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Havana Restores Monument to Victims of USS Maine

It was a little before 10 p.m. that February night in 1898 when a fiery explosion roiled the normally calm waters of Havana Harbor, blowing out windows in the city and sinking the USS Maine to the bottom of the bay, just the mast and some twisted metal wreckage left to poke above the waves.

Havana's monument to the 266 U.S. sailors who died that night was dedicated 27 years later as a tribute to lasting Cuban-American friendship, a thank-you for Washington's help in shedding the yoke of Spanish colonial rule, which was known for its cruelty.

But the years since have been unkind to the twin-columned monument, and to U.S.-Cuba ties. While relations between Washington and Havana remain in a deep freeze, the monument, at least, is now getting a facelift.

The restoration project is fraught with symbolism, and the monument's scars tell the story of more than a century of shifts in the complex relationship and changing interpretations of the marble structure.

"Of the monuments in Havana, that's one that really is struggling to contain all of these different historical episodes," said Timothy Hyde, a historian of Cuban architecture at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. "It doesn't just symbolize any longer this single moment of the sinking of the Maine. It symbolizes all these periodic moments of antipathy and hostility and challenges between the two nation-states."

Cuba USS Maine.JPEG
AP
In this Tuesday, Feb. 12, 2013 photo, a youth... View Full Caption

Soon after the USS Maine's sudden sinking off the coast of this Caribbean capital 115 years ago Friday, the United States accused Spanish colonial authorities of responsibility for the blast.

"Remember the Maine!" became a rallying cry in the States, and after the U.S. victory in the monthslong Spanish-American war, Spain ceded control over Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam.

The Maine monument was inaugurated in 1925 and bears the names of all 266 sailors. Two statues standing shoulder-to-shoulder at the base represent a maternal America guiding the maiden Cuba into independence.

Words etched into the marble quote an 1898 U.S. congressional resolution recognizing Cuba's right to be free, and the massive bronze eagle that long capped the monument faced due north in a symbol of Washington's promise to return home after helping the island break from Spain.

"To me it signifies a legacy of loyalty ... friendship between two peoples," said Julio Dominguez Santos, the monument's night watchman of 17 years.

But things didn't work out as that earlier Congress had hoped.

Many Cubans resented the 1901 Platt Amendment, which said Washington retained the right to intervene militarily as a condition of ending the postwar U.S. occupation.

The U.S. did in fact intervene several times, and American business and mafia gangs came to dominate many aspects of the island in the run-up to the 1959 revolution — leading many Cubans to feel like the eagle had never flown back north.

Soon after Fidel Castro's rebels marched victoriously into Havana, the tense marriage rapidly careened toward divorce and diplomatic ties were severed in 1961. Following the doomed, U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion months later, the more than 3-ton eagle was ripped from the monument during an anti-American protest and splintered into pieces.

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