Talk:Battle of Santiago de Cuba

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Reliability issues

I'm afraid this article is not most reliable. See Talk:Spanish-American_War. Comparing with web sources, like http://www.spanamwar.com/santiago.htm (reliable-looking), the article contains some errors, and many "suspected" differencies.

I'm no expert at this subject, so I tried to fix obvious errors only:

• the second destroyer was Furor, not Terror
• the Cervera's ships were escaping west, not east; "Brooklyn" turned east, not west
• more correct designation for "Vizcaya" class is armored cruiser -it had side belt

The last paragraph, about Sampson with "New York" and "Massachusetts" chasing "Colon" is very doubtful - it was rather Schley with "Brooklyn" and "Oregon". Pibwl 23:43, 13 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Missing U.S. perspective

This is quite an entertaining and informative article. I've done some cleanup work, especially some rephrasing to avoid word repetition and to reduce some sentence complexity, as well as changing most occurrences of "American" to the more precise "U.S.".

The main lack I see in the current article is an absence of the U.S. perspective of the battle. It appears to be written from the Spanish POV, with mostly statistical nods toward the U.S. forces (aside from repeated citations of American "bewilderment" and ineptitude, which may very well be accurate, but does not encourage one to believe the article's NPOV-ness). I'd rather hold off on slapping an POV tag on the article until people can work in a little more of the U.S. view of this battle. I'd also hate to lose nice passages like this one:

Shortly thereafter, the Spaniard turned his attention to the burning wreck that was Vizcaya and saluted her.

Adios, Vizcaya?

At his words, the fires raging onboard Vizcaya reached her magazine, and she exploded, throwing bodies and debris for miles.

It was a fitting end to a sad day.

even though it's obviously POV, just for the sake of a more neutral point-of-view. Can some folks familiar with the subject broaden the perspective without losing the poignancy of the Spanish defeat? — Jeff Q 08:18, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)