Raul Eduardo Chao received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University and after a brief stint in industry spent 18 years as Full Professor and Department Chairman at the Universities of Puerto Rico and Detroit. In 1986 he founded a very successful management consultancy, assisting companies and government agencies to develop positive work environments and process improvement techniques as the means to secure improvements in productivity and quality. The Systema Group had as clients many Fortune 100 companies and Federal and State organizations, both in the US and abroad. Chao is the author of 15 previous history books, all skillfully documented with hundreds of photographs and quick biographies of all important characters. Complementing his narrative with timely images –many of them seldom seen in serious historical treatises– has been Chao’s distinctive contribution to modern historiography.

The Spanish American war was not decided by the Battle of El Caney or the Battle of San Juan Hill, nor were Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders the heroic victors of the war. That was a military fantasy propagated by the American press, William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, both trying to increase the circulation of their newspapers. The true outcome occurred in the waters of Santiago de Cuba with the total loss of Admiral Pascual Cervera’s Spanish fleet in a suicide encounter with the United States armada. This book presents a personal account and detailed analysis of the battles written by the defeated Admiral Cervera in 1899. The author of this book, Raul Eduardo Chao, has limited himself to only add images and explanatory notes to these exciting and poignant Memorias del Almirante Cervera.