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

Notes

1. Long before Oliver Stone's JFK, there was Lee Harvey Oswald and the ‘Fair Play for Cuba Committee’. Indeed, theories of conspiracy in the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy seem to cross-cut many communities and much scholarship, in Miami and Havana (where one can find a wide selection of state-published and translated volumes such as ZR Rifle: The Plot to Kill Kennedy and Castro (Furiati 1994) and shorter texts (Allard 2012)), as well as in the rest of the US. However, as I will demonstrate, neither the Kennedy killing nor the Cold War itself is an adequate structure for understanding the conspiratorial mode.

2. ‘In his first dispatch [Captain] Sigsbee had urged that public opinion be suspended, but this was not possible. To most Americans there was no doubt about the conclusion to be drawn from the fact that the Maine had been destroyed at night in a Spanish port. As retired Rear Admiral George E. Belknap said, it was significant that the ship should have been blown up “in that particular harbor at that particular time”’ (Weems 1958).

3. For an excellent study in how conspiratorial explanation can become ‘self-sealing’, see Watzlawick (1977). Watzlawick describes an ingenious experiment carried out by Alex Bavelas in which two subjects without any medical training are separately shown medical slides and asked to distinguish between sick and healthy cells. Subject A gets accurate feedback about his or her responses from experimenters and in time guesses with a fair degree of accuracy. Subject B, however, gets ‘noncontingent’ reinforcement – his or her feedback is actually based on A's answers. B is searching for an order that does not exist in relation to his or her own theorizations. A and B are eventually asked to discuss what they have come to consider the rules for distinguishing between healthy and sick cells. A's explanations are simple and concrete; B's are of necessity very subtle and complex – after all, B had to form his or her hypothesis on the basis of very tenuous and contradictory hunches. The amazing thing, Watzlawick notes, is that A does not simply shrug off B's explanations as unnecessarily complicated or even absurd, but is impressed by their sophisticated ‘brilliance’. A tends to feel inferior and vulnerable because of the pedestrian simplicity of his or her own assumptions, and the more complicated B's ‘delusions’, the more likely they are to convince A. Indeed, Watzlawick continues, their very baroqueness may itself be self-fulfilling, as further evidence to the contrary tends to produce even more elaboration rather than correction (Watzlawick 1977).

4. Again, note that ‘conspiracy theory’ is my term: in Cuba such narratives would be called teorías de conspiración only in a very academic setting. In everyday use, they would be roughly grouped as a subset of intriga. In popular contexts analogous to those in the US in which ‘conspiracy theory’ is dismissive, in Havana one would hear phrases – whose very number and variety speaks to the prevalence of the form in popular discourse – such as the following: ‘¡Oye, como te gusta la intriga!’; ‘¡Chico/a, pero mira que tú inventas!’; ‘¡Qué cuento es ese [fulano/a]!’; ‘¡Ay niño/a pero déjate de cuentos!’; ‘¡Óyeme este/a niño/a, pero qué imaginación tú tienes!’; ‘¡Oye como te gusta el enredo!’; ‘¡Déjate de intriga, anda!’; ‘Oye, pa' mi que tú eres chivato, chico, porque tú siempre tienes una explicación pa’ todo‘; ‘¡Ay hijo/a, no compliques más las cosas!’; ‘¡Oye, tú eres la intriga misma!’; or ‘¡Coñó mi hijito/a, qué teje'madeje!’ (Iván Pérez, personal communication, 10 March 2015).

5. This particular thesis is easily tested by photographic evidence (e.g., see Figure 3). The great majority of the enlisted crew of the Maine was the same colour as her officer corps. It is true that a disproportionate share of the officers, quartered aft, survived the mysteriously triggered explosion of the ship's forward magazines, and it is also true that at least two African-American crewmen were killed (Remesal 1998).