July 1898 was a bad month for Spain and the trigger for a disastrous year that would go down in the annals.
After the naval defeat in Cavite (Philippines) against the young but already powerful US Navy, Spanish power was crumbling in the archipelago: on July 1 the siege of Baler began there, in which a Spanish detachment in an enclave on the island of Luzón resisted with epic but without hope the attacks of the insurgent Filipinos.
The episode is better known in our parts with the traditional title of “The last of the Philippines.” If things got ugly in the Pacific, they weren’t much better in the Caribbean: on July 3, the Americans once again inflicted a severe corrective on the beatable Armada in Santiago de Cuba. Spain, once imperial, was headed for the disaster of 1998.
