Talk:Battle of Santiago de Cuba

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[edit] 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)

The main reference for this article, "A Dirty Little War by A. Bagosy," is a mystery work. There are no copies available for sale on any number of new and used book sites in both the U.S. and Europe. It can't be found on WorldCat nor in the Library of Congress catalog, etc. Basically, one has to question an article that depends almost exclusively, by the author's own admission, on a single unknown, unobtainable source - given the fairly obvious bias noted by this and other readers, one wonders if a potential reader wouldn't be better off being told to look elsewhere for information on this subject. By the way, the standard academic work on the war is Trask's "The War with Spain in 1898" - generally available new, used, in libraries, etc. jmdeur 02:52, 31 Oct 2007 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.158.231.130 (talk)

[edit] 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)

Hard to reproduce the "American POV" on a passage like this one, considering that none of the American ships blew up. Albrecht (talk) 01:58, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

Not sure what is meant by "reproduce" immediately above - did the commentator mean reduce? If so, it would be hard to imagine how "American POV" could be reduced any further in this article. jmdeur 04:00 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Just checked what the definition of "B article" means in this forum, I hate to disagree, but this article sure doesn't appear to meet these criteria:

1. "suitably referenced" - the text appears to be based on a single obscure reference (see my note above). points are not cited.

2. "does not contain major omissions or inaccuracies" - the reviewer above notes several inaccuracies and another reviewer has pointed to the bias towards one side of the battle.

3 and 4. okay, it has sections and appears to be grammatically correct.

5. images again repeat the one-sided viewpoint of the author, a diagram might have helped him get the geography straightened out. jmdeur 13:39, 31 Oct 07 (UTC)