylight, with long intervals and destroyers in tail—changed the situation, making the sought-after perfect excuse a reality: we had lost the war by losing the Fleet and had to abandon the overseas provinces.

And, if any reader is shocked, by way of example, we need only recall that Captain Víctor Concas, Commander of the cruiser Teresa, and absolutely politically and historiographically correct, wrote in his book Admiral Cervera’s squadron (pages 109-110; 1901) that he voted against the Fleet’s departure “because he believed that the Government wanted the fleet lost as soon as possible”.

Following the Spanish defensive victories at Las Lomas and El Caney, and since the front had not been broken on July 1, Captain General Blanco inexplicably (barring treason) ordered the Fleet’s withdrawal, as if the fall of Santiago were inevitable and imminent.

This was not the case, especially given the tropical diseases and the enemy’s demoralization, something so important to note that it excuses the need to repeat it. This is demonstrated, as we shall see, by the “Round Robin Letter” and the aforementioned communications from Theodore Roosevelt to President McKinley (a Freemason) through Cabot Lodge.

Our generals knew, from the aforementioned historical background and their campaign experiences, the burden of disease imposed by the Cuban terrain and climate.

And, to a large extent, they were aware of the Yankee combat losses, in addition to being able to estimate the sickness losses among unacclimatized and unacclimatized troops. They also knew precisely the imminent arrival in Santiago from Manzanillo of the Escario Column, 3,500 acclimatized and seasoned men, with artillery, engineers, and support.

A counterattack by them, especially if reinforced with 1,000 sailors, could have easily turned the campaign around, but it didn’t happen. Especially considering the fire from Santiago and the Fleet in its port. Also, through terrain much more practicable than the Sierra Maestra, reinforcements could have been sent from Guantánamo and Holguín.

Even a mere static defense worked against the attacker, who was mired in disease and on the verge of exploding into epidemics. This defense was surely unnecessary because, as Auñón says (Light on the War of ’98, Ninth Section, Santiago de Cuba, Chapter V. Case for the Surrender of Santiago), “… the situation of the enemy Army was becoming so critical, as described by General Shafter… in an official document, that the Spanish position was really so strong that he did not wish to assault it as long as he could avoid it, and that a thorough examination of the Spanish defenses carried out after the surrender confirmed that the trenches could only be taken with great losses, probably no less than 6,000 dead and wounded”.

The situation following the sinking of the fleet, directly caused by the orders of Generals Blanco (Captain General, H. Barcelona) and Linares (Chief of the Santiago Army Corps) regarding the fighting on land and sea, which cannot be described other than treason induced by the Government, did not push for quasi-unconditional surrender either. And that is practically what is conveyed by Sagasta’s clear telegram to Blanco on July 12, sarcastically described by the New York Journal as “Prime Minister Sagasta’s pitiful appeal”: “Peace would be obtained today under conditions that would be accepted and honorable for the Army… But once Cuba has been surrendered by hunger, Manila lost, part, if not all, of Puerto Rico occupied, and the most important cities of our coast bombarded, it will not be possible to think of Peace. … I trust that… you and the generals under your command… will know how to respond to discipline… and will obey the Government’s resolutions regarding peace”.

In that “today” of Sagasta, who had been Grand Master of Freemasonry, 33rd degree and symbolic name “Peace”, the Philippines were still entirely preserved (Manila was occupied, not to say surrendered, precisely and strikingly one day after the signing of the Peace Protocol, on August 13) and Puerto Rico, which had not yet been invaded (it was on Santiago Day, July 25), and the Yankee expeditionary army in Cuba was crumbling due to disease and logistical incompetence.

In this regard, Lieutenant General Pando, Chief of Staff of Cuba and who, inexplicably?, was sent on a secret mission to the USA by General Blanco at the outbreak of war, wrote in his report of that mission that: “Being (he; writing in the third person) in the United States as an eyewitness and due to reliable news he was able to acquire there, he was convinced that if the war had continued, despite the undue triumphs of the Yankees, we would have been able to achieve an honorable peace; in the United States, (public) opinion imposed peace on MacKinley at all costs… the Yankee fleet, even without fighting, was for the moment useless, the ships having to be careened (due to the abundant mollusks in tropical waters adhering to the hulls), and the large pieces out of service due to having fired too much” (Auñón, Op. Cit., Pando Annex).

The telegram appeared in the New York Journal Supplement on November 20, 1898, but was not reproduced in Spain until February 17, 1899, by El Correo Gallego (“Secret Documents”), the date on which the “state of war” and, consequently, censorship ended; a conflict whose peace treaty had been signed in Paris three months earlier, on December 10, 1898. This is yet another piece of data to assess the democratic qualities of the liberal-progressive government of the Restoration Regime, which perpetrated the Betrayal of ’98.

But… there are still many more “buts”. One, for example, is that the “interim” command of Santiago, General Toral, faced with the very suspicious casualty of Lieutenant General Linares due to a gunshot wound to the arm (Chronicles of Santiago de Cuba, by Emilio Bacardí Moreau, Volume X, page 17, 1908; and Auñón: Op. Cit. Annex “The Honors”), “inexplicably” surrendered not only Santiago but all the forces under his command in other garrisons, for which he was condemned by a court martial… in which he recorded that he did so: “…as the General in Chief and the Government told him in a telegram received on the 15th” (Light on the War of 98, Ninth Section. Santiago de Cuba, Reserved votes in the case brought regarding the surrender of Santiago; SND, 2023). By the way, when will the still-undeclassified documents from that war be available to view in Spain and the United States?.

4.- Who was Theodore Teddy Roosevelt?

A brief overview of this figure is in order, as he was key to the topic at hand. Teddy Roosevelt (1858-1919) was descended from a wealthy New York family, which undoubtedly helped him to be elected to the New York State Assembly at the age of 23. Perhaps also, his participation in unusual secret societies such as the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity in college was a factor. In April 1897, President William McKinley appointed him Assistant Secretary of the Navy Department.

He was, therefore, one of the main architects of the declaration of war on Spain, including the sinking of the Maine. When this declaration occurred, he left office to command a volunteer cavalry regiment (militia, later National Guard) as a colonel. By the way, that regiment and the entire Cavalry Division to which it belonged, due to logistical chaos, had no horses!.

He was, therefore, a very influential figure even at that time, with practically direct access to McKinley, and whose future was not subject to the restrictions of professional military personnel.

He was also unscrupulous. He proudly wrote to Henri C. Lodge: “Did I ever tell you I killed a Spaniard with my own hand?” Hugh Thomas, in the aforementioned book, also attested that “a friend of his (Teddy’s) told Mrs. Roosevelt: ‘…when I ran into him (Theodore) on the day of the charge…he was in the midst of an orgy of victory and bloodshed.

He had just finished off a Spanish officer like a ‘rabbit’ as he was retreating from a pillbox and was urging us to look at those ‘damned Spanish dead.’” Although in 1899 he wrote in his book The Rough Riders: “That day the Spaniards proved themselves to be brave enemies, worthy of honor for their gallantry”.

After the war, he served as Governor of New York. On the website “Jewish Link,” you can read that the Rough Riders included many Jewish soldiers. And that “jinjoe” Teddy was heavily encouraged by Jewish Republicans in his election as Governor of New York for his role in the victory over Spain… as revenge for the expulsion in 1492.

Following McKinley’s reelection in 1900, he was named the 25th Vice President of the United States, at which point he officially entered Freemasonry with the 3rd degree. At just 42 years of age, and following McKinley’s mysterious assassination (June 6, 1991), so reminiscent of Kennedy’s, in September 1901 he became the 26th US President (1901-09). It should be noted in this regard that the Philippine genocide carried out by the United States did not end in 1902, but continued intermittently until 1908 and even into 1913-14. Roosevelt was largely responsible.

 That “war” left well over a million Filipino deaths (J. B. Goodno: The Philippines, 1998, and The Filipino Genocide, 2005), one-sixth of the population (there is talk of 400,000 “insurgents” and a million civilian “gugus,” a term they used disparagingly to refer to Filipinos; out of a population of nine million).

Terrifyingly, Theodore Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 (for his mediation in the russo-japanese War).

Some significant examples of his political ideology are the following quotes: “I wouldn’t dare say that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but nine out of ten are, and I’d rather not have to investigate the tenth case too closely… The most depraved cowboy has more moral standing than the average Indian”.

“As a race as a whole (blacks), they are inferior to whites… and giving them the right to vote would reduce parts of the South to the level of Haiti” In 1913, after a trip to Argentina, he said: “As long as those countries remain Catholic, we will be unable to dominate them”.

He was a fervent Zionist who believed it was absolutely appropriate to build a Zionist state around Jerusalem.

5.- The “Round Robin Letter”

 Immediately after the surrender of Santiago de Cuba on July 16, a strong movement arose within the command of the American units that had landed in Cuba demanding their immediate return to the United States due to the extremely serious illness of many of their members. This movement reached a point that bordered on insubordination.

According to US data, 4,270 soldiers were seriously ill with malaria and yellow fever on July 28 in Santiago de Cuba. Colonel N. Ermalov, a Russian military observer with the US expeditionary army, wrote a report, later published as “A Subject of the Tsar in Cuba” (in 1999), in which he said: “The expedition arrived in Santiago Bay on June 20 (21 ships with 16,286 soldiers)… with 82 patients with typhus… by August 1 they already had 5,000 patients… And the most tragic thing of all was that in the United States, in Washington, no one knew the truth. Moreover, in the period from July 14 (remember that the Sagasta message cited was on the 12th) until the end of the war, Shafter’s soldiers… who was nicknamed “the ignorant” … began to perish rapidly from these diseases.

In August, as many as 859 men fell ill each day. … Without medical care, typhus appeared and became an epidemic… The Americans did not know how to care for large masses of troops. None, not even the most basic rules for disease prevention in general, and yellow fever in particular, were adopted in Cuba. A veterinarian was for a long time the physician of the First Army Corps in Chickamagua. … The ships that participated in the evacuation of the sick and wounded from Cuba—the ‘Seneca,’ the ‘Corcho,’ the ‘Hudson,’ and others—were below any scrutiny… without water or medicine, with filthy bedding and a lack of the most basic medical resources.

One newspaper wrote of the ‘Seneca’: “And our hospital ships, of which we boasted, turned out to be nothing more than floating breeding grounds for infection.” No area of service failed more in this war than the medical services… two young doctors cried out one day: “Colonel, this is horrible! We have nothing, no quinine, no thermometers. A wounded man is moaning with a bullet in his lung and is suffocating from humor, and we can’t operate on him because we have no instruments”

The supply (of quartermaster) was carried out slowly and in a disorderly manner… The delay in the supply of material reserves to the troops was due to the inexperience in the quartermaster service, the troops’ lack of knowledge of how to formalize orders, the overloading of the railways, formalism, centralization and disorder…».

On August 1, General Shafter sent the following sick leave report to Washington: “Total sick, 4,255; total fever cases, 3,164; new fever cases, 653; fever cases discharged, 722” (from Russell Alger’s book: The Spanish American War, 1901).

To use only the “correct” version published in the Revista General de Marina (June 2021), “Roosevelt (leaked) … a letter to the media—popularly known as the “Round-robin”—following the refusal he had received from his commanders in Washington when he requested the return home of his soldiers suffering from malaria. Ultimately, everything was resolved as requested in the letter, again thanks to the massive media coverage to which the Secretary of War at the time was exposed. And as his descendant (Brett Elliott Crocier, Commander of the aircraft carrier “USS Theodore Roosevelt” in the spring of 2020 on the occasion of a “Covid epidemic” -sic- on board) rightly says, the world remembers his grandfather and no one remembers the former Secretary, Russell Alger”.

The fact is that it was surely Roosevelt who influenced and directed other generals to resubmit their neglected requests and reports to Shafter in the form of a Round Robin, accompanied by a letter of referral with an explanatory summary. Shafter ignored them, but reported the situation to Washington, where it provoked an angry reaction. In response, it was probably Roosevelt again who leaked the letter to the press.

But all these actions led to the eventual repatriation, on July 28, of Secretary of War Russell A. Alger, ordering the repatriation of virtually the entire U.S. Army in Cuba and the construction of a quarantine facility on the mainland for them: Camp Wikoff, Montauk Point, Long Island, New York. Barely 10 days had passed since the surrender.

On August 3, one day before the Round Robin letter appeared in the press, the evacuation order was formally given, and the first departures from Cuba occurred four days later.

A copy of the Round Robin is attached, taken from the aforementioned book by Secretary Russell Alexander Alger. But, in summary, and as later published in Spain (Salmantino News 148, dated 8/11/1899), what the 10 generals and colonels commanding brigades or higher-ranking units are acknowledging is “that their army is unable to advance into the interior of the island, that with their current equipment they are not prepared to carry out their operations inland, and that during the rainy season their casualties would be heavy due to fever. In short: ‘Either the army withdraws or it perishes'” …

And this situation was practically the case from the very beginning of the battle at Caney-Las Lomas on July 1, as we have seen Roosevelt testify. Official US deaths from disease resulting from the Cuban campaign must have been around 2,500 (about 260 at Camp Wikoff). “Confessio partis, probationem eximit.”

 A confession by a party relieves the evidence. It is clear that the Cuban Campaign, like those in the Philippines and Puerto Rico, was a rigged battle in which Spain, by decision of its government and regency, played the role of the contender who allowed himself to be defeated.