A Message to Garcia (Extract)
In all this Cuban business there is one man stands out on the horizon of my memory like Mars at perihelion. When war broke out between Spain & the United States, it was very necessary to communicate quickly with the leader of the Insurgents. Garcia was somewhere in the mountain vastness of Cuba—no one knew where. No mail nor telegraph message could reach him. The President must secure his cooperation, and quickly.
What to do! Someone said to the President, “There’s a fellow by the name of Rowan will find Garcia for you, if anybody can.” Rowan was sent for and given a letter to be delivered to Garcia. How “the fellow by the name of Rowan” took the letter, sealed it up in an oil-skin pouch, strapped it over his heart, in four days landed by night off the coast of Cuba from an open boat, disappeared into the jungle, & in three weeks came out on the other side of the Island, having traversed a hostile country on foot, and delivered his letter to Garcia, are things I have no special desire now to tell in detail.
The point I wish to make is this: McKinley gave Rowan a letter to be delivered to Garcia; Rowan took the letter and did not ask, “Where is he at?” By the Eternal! There is a man whose form should be cast in deathless bronze and the statue placed in every college of the land. It is not book-learning young men need, nor instruction about this and that, but a stiffening of the vertebrae which will cause them to be loyal to a trust, to act promptly, concentrate their energies: do the thing- “Carry a message to Garcia!”
Colonel Andrew Summers Rowan was born in Gap Mills, Virginia, in 1857. He was an American officer and graduated of West Point class of 1881. In the years before the Spanish American War, Rowan served several frontiers posts and with military intelligence in Latin America. He was interested in Cuba in particular and wrote a book about the island. With tensions between the United States and the Spanish (who then ruled Cuba) growing, President William McKinley saw value in establishing contact with the Cuban rebels who could prove a valuable ally in case of war with Spain. McKinley asked Colonel Arthur Wagner to suggest an officer to make contact with Garcia’s rebels. Wagner suggested Rowan who then travelled to Cuba via Jamaica. Rowan met Garcia in the Oriente Mountains and established a rapport. Rowan garnered information from Garcia who was eager to cooperate with Americans in fighting the Spanish. Rowan returned to the US and was given command of a force of “Immunes”, African-American troops assumed to be immune to tropical diseases found in Cuba. After his service in the Spanish-American War, he served in the Philippines and posts in the US Fort Riley (Kansas), West Point (Kentucky) and American Lake (Washington), retiring in 1909. More than twenty years later, Rowan was presented the “Distinguished Service Cross” for his extraordinary heroism in action in connection with the operations in Cuba in May, 1898. Rowan died in the Presidio of San Francesco in 1943. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
… Elbert Hubbard
(1899)
CK Garabed
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