The Spanish-American War, the Disaster, the Cuban War of Independence—it was a different war for different people. But only the United States won. Though the war’s boosters in America had promoted it as the war to rescue poor Cuba in its noble struggle against Spanish tyranny, once the new territories of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Phillipines were taken by military force, the United States had little interest in setting any of them free. In fact, the United States granted Puerto Rico and Cuba less self-government than the Spanish had offered. The new territories were, to the Americans, delicious war booty. Books with titles such as Our New Possessions excitedly introduced these prizes to the American public. Meanwhile, the Spanish public had to adapt to suddenly being without these places, the last of the empire that they had known for four centuries. Spain had lost the lands won by Columbus, Magellan, Elcano, and all the other great men reproduced in stone and bronze. The places with which they traded, the places to which a Spaniard went to seek a fortune or adventure, the places to go when things went wrong in Spain, the places that were Spain’s claim to being a world power, were gone.
This disaster produced the greatest flow of literature Spain had seen since the period from the mid-fifteenth century to the late sixteenth century known in Spanish literature as the golden age. The new turn-of-the-century writers and artists were called “the generation of ’98,” a group who responded to El Desastre by seeking to analyze and redefine the newly diminished Spain. Through paintings, novels, poems, and essays, they searched for the essence of Spain in Castilian landscape, in the history of the golden age, in critical examinations of classic literature such as Cervantes’s Don Quixote de la Mancha. The pivotal question was: How can Spain undergo a regeneration?
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