"CARRY A MESSAGE TO GARCIA":

About That Message to Garcia...: A signature American homily offers lessons on initiative, loyalty, hard work, and enterprise. (Robert McHenry, November 26, 2008, The American)

Someone said to the president, “There is a fellow by the name of Rowan will find Garcia for you, if anybody can.”

Does anyone read “A Message to Garcia” anymore? It was in my ninth-grade literature book, if I recall aright. At the time, at the age of 13, I had no idea who Garcia was and little more of where Cuba was, and I could not see why the delivery of some message—whose contents, by the way, are never disclosed in the essay—to this unknown person in an unimaginable place should be of concern to me. Yet, by some magic evidently known to educators once but now forgotten or dismissed by their successors, the story and its lesson have stuck with me.

Garcia was General Calixto García e Iñiguez (1839–1898), who was from an early age involved in uprisings against the Spanish authorities in Cuba. By 1896 he was second in command of the insurrectionary army. It was in that capacity that he was drawn into an uneasy alliance with U.S. forces that began landing on the island in June 1898.

So much for background. Now, what about that message, and why do we (some of us, anyway) remember it?

To begin with, there was no message to Garcia.