The Irish journalist who became the ‘most dependable evaluator of military strategy’

In the winter of 1872, journalist James O’Kelly arrived in Cuba to report on an uprising against Spanish colonial rule. The 30-year-old Dubliner had been sent by the New York Herald with instructions to find the rebels’ camps and interview their leader, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes.

From Havana, O’Kelly went in search of the patriot fighters based in the island’s eastern provinces, regaling his American readership with dispatches from his horseback travels.

Spanish authorities kept a close eye on O’Kelly’s movements, warning that he risked being shot as a spy if discovered in enemy lines, but the Irishman remained undaunted.

O’Kelly at first struggled to locate the insurgents as they were constantly on the move. Then, one evening, an unsigned letter was slipped through the door of his hotel room in Santiago de Cuba. The message gave directions to a place where he could go to be escorted to the rebel territory of “Cuba Libre”. He wondered if it was a trap, but took the chance and rode out to meet his guide.

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Thus followed a long trek through dense, hilly forests, part of which had to be taken on foot after his horse ran away.

In March 1873, O’Kelly finally reached Céspedes and secured his exclusive interview, breakfasting with the revolutionary leader in his makeshift presidential residence.

Céspedes urged his visitor to leave Cuba as soon as he could, but the Dubliner insisted on following the rebel forces’ march through the mountains. When the time came to take his leave, a guard of 20 men accompanied him to a point near the Spanish outposts.

O’Kelly made no secret of his sympathies as he shadowed the Cubans. An Irish Fenian, he was sharply critical of imperialism and awed by the strength of a people “holding out against fearful odds”.

His impressions of the patriots were far removed from the picture given to him by Spanish officials. “Sitting among these gentle-natured and good-hearted people,” as he wrote. “I could not refrain from wondering how boldly men can lie, how cruelly the character of a people can be blackened... Here were men who for months had been represented to me as ferocious savages.”

The expedition came to a dramatic end with O’Kelly’s arrest and detention by Spanish authorities – a development that prompted outraged headlines in the US. He was eventually transferred to a jail in Spain and released, whereupon he returned to New York.

In 1874, he published The Mambi-Land, or Adventures of a Herald Correspondent in Cuba, based on his reports for the Herald. The scholar Jennifer Brittan has described it as the first book-length publication on the Ten Years’ War.

O’Kelly’s time in Cuba was far from the only colourful episode in his career. He had previously served with the French Foreign Legion in Algeria and Mexico, and acted as an arms agent for the Irish Republican Brotherhood in Britain.

O’Kelly’s subsequent assignments included accompanying the emperor of Brazil on an American tour and reporting on the US army’s war against the Sioux.

As the historian Paul Townend has written, he was by now the Herald’s “most dependable and independent evaluator of military strategy”.

O’Kelly later turned his attention back to Ireland and became an MP for the Irish Parliamentary Party, representing Roscommon for more than three decades until his death in 1916.

This Extraordinary Emigrants article was written by Dr Catherine Healy, DFA historian-in-residence at EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum, an interactive museum that tells the story of how the Irish shaped and influenced the world. O’Kelly’s trip to Cuba is featured in Entangled Islands, a new exhibition exploring four centuries of Irish connection to the Caribbean, now open at EPIC until February 2024. epicchq.com/entangled-islands