1898 Spanish–American War

The 1898 Spanish–American War is the historical setting for Manuel Xaloc’s final voyage and the end of the family’s thwarted love story. Macarena recounts how the sailor, after losing his chance to marry Carlota, became a privateer, carried messages and supplies into Santiago de Cuba, and sailed out against the American fleet on July 3, 1898. He went down attempting to ram the Indiana, with no survivors; his choice turns an intimate family history into an account of deliberate sacrifice.

From separation to privateering

After Carlota’s family rejected the match, Xaloc left the house and went to the church where they had dreamed of marrying. He gave the parish priest Carlota’s twenty pearls, spent the night walking through Santa Cruz, and departed at dawn on the first sailing ship to leave. This time, Macarena notes, no one saw him wave a handkerchief. The detail marks the separation as an ending without farewell, before the war gives Xaloc another, public stage.

In 1898, as the Maine exploded in Havana harbor, the Spanish government authorized privateering against the United States. Returning to sea, Xaloc immediately obtained a letter of marque. His fast armed yacht, the Manigua, carried a crew Macarena describes as recruited from the roughest elements of the Antilles. It forced the blockade; in June, it attacked and sank two merchant ships in the Gulf of Mexico, then fought a night encounter with the gunboat Sheridan in which neither vessel emerged unscathed.

The final sortie

Xaloc’s last mission was to break the blockade of Santiago harbor and bring messages and supplies to Admiral Cervera. On the morning of July 3, he put to sea with the other Spanish ships. He could have remained in port: he was a merchant sailor, not under the squadron’s orders, and the Spanish ships were widely understood to be outmatched by American battleships and cruisers. Instead, he chose to sail. He was the last to leave, after the other Spanish vessels had been sunk or were burning.

The Manigua did not turn away to escape. Xaloc headed at full speed toward the enemy ships, flying a black pennant beside the Spanish flag. As the yacht sank, he was still trying to ram the battleship Indiana. No one survived. Macarena’s telling presents this as a final, freely chosen act, not as an accidental loss at sea: Xaloc had been able to stay out of the battle, but went out to meet it.

Memory and significance

Macarena admits that she feels proud of the man who might have been her great-great-uncle, had her family not been blinded by its refusal of the match. She recalls that Xaloc entered history as the last Spanish privateer and the only one to operate during the Cuban War. The pride is inseparable from reproach: the family’s rejection separated him from Carlota, while the wartime story preserves him as a man who acted decisively to the end.

The account is embedded in Macarena’s nighttime conversation with Quart beside the river. After telling him that the rest of Xaloc’s story could be found in contemporary newspapers, she describes his service and death; Quart recognizes how thoroughly she knows the history. The war’s public record thus supplies the ending that the private family story cannot: after the quiet departure and the abandoned hope of marriage, Xaloc’s last appearance is a black pennant beside Spain’s flag, and a ship that keeps advancing as it sinks.