Cuba in War Time

Celebrating a decade of Columbia Global Reports, the Forerunners series revives groundbreaking works of investigative journalism and incisive analysis published a century before CGR’s founding. These texts, once forgotten or underexplored, reflect CGR’s core mission: fearless reporting, global perspective, and intellectual rigor. Each selection remains strikingly relevant today, offering historical insights that challenge contemporary perspectives and reaffirm the power of journalism to shape the world.

Initially published in 1897, Cuba in War Time brought readers onto the battlefields with a style that was urgent, immersive, and unmistakably modern. Richard Harding Davis, the most famous journalist of his generation, filed vivid, morally charged dispatches, capturing everything from Spanish atrocities to the execution of a young Cuban rebel, and helped transform frontline reporting into a new literary form and a potent political force. Davis’s work helped ignite public support for the Spanish-American War, and his account of the Battle of San Juan Hill turned a young Theodore Roosevelt into a national hero. Yet his work often blurred the line between fact and spectacle, revealing how easily journalism could be swept into the causes it chronicled.

This edition reexamines Davis’s legacy with a searching new introduction by Peter Maass, a celebrated war reporter himself. A foundational text in the history of American media, Cuba in War Time remains as gripping and unsettling as the events it describes.