Cuban War

The Cuban War is recalled through Macarena Bruner’s story of Manuel Xaloc, a would-be ancestor whose defiant last voyage gives the conflict a personal and dramatic shape. His conduct during the war stands in sharp contrast to the cautious bargains and institutional compromises surrounding Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas in the novel’s present.

Xaloc and the war

Macarena recounts that the Spanish government authorized privateering against the United States in 1898, and that Xaloc immediately obtained a commission. His fast armed yacht, the Manigua, carried a crew recruited from the Antilles. In June he forced the blockade and attacked and sank two merchant ships in the Gulf of Mexico; a nighttime encounter with the gunboat Sheridan left both vessels badly damaged.

Macarena says she is proud of the man Xaloc might have been her great-great-uncle, had her family not been blinded by its foolishness. She presents him as the last Spanish privateer and the only one to operate during the Cuban War. In this telling, the historical conflict is not a distant backdrop: it is the setting in which an excluded family figure acquires a legend of his own.

The sortie from Santiago

Xaloc’s final action begins with a breach of the blockade at Santiago. He entered the port at night carrying messages and supplies for Admiral Cervera. On the morning of July 3, 1898, he sailed out with the other ships. As a merchant mariner, he was not under the squadron’s orders and could have stayed in port; the Spanish vessels were old, poorly armed, and equipped with failing engines, facing American battleships and cruisers.

Instead, Xaloc chose to leave. He was the last to put to sea, after the other Spanish ships had already been sunk or set ablaze. He did not try to escape: with a black pennant flying alongside the Spanish flag, he steered at full speed toward the enemy and, as his vessel went down, was still attempting to ram the battleship Indiana. There were no survivors.

Memory and contrast

The episode reaches Lorenzo Quart not as an impersonal account of the war but as Macarena’s passionate family recollection. Her pride in Xaloc’s courage is also an implicit judgment on the family’s failure to recognize him. The story gives the Cuban War a human measure—one man’s decision to join a battle he could have avoided—and lets his uncompleted charge stand against the compromised calculations that dominate the church dispute.

That contrast is sharpened by the novel’s other references to the war. In the contemporary negotiations over the church site, Archbishop Aquilino Corvo presents a Cartujano Bank development deal as a source of diocesan compensation, a new church in one of Seville’s poorest districts, and support for social work among the Roma community. Elsewhere, church authorities debate whether the Holy Office should intervene in the church crisis, while Father Óscar Lobato condemns the Church’s submission and silence and recalls its losses among workers, young people, and women. Against these competing claims of duty and institutional survival, Xaloc’s final sortie is remembered as an act that required no promise of safety or reward.