The Imprisonment and Rescue of Evangelina Cisneros

Few stories ever generated such passionate responses to the Spanish's treatment of Cuban prisoners than that of Evangelina Cisneros, an 18-year-old who was arrested during the rebellion after attempting to trap and kill a Spanish officer. Any crime on Cisneros' part was ignored by Hearst, who sided unwaveringly with the young woman. According to the New York Journal, Cisneros was "guilty of no crime, save that of having in her veins the best blood in Cuba." Almost immediately, Hearst set out on a mission to rescue her, using the campaign as a symbol for American involvement in the war. He sent Karl Decker, a reporter at the Journal's Washington bureau, to Cuba, in order to plot Cisneros' rescue. With the help of accomplices, Decker was able to break Cisneros out of the Spanish prison on Oct. 7, 1897. After spending two days in hiding, Cisneros was smuggled on a passenger steamer that later arrived in New York City.

Hearst and his Journal lauded the liberation as an epochal event, crediting it as one of the great journalistic achievements of the century. Not only what this story highlighted to raise circulation for the newspaper, but it was also used to garner support for America's intervention in the war. Even the complicit Cuban prisoners were exonerated by the piece, and the ultimate message pervading Hearst's papers was that, if this atrocious treatment of young Cubans was ever going to end, America was going to have to step in.

Newspapers of the day saw the rescue mission as a hoax, one of the many exaggerated accounts of Cuban prisoner abuse that both Hearst and Pulitzer were known to have run in their papers. These dissenters included The New York Times, which ran an article accusing the entire rescue of being staged, with the Spanish authorities cooperative in the event. Additionally, one of the former editors of the Journal decried the mission, after he left the paper, as "a false bit of cheap sensationalism." However, Cisneros herself debunked many rumors about a planned escape, and many scholars today are still divided over whether or not this was a genuine effort, or a ruse to drum up publicity for Hearst's crusade.