21 pages • 42 minutes read
Elbert HubbardA Message to Garcia
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1899A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Important TermsIndex of Terms
Cuba
Cuba is the island where Rowan must go to get McKinley’s message to Garcia during the war between the US and Spain. Rowan disappears into its deep jungles in search of Garcia; he emerges three weeks later, on the other side of the island, having delivered the message.
Cuba is the largest island in the Caribbean Sea. For 400 years it was a colony of Spain; during the late 1800s, a Cuban resistance movement emerged to fight for freedom from Spain. Several wars were fought without success, and it was not until the US entered the fray and defeated Spain that Cuba became free of its master.
Hubbard gets his history slightly mixed up: Rowan traveled to Cuba in April 1897, and the Spanish-American War began a year later. Hubbard is correct, however, in linking Rowan’s work to the war effort, as the US and Spain already were fast approaching a crisis when Rowan made contact with the rebels.
After the war and Spain’s defeat, Cuban sovereignty was guaranteed by the US, which, as a practical matter, meant that the US had great influence in the conduct of the island’s new government. General Garcia, who received Rowan’s missive, was critical to the war effort, but his armies were forbidden entry into Havana, where they’d hoped to celebrate victory.
The Letter
Rowan must deliver a letter to General Garcia, leader of Cuban resistance forces hidden deep in the Cuban hinterlands. Rowan delivers the message successfully despite the extreme difficulties of travel through a densely tropical war zone.
The “letter” acts as a symbol for the US Army’s attempt to communicate discreetly with the Cuban resistance movement. Rowan’s contact with General Garcia began a collaboration that resulted in victory by US and rebel forces the following year.
Message to Garcia
The central focus of the essay is the importance of character at work, specifically the type of person who can get anything done without complaint, despite difficulties—someone who can “carry a message to Garcia” (12), or achieve a goal despite all obstacles. The essay repeats this phrase multiple times; after the work caught fire among a vast readership, the phrase “carry a message to Garcia” became an expression that remained popular for decades. American President Nixon even uttered the phrase when discussing a difficult assignment with aides.
War Between Spain and the US
When Hubbard writes that “war broke out between Spain and the United States” (1), he refers to what’s now known as the Spanish-American War, a brief conflict meant to resolve accusations of Spanish cruelty toward resistance fighters. The US intervention there—sparked by the sinking of a visiting American Naval vessel, the USS Maine—was popular among the American people but unpopular in the McKinley administration, which sought to allay fears by major industrialists that the war would damage the US economy, so recently beset by a major recession.
The Treaty of Paris officially concluded the war, with Spain ceding the last vestiges of its once-mighty empire to the US, which acquired the Philippines and other islands in the Pacific and the Caribbean. Ironically, the US then confronted a burgeoning Filipino resistance movement, which it proceeded to put down with the kind of cruelty it had abhorred in Cuba.
Also in 1898, the US engineered the takeover of the Hawaiian Islands, making them into a protectorate. It was the Spanish-American War, though, that marked the arrival of the US on the world stage as a major power. A few years later, President Teddy Roosevelt sent the Navy on a world tour, and the President brokered a peace treaty between Japan and Russia. The American Century was under way.
In 1961, the US once again tried, but this time failed, to overturn the Cuban government of Fidel Castro following his 1959 Communist takeover of Cuba. In late 1962, the US and Soviet Union nearly came to blows over Russia’s placement of nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba. US-Cuban relations have been fraught ever since.
Today, the Philippines is an independent nation, but the US still controls a smattering of once-Spanish-ruled islands, including Guam in the Pacific and, most significantly, Puerto Rico in the Caribbean. “A Message to Garcia” is an inspirational story about the very beginnings of this complex history.
