To Hell With Spain!

On a warm February night in Havana Harbor, the quiet lull of evening shattered in a blinding flash. The USS Maine, an American naval vessel anchored peacefully in Cuban waters, erupted in fire and twisted steel. More than two hundred sixty men died that night, and the shockwaves of the explosion echoed far beyond the Caribbean. The ship’s wreckage would soon become more than debris—it would become a rallying cry. “Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!” Americans repeated it in headlines, in barrooms, and in Congress. What followed was not merely a war. It was a declaration that marked the United States’ entrance onto the world stage, not just as a democracy with ideals, but as an emerging empire with ambitions.

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To understand why the United States declared war on Spain on April 20, 1898, one must begin with Cuba. For decades, Cuban revolutionaries had fought to free themselves from Spanish rule. The Ten Years’ War from 1868 to 1878 failed to achieve independence but revealed deep fractures in Spain’s control. Another failed uprising in 1879 further tested Spain’s grip, and by 1895, José Martí, an exiled poet and nationalist leader, had orchestrated a new, better-organized campaign for independence. Martí, along with military leaders Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo, launched a three-pronged invasion of the island. Martí died early in the conflict, but his death only deepened the resolve of Cuban patriots.

Spain responded with violence and bureaucracy. General Arsenio Martínez Campos failed to stem the rebellion, and in 1896, the Spanish government appointed General Valeriano Weyler as governor. Weyler had no intention of pursuing diplomacy. He instituted a brutal policy known as “reconcentration,” forcing rural Cuban civilians into fortified camps to deprive rebels of support. Disease and starvation followed. By some estimates, over one hundred thousand civilians died in these camps. To many Americans, these were not just military tactics—they were atrocities.

It was also a media sensation. Newspaper magnates William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, engaged in a fierce circulation war, flooded their front pages with lurid tales of Spanish cruelty. The term “yellow journalism” did not exist yet, but the style already did—dramatic headlines, emotive drawings, and a loose relationship with fact. Stories of Cuban women tortured, churches desecrated, and entire villages massacred helped ignite American outrage. In this world of ink-stained patriotism, Spain played the villain, and Cuba the damsel in distress.

President William McKinley was not eager for war. A Civil War veteran, he knew what conflict cost. As late as 1897, he sought a peaceful resolution and urged Spain to reform its colonial policies. Spain, sensing pressure, recalled Weyler and offered limited autonomy to Cuba. But it was too little, too late. Cuban insurgents had no interest in a half-freedom, and many in Congress had grown impatient with Spanish promises.

Then came the De Lôme Letter. On February 9, 1898, Hearst’s New York Journal published a private letter from Spanish Ambassador Enrique Dupuy de Lôme, who described McKinley as weak and a crowd-pleaser. It was a diplomatic embarrassment, and although Spain apologized and De Lôme resigned, American pride had been bruised.

Six days later, the Maine exploded.

What caused the destruction remains uncertain. The U.S. Navy’s initial investigation—led by the Sampson Board—concluded that an external mine had triggered the blast. Although no conclusive evidence tied Spain to the explosion, the damage had already been done. Spanish officials denied involvement and offered to cooperate in a neutral inquiry, but the American public had made up its mind. Spain was guilty by proximity, and the press had little interest in ambiguity. Even later reports, such as Admiral Hyman Rickover’s 1976 investigation that pointed to a likely coal bunker fire as the cause, could not undo the force of public opinion forged in 1898.

Congress responded with funding. On March 9, it approved $50 million for national defense. On April 11, McKinley, still seeking to avoid war, asked Congress for authority to intervene in Cuba to end the fighting. After intense debate, both houses passed a joint resolution recognizing Cuban independence and demanding Spanish withdrawal. Spain, insulted and defiant, broke diplomatic relations. On April 20, 1898, McKinley signed the resolution. Five days later, Congress formalized the declaration of war, retroactive to April 21.

This war was not just about Cuba. Beneath the surface, strategic and economic calculations drove American interest. The island’s proximity to the United States, its sugar trade, and the potential for a future canal through Central America all made Cuba critical to American influence in the hemisphere. Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan’s theories of sea power, widely admired by McKinley’s naval advisors and by Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, argued for the expansion of the U.S. Navy and acquisition of strategic ports. Roosevelt himself would soon resign from the Navy and lead the Rough Riders in Cuba, where he helped seize San Juan Hill.

For many Americans, the war offered a sense of righteous purpose. Cuba’s rebellion against monarchy echoed the American Revolution, and many viewed intervention as a moral obligation. African American soldiers volunteered in large numbers, hoping their service would earn respect and greater civil rights at home. Churches, civic groups, and labor unions alike rallied behind the cause. Others, more cynical, saw the war as an excuse to flex muscle and gain territory.

The war itself lasted only a few months. In Cuba and the Philippines, American forces overwhelmed Spanish garrisons. Commodore George Dewey’s fleet destroyed the Spanish Pacific Squadron in Manila Bay. Puerto Rico fell with little resistance. Spain’s empire, already in decline, crumbled almost overnight. The Treaty of Paris, signed in December 1898, ended the war and granted the United States control of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. Cuba was to become independent, but only after three years of American military occupation and with conditions imposed by the Platt Amendment, which allowed the United States to intervene in Cuban affairs and establish a naval base at Guantánamo Bay.

The legacy of the April 20 declaration lives on in ways both grand and sobering. For the United States, the Spanish-American War was a pivot—a shift from a continent-bound republic to a global power. It marked the beginning of what some called an “American Century,” defined by expansion, influence, and military reach. For Spain, it marked the final collapse of an empire that had once circled the globe. The shock of defeat triggered soul-searching within Spanish society, giving rise to the “Generation of ’98,” a literary and philosophical movement that questioned the nation’s identity and direction.

Cuba, meanwhile, found freedom laced with strings. Its long struggle for independence ended not in complete sovereignty, but in protectorate status under American shadow. The Cuban people, who had fought and died for their own vision of liberty, found their future shaped by the very power that claimed to be liberating them.

And as for the Maine, her twisted hull would become both shrine and symbol. The words spoken in anger—”To hell with Spain!”—captured a moment of righteous fury and helped push a reluctant president and a divided Congress into war. Yet history, with its long memory, asks more difficult questions. Was it truly a war for liberty? Or was it an imperial venture wrapped in the language of justice?

Whatever the answer, that spring of 1898 marked a national transformation. A battleship exploded, a slogan was born, and the United States, once wary of entanglements, marched onto the world stage with flags waving and cannons loaded. The echoes of that decision still reverberate through foreign policy, media, and the complex dance between principle and power.