The old monument still towers over the Malecon, Havana's tattered seafront promenade, but it has been stripped of most of its original busts and plaques, including the eagle that once crowned it. Clearly, even after 100 years, remembering the Maine has a different meaning in Cuba than in the United States.
''To the victims of the Maine, who were sacrificed to imperialist greed in its fervor to seize control of the island of Cuba,'' reads an inscription at the base of the memorial.
Only two rusted cannon and a weathered tablet listing the 267 American sailors who died in the still-unexplained sinking of the battleship remain intact at the site.
As generations of schoolchildren in the United States, Cuba and Spain have been taught, the Maine blew up in Havana on Feb. 15, 1898, leading to a four-month war that freed Cuba from Spanish rule and made Puerto Rico an American possession.
Now, with the centennial of that war looming, Cuba has embarked on a campaign to selectively revive memories of the conflict as a tool to be used, scholars and diplomats say, in disputes with the United States and Spain.
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