"The Cuban Melodrama" (Puck cover, 3 June 1896)
Uncle Sam, labelled the 'Noble Hero' of a stage melodrama, stands over a kneeling young woman marked 'Cuba' and tells a cloaked 'Heavy Villain' marked 'Spain' to stand back. The tell: stage roles do the sorting, so the good and bad parties are named before the viewer weighs anything.
Puck ran this cover on 3 June 1896, two years before the U.S. declaration of war on Spain and during the Cleveland administration's stated neutrality. Uncle Sam, labelled the 'Noble Hero' of a stage melodrama, stands over a kneeling young woman marked 'Cuba' and tells a cloaked 'Heavy Villain' marked 'Spain' to stand back. Name-calling and transfer work through the stage labels, which assign the roles before a viewer weighs anything.
Propaganda techniques used in this cartoon
- Date
- June 3, 1896
- Period
- Pre-1914
- Made by
- Puck (Keppler & Schwarzmann, New York)
Full record
Region, Country, Medium, Issuer type, Regime, Leader, Audience, Purpose, Themes, Event, Source, Rights
- Region
- North America
- Country
- United States
- Medium
- Cartoon
- Issuer type
- Media
- Regime
- Cleveland Administration
- Leader
- Grover Cleveland
- Audience
- Domestic public
- Purpose
- Persuade or win support
- Themes
- War and the military, Empire and colonialism
- Event
- Cuban War of Independence
- Source
- Identified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they are
- Source
- Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, retrieved October 10, 2026
- Rights
- Public domain (published 1896, before 1931); LoC: no known restrictions on publication
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LCCN 2012648531. "The Cuban Melodrama" (Puck cover, 3 June 1896)
