Santiago de Cuba enters the narrative at the moment of surrender, marking the campaign’s end and exposing the distance between military action, political reward, and the interests served by victory.

Campaign and Surrender

The account states that Santiago de Cuba had surrendered and calls the campaign successful. It also undercuts the heroic image attached to the fighting: regular troops had already reached San Juan Hill from the other side, and, in retrospect, there had been no need to take the hill at all. The city’s surrender thus closes a campaign whose celebrated military episode was not as necessary as its public legend implied.

The Aftermath and Its Beneficiaries

After the fighting, volunteers, war correspondents, and magazine writers wanted to go home. Theodore Roosevelt organized a round-robin appeal to the President asking that the amateur warriors be sent back and that regular troops be left to the exhausting work still required in Cuba. The contrast is pointed: the regulars continued digging trenches and contending with disease, while the celebrated volunteer leader’s charge up San Juan Hill carried him, in the narrative’s compressed account, toward the governorship of New York.

The account links the unfinished work in Cuba to the commercial interests that stood to benefit from the campaign. Its sharply critical formulation is that the regulars were making the island comfortable for the Sugar Trust and National City Bank. Santiago de Cuba therefore signifies more than a military objective achieved: its surrender belongs to a victory whose burdens fell unevenly and whose political and economic returns extended beyond the battlefield.

Narrative Significance

The treatment of Santiago de Cuba sets patriotic spectacle against the unglamorous labor and illness that followed combat. The city is named as surrendered, but the narrative’s emphasis shifts quickly to what that victory enabled: Roosevelt’s public ascent, the continued hardship of ordinary soldiers, and the strengthening of American commercial interests in Cuba. The successful campaign is consequently presented as both a military conclusion and the beginning of a contested aftermath.