Uncrowned King by Kenneth Whyte

Author:Kenneth Whyte
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781582439853
Publisher: Perseus
Published: 2017-02-21T05:00:00+00:00

HEARST’S FIRST SIGNIFICANT MOVE on the story, two months into his tenure at the Journal and toward the end of the first year of the uprising, was a reaction against all of the misinformation and conjecture appearing in the pages of his rivals. He dispatched to Havana as his “special commissioner” the celebrated Murat Halstead who the previous summer had defended Hanna in the Journal. Halstead’s assignment was to gauge the real state of play in Cuba and he was an inspired choice. In the course of his long and prolific career, much of it spent at the Cincinnati Commercial, he had witnessed the hanging of John Brown at Harpers Ferry and the rise of Abraham Lincoln in the conventions of 1860, and he had reported from the front lines of the Civil War and of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. He enjoyed such high repute that a town in Kansas had already been named in his honor. That he was a Republican reinforced Hearst’s commitment to an impartial report.16

A walrus-faced man with a mussy white Vandyke, Halstead arrived in Havana by steamer from Florida and checked in at the Inglaterra, a luxurious hotel that served as an unofficial headquarters for the American press in Cuba. An experienced traveler, he was pleased with the accommodations. His sumptuously furnished room featured twenty-foot ceilings and a large four-poster bed with a mother-of-pearl inlaid headboard and red velvet canopy. Glass doors opened onto a wide white marble balcony. Halstead would press a button at the head of his bed at 7 a.m. and in precisely 150 seconds a bearded porter would arrive to take his order. In exactly five minutes more, coffee, hot milk, rolls, butter and perfectly peeled oranges would be delivered on a solid silver tray with a full breakfast to follow at 11 a.m. The quality of the food in Havana put Halstead in mind of Paris. He was also impressed with his local barber—“deliberate, artistic and couteous . . . almost the barber of my soul.” But it was his barkeep who won Halstead’s deepest admiration. The man managed to keep a steady supply of crushed ice no matter what the temperature out of doors. He mixed drinks with two crystal glasses, one large, one small. He filled the large glass with ice and the other with liquors, bitters, and sweets and splashed the ingredients back and forth between the glasses, “clinking the crystal in a way that would delight a German’s sense of sound.” He then flung the concoction through a strainer, filling the smaller glass to the rim, and then returned the large glass to the counter with a triumphant “thwack.”17

Halstead soon learned that the Inglaterra stood in stark relief to much of its surroundings. Havana was a squalid city with crumbling infrastructure and a dispirited, frightened population. At all hours, the streets and cafés were awash in rumor, and there was no such thing as a dependable source of information. The local population, accustomed to an atmosphere of rebellion, was better trained in conspiracy than objectivity.

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