The Battle of Santiago (1898) enters the novel through Macarena’s account of Manuel Xaloc, remembered as the last Spanish privateer. On July 3, 1898, after carrying messages and supplies into the blockaded port, he sailed out with the Spanish fleet despite having no obligation to join it. He steered his armed yacht, the Manigua, toward the enemy and died trying to ram the battleship Indiana. His final sortie turns a historical defeat into the tragic culmination of a love story and a family’s inherited memory.

Historical Setting and Xaloc’s Privateering

The battle belongs to the wider crisis of 1898. While Xaloc was returning to sea, the Maine exploded in Havana harbor; the Spanish government authorized privateering against the United States, and Xaloc promptly obtained a commission. He commanded the fast armed yacht Manigua, whose crew Macarena describes as recruited from the roughest elements of the Antilles.

Xaloc’s privateering had already brought the Manigua into action in the Gulf of Mexico. In June 1898 it attacked and sank two merchant ships, then fought a nighttime encounter with the gunboat Sheridan in which neither vessel came away unscathed. These exploits make the final sortie more than a sudden act of defiance: the battle concludes a campaign in which Xaloc had repeatedly taken the war to the enemy at sea.

The Blockade and the Last Sortie

Before the fleet’s destruction, Xaloc broke the blockade of Santiago harbor by entering at night with messages and supplies for Admiral Cervera. Macarena emphasizes that he was a merchant sailor, not a man under the squadron’s orders. He could have remained in port, and the fleet’s chances were plainly poor: its ships were old, their engines bad, and their armament inferior to the American battleships and cruisers.

On the morning of July 3, Xaloc nevertheless went out with the other ships. He was the last to leave, after the Spanish vessels that had sailed ahead were sunk or burning. He did not try to escape. The Manigua made straight for the enemy at full speed, flying a black flag beside the Spanish flag, and Xaloc was still attempting to ram the Indiana as his yacht went down. There were no survivors.

The Battle as Family Memory

Macarena tells the episode during a night beside the river, after recounting how Xaloc had given Carlota’s twenty pearls to the parish priest before leaving Spain. He had departed at dawn on the first sailing vessel, without the handkerchief-waving farewell that had marked an earlier separation. The battle story therefore follows a private loss into public history: the man who had been driven away from the woman he loved became a daring corsair, then chose a final action from which he could not return.

Quart observes that Macarena speaks of Xaloc with pride. She acknowledges that pride and calls him a real man, lamenting that her family’s blindness had prevented him from becoming her great-uncle. Her account presents the battle not as an impersonal military episode but as the end of a life whose courage and tragic separation have been preserved within the family’s story.

Narrative Form and Significance

The episode is delivered retrospectively by Macarena, who directs Quart to the contemporary newspapers for the public record and supplies the personal history that those records cannot contain. Her narration moves from the lovers’ separation to the Manigua’s wartime actions, then concentrates on the final morning and the absence of survivors. The shift from historical report to family remembrance lets the battle carry two kinds of finality: the destruction of the Spanish fleet and the irrevocable ending of Xaloc’s private life.

The Manigua’s last charge is also the sharpest contrast in the story. Xaloc had once left without a farewell and with no witness to wave a handkerchief; in 1898, he sailed openly under two flags toward a doomed enemy. His refusal to remain safely in port gives the memory its heroic force, while the lack of survivors leaves that force inseparable from loss.