TAKING UP THE WHrrE MAN'S BURDEN 109


 Fig. 1: 'Images of the Spanish American War Photographer': Gilson Willets,
 from Greater America: Heroes, Battles, Camps [ 1898]. Caption reads: "Cuban
 Volunteers in Their Barracks, Many of These were Cigar Makers at Tampa."

"a jewel in the Caribbean sea." At the heart of this fictional representation,
however, is Cuba, and by extension-Puerto Rico-the two "jewels" to which,
according to General Miles as cited in the opening epigraph, the United States
brought "the advantages and blessings of enlightened civilization." In effect,
the charming plot and captivating images of The Americano explain and
reiterate the doctrine of foreign intervention as Nelson Miles and Teddy
Roosevelt-at front of the military occupation of Cuba and Puerto Rico
respectively-would have it. And as David Walker Griffith would have it, both
Latin American and U.S. audiences are seduced with, not the hideousness of
war, but the "beauty of idea" behind the backdrop of war. This film also
permits the scrutiny of the necessary alliances that have to arise between
political, private, and public enterprise. The "chain of stereotypical
signification" that we see constructed in this film, as well as in the photo-
journalism that endlessly narrated a romanticized justification of the Spanish
American War (see figures 1 and 2), "meets the demand of colonial discourse"
and "what is being dramatized is a separation-between races, cultures,
histories, within histories-a separation between before and after that repeats
obsessively the mythical moment or disjunction" (Bhabha 82).
 By scratching the surface of the early film text, by linking it to its historical /
cultural milieu, one plummets to their meaning and finds, in this instance, a
signifying practice that is particularly revelatory for, indeed, The Americano
is one of the earliest Hollywood depictions made of the Spanish Caribbean.
Its representational power defined the region's public self by formulating
the way natives would 'become' to the U.S. audiences; it constructed the