To the Editors: In her interesting review of Daniel Okrent’s The Guarded Gate, Sarah Churchwell writes that “the term ‘concentration camps’ was also used as early as 1897 by the American press to describe the internment camps, with their ‘concentration of misery,’ forcibly established in Cuba in the run-up to the Spanish-American War for civilians labeled reconcentrados.” Those reconcentrados were in fact interned or “concentrated” in camps, to which they gave their name, created by the Spanish Army in Cuba while suppressing the patriotic rebellion of 1895.
Source : The First Concentration Camps
