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That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution
That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution
That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution
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That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution

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Lars Schoultz offers a comprehensive chronicle of U.S. policy toward the Cuban Revolution. Using a rich array of documents and firsthand interviews with U.S. and Cuban officials, he tells the story of the attempts and failures of ten U.S. administrations to end the Cuban Revolution. He concludes that despite the overwhelming advantage in size and power that the United States enjoys over its neighbor, the Cubans' historical insistence on their right to self-determination has been a constant thorn in the side of American administrations, influenced both U.S. domestic politics and foreign policy on a much larger stage, and resulted in a freeze in diplomatic relations of unprecedented longevity.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateFeb 1, 2011
ISBN9780807888605
That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution
Author

Lars Schoultz

Lars Schoultz is the William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a past president of the Latin American Studies Association.

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    That Infernal Little Cuban Republic - Lars Schoultz

    THAT INFERNAL LITTLE CUBAN REPUBLIC

    THAT INFERNAL LITTLE CUBAN REPUBLIC the UNITED STATES and the CUBAN REVOLUTION

    THAT INFERNAL LITTLE CUBAN REPUBLIC the UNITED STATES and the CUBAN REVOLUTION

    LARS SCHOULTZ

    The University of North Carolina Press

    Chapel Hill

    This book was published with the assistance of the william R. Kenan Jr. Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

    © 2009 The University of North Carolina Press

    All rights reserved

    Designed by Kimberly Bryant

    Set in Arnhem and Sveva

    by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

    Manufactured in the United States of America

    The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

    The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schoultz, Lars.

    That infernal little Cuban republic : the United States and the Cuban Revolution / Lars Schoultz.

    p. cm.

    Includes bibliographical references and index. iSbn 978-0-8078-3260-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

    1. United States—Foreign relations—Cuba. 2. Cuba— Foreign relations—United States. 3. United States— Foreign relations—1945–1989. 4. United States—Foreign relations—1989– 5. Presidents—United States—History— 20th century. 6. Cuba—History—Revolution, 1959– 7. Cuba—Politics and government—1959–1990. 8. Cuba— Politics and government—1990– I. Title.

    E183.8.C9S375 2009

    327.7307291—dc22

                                    2008036714

    13 12 11 10 09 5 4 3 2 1

    I am so angry with that infernal little Cuban republic that I would like to wipe its people off the face of the earth. All we have wanted from them was that they would behave themselves and be prosperous and happy so that we would not have to interfere. And now, lo and behold, they have started an utterly unjustifiable and pointless revolution.

    —President Theodore Roosevelt, 1906

    Contents

    Introduction Neighbors

    1 Heritage

    2 Prelude The Truman Years

    3 Arousal The Eisenhower Years, 1953–1958

    4 Watching and Waiting The Eisenhower Administration, 1959

    5 1960 The Year of Pushing and Shoving

    6 The Bay of Pigs

    7 State-Sponsored Terrorism

    8 He’s Going to Be There until He Dies The Johnson Administration

    9 Mutual Hostility as a Fact of Life The Nixon-Ford Years

    10 Reconciliation and Estrangement The Carter Years

    11 Back to Square One The Reagan Years

    12 Unwavering Hostility The George H. W. Bush Administration

    13 Blessings of Liberty The Clinton Administration

    14 More Blessings of Liberty The George W. Bush Administration

    Conclusion Benevolent Domination

    Notes

    Index

    THAT INFERNAL LITTLE CUBAN REPUBLIC

    INTRODUCTION NEIGHBORS

    Imagine living in a neighborhood where the family across the street irritates you. It’s a wide street, fortunately, so most of the time you can simply ignore them, but every so often they do something annoying— your kids go over to play with theirs and wobble back home with the marijuana giggles, or these neighbors welcome some out-of-town houseguests who are clearly up to no good, placing you nervously on guard until you see them leave. Or what about that morning when you awoke to discover that a few of their many children had pitched a tent in your front yard, complaining they can no longer endure living at home? They apparently intend to stay forever.

    Then imagine that you try not to let all this bother you. You understand that these neighbors haven’t had your advantages. They come from different stock—a tropical people, outwardly cheerful but hopelessly emotional and pathologically frenetic, investing most of their energy in billowy arm-waving and oral pyrotechnics. Style is fairly insignificant, of course, but when combined with the irresponsible behavior, it all adds up, sometimes to the point where you simply cannot take any more. That’s when you march across the street to set them straight. Usually, you don’t have to do anything more than raise your voice—they know the consequences when you get angry, so they quickly promise to behave better. Yet can they? Probably not without your help, which requires lots of solid advice and sometimes a modest loan but also makes you feel good. After you’ve set them on the right path, you always return home with a sense of genuine accomplishment.

    Then imagine you do this once too often.

    WHAT HAPPENED NEXT was called the Cuban Revolution. Of course, the revolution involved much more than shooing the Yankees back across the street, but this book focuses on the U.S.-Cuban relationship. It examines how the United States deals with a difficult neighbor. The story focuses on the island’s revolutionary generation, which grew to maturity in a country characterized by widespread deprivation, extreme inequality, and extraordinary corruption. And, unfortunately, many Cubans of that generation were convinced that the United States bore much of the responsibility for the problems that faced them. The first chapter of this book explains what the dean of historians of Cuba meant when he wrote that almost any comprehensive history of Cuba is, of necessity, a discourse on U.S.-Cuban relations.¹

    This initial chapter also introduces Washington’s mental image of Cuba, focusing on the widespread expectation that the United States would act as a guardian of the less-developed peoples of the Caribbean but emphasizing that the root of this hegemonic presumption was a benevolent disposition and an unshakable belief that proximity to the United States was the region’s singular good fortune. Or, as an assistant secretary of state asserted in 1916, Nature, in its rough method of uplift, gives sick nations strong neighbors.² Three months later the United States sent several hundred soldiers to lift up what was then Cuba’s sickest province, Camagüey, where they stayed for five years.

    The trouble really began several decades later, in 1959, when a group of rebels ousted a perfectly acceptable dictator and proceeded to cause more trouble than anyone could have imagined. There was something on Cuba every five minutes, complained an exasperated secretary of state, Christian Herter, and while he and President Dwight D. Eisenhower at first tried to be accommodating, they soon lost patience and began planning the Bay of Pigs invasion. There is a limit to what the United States in self-respect can endure, Eisenhower said when he announced the closing of the U.S. embassy, and when he handed John F. Kennedy the keys to the White House three weeks later, Eisenhower also passed along an admonition: We cannot let the present government there go on.³

    That was in 1961. Twenty years later, Eisenhower and Kennedy were both dead and buried, yet Fidel Castro was boasting that "we will still be here in another 20 years. Not if incoming U.S. president Ronald Reagan and his new secretary of state, Alexander M. Haig Jr., had anything to say about the matter. During the 1980 campaign, Reagan had proposed a blockade of Cuba, and now, at the first meeting of his national security team, Haig proposed going one step further: an invasion. Finding little support for the idea, the secretary pulled his principal deputy aside and gave him his first assignment: I want to go after Cuba, Bud. I want you to get everyone together and give me a plan for doing it."

    That was in 1981. Twenty years later, Ronald Reagan was dying of Alzheimer’s disease and Alexander Haig was a semiretired consultant padding around his Northern Virginia office in Hush Puppies, while George W. Bush had slipped on the presidential wingtips and was promising no letup: I’ve got a plan to spread freedom, he told a 2004 campaign audience, not only in the greater Middle East but also in our own hemisphere, in places like Cuba. But the second President Bush, like his nine immediate predecessors, had been obliged to focus on more important problems. He did not even mention the island in a wide-ranging foreign policy speech near the end of his tenure, and in reply to a question from the audience, he indicated that he was leaving the island’s fate to divine intervention: One day the good Lord will take Fidel Castro away.

    IMAGINE NOW, on the revolution’s golden anniversary, that your grandchildren ask you to explain U.S. policy during the half century after 1959. On a basic level, the answer is easy: We have been attempting to protect our interests. Specifically, Washington’s policy has reflected first the economic concerns of U.S. investors, then—and much more important—the security concerns of U.S. defense managers, and finally the electoral concerns of U.S. politicians, who have eagerly sought the support of Cuban Americans, some of whom are wealthy campaign contributors and several hundred thousand of whom vote in the crucial state of Florida. It’s that simple—an ever-varying mixture of economic, security, and domestic political interests—and if you think it will be enough of an explanation for your grandchildren, read no further.

    But you’ll miss what makes this relationship so intriguing: underlying these everyday interests is an ideology, a set of tightly integrated beliefs that controls the way powerful countries like the United States have traditionally thought about smaller neighboring countries like Cuba. At the most rudimentary level, this book is simply a case study in an intellectual tradition stretching back to the fifth century, b.C., when Thucydides, chronicling the conflicts among Greek city-states, captured perfectly the bedrock principle of what we today call realism: the strong will do what they want, and the weak will accept what they must. Realism is a part of our ideology—an important part.

    Were Thucydides explaining U.S. policy toward the Cuban Revolution, he would begin with some basic data:

    Here, Thucydides would emphasize, is a modest island with an economy 1/250th the size of its wealthy, continent-wide neighbor, which has used a substantial portion of its fabulous wealth to create the most powerful military in the history of the human race. And that raw strength has given politicians such as Vice President Richard Nixon the ability to tell voters that the United States has the power, and Mr. Castro knows this, to throw him out of office, and it has given cabinet members such as Alexander Haig the ability to ask President Reagan for a simple green light: You just give me the word and I’ll turn that f—— island into a parking lot.

    What Thucydides would have difficulty explaining—and what makes traditional realism an incomplete theory—is this: When the Cubans refused to accept what they must, their leaders were not thrown out of office and their island was not turned into a parking lot. This gives rise to the question that makes relations with this modest island fascinating for casual observers and especially relevant for theorists: How have Cubans managed to get away with it? For decades, the answer was that Cuba balanced U.S. power by enlisting the support of a rival superpower, but that answer, which was never more than partially correct, takes us only to about 1990, when the Soviet Union withdrew its support. A complete answer has to include the constraints that the modern world now imposes on the exercise of power.

    This book accents the most elemental constraint, the need to maintain a sense of proportion, and emphasizes that it is not simply a good idea; it is mandatory. This constraint arose as humans became increasingly aware of the costs attached to every benefit, especially in international relations, where the potential costs have risen in lockstep with technology. For chronic but not acute aggravations such as Cuba, superpowers are now especially wary of the opportunity costs, and a simple list of all the other issues confronting any superpower like the United States is sufficient to explain why Richard Nixon did not employ U.S. power to throw Castro out of office (in fact, Nixon largely ignored Cuba when he finally claimed the presidency), why President Reagan declined to endorse Secretary Haig’s parking-lot solution, why President Bush left Cuba to the good Lord, and why presidential adviser Arthur Schlesinger Jr. said this about the one president who seemed to spend more time than any other on Cuba: Castro was not a major issue for Kennedy, who had much else on his mind.⁷ It took JFK’s best and brightest only three months—until the Bay of Pigs—to discover that Cubans were going to fight back. We could certainly make them accept what they must, but not with a couple of thousand Cuban exiles; we would have to do it ourselves, with the U.S. Marines, and they might indeed have to turn the island into a parking lot. Victory would be ours, but at an especially exorbitant price in the currency that might matter most, world opinion.

    So what was Plan B? After a few years of what we today would call state-sponsored terrorism—of sabotaging power plants, torching sugar fields, and arming assassins—U.S. policymakers slowly reached a consensus that Cuba was not all that important and that the logical course of action was to back off. During the Kennedy era, I used to get a call from McGeorge Bundy or one of his assistants every day about something, recalled the State Department’s principal Cuba officer, but then under Johnson, the calls dropped down to probably once a week, and then maybe once every two weeks or once a month. Inexperienced in foreign affairs, Lyndon Baines Johnson had waited only a few days after inheriting the White House to seek advice from the widely respected chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, J. William Fulbright, who warned against doing anything dramatic. I’m not getting into any Bay of Pigs deal, Johnson interrupted to agree. No, I’m just asking you what we ought to do to pinch their nuts more than we’re doing.

    Nut-pinching has been U.S. policy ever since.

    Why? Because even a superpower’s resources are limited, and LBJ, like every one of his successors, had better ways to spend his political capital. Instead of ramping up Operation Mongoose, JFK’s effort to overthrow the island’s government, President Johnson initially chose to focus on domestic issues—a month after consulting with Fulbright, LBJ went before a joint session of Congress to declare the War on Poverty and to press for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Thus distracted, Johnson had little time for Cuba, especially as his administration’s foreign policy eyes began to focus on Indochina. National security adviser McGeorge Bundy soon was encouraging everyone to face reality. The chances are very good that we will still be living with Castro some time from now, he said; we might just as well get used to the idea.⁹ Thucydides never would have said that.

    In our time, only an administration misjudging the Cubans as an easy takedown (as JFK’s did) or an administration underestimating the costs in political capital (as Jimmy Carter’s did) would invest heavily in an island such as Cuba. All the rest have done what they felt they had to do to protect the ever-changing U.S. economic, security and political interests, but all have done so on the cheap, never treating Cuba as a problem requiring decisive action. Of course the United States could turn the island into a parking lot, they seemed to say, especially after the end of the Cold War, but it might distract the country from more important problems such as combating terrorism or resolving the domestic issue du jour. In a world packed to overflowing with threatened interests and an unlimited number of domestic problems, small islands are simply not that important. Realists have to be realistic.

    This moderation is a fascinating aspect of modern realism. When your grandchildren ask you to explain it, you can use Cuba. There is no better example of how we are obliged to control ourselves—and, therefore, of how today’s foreign-policy-making process actually works.

    BUT THERE IS MORE to the Cuba ideology than moderated realism. An additional part was largely hidden during the three decades when Washington justified its hostility by pointing to the revolutionary government’s alignment with the Soviet Union. But then the Cold War ended, and the geostrategic shell cracked apart to reveal the existential core of the ideology underlying Washington’s compulsion to march across the street and set everything straight: the United States simply could not stand aloof while the Cuban government misbehaved. Specifically, for the past two decades, we have been determined to do something to protect Cubans’ human rights. Thus, when the Cold War ended and the United States needed new laws about Cuba, we gave them human rights titles, beginning with the 1992 Cuban Democracy Act and the 1996 Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act.

    This was nothing new. Cold and hot wars come and go, but what remains constant is the belief that Cubans, like most of the people who live beneath the United States, will benefit from our humanitarian legislation. Cubans are Hispanics and blacks, imperfect leaves on two stunted branches of the human species—not simply underdeveloped, but probably underdevelopable left to their own devices and given their origin. Or, as a U.S. ambassador wrote from Havana in the late 1940s, just as Cuba’s revolutionary generation was reaching adulthood, Many of them possess the superficial charm of clever children, spoiled by nature and geography—but under the surface they combine the worst characteristics of the unfortunate admixture and interpenetration of Spanish and Negro cultures—laziness, cruelty, inconstancy, irresponsibility, and inbred dishonesty.¹⁰

    It is probably a sign of progress that U.S. diplomats no longer write such sentences, but today’s political correctness makes it more difficult to identify and examine this aspect of the ideology underlying U.S. policy. Perhaps that explains why it is so common to argue that today’s focus on human rights is only a ruse—that human rights offers a convenient rationale for a policy dictated by post–Cold War domestic politics, dictated specifically by the need to curry favor among the Cuban Americans who detest the Cuban Revolution, several hundred thousand of whom live in a state with twenty-seven electoral votes. Don’t tell this to your grandchildren—it’s wrong. Anyone who watched George W. Bush snatch the White House from Al Gore in 2000 understands how important Florida can be, but elections, like wars, come and go, while Washington’s civilizing mission remains a constant. Florida had only five electoral votes and there was no such thing as a Cuban American voter in 1901, when Congress passed the Platt Amendment granting the United States the right to march across the street whenever it wanted for the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty.¹¹

    Today this part of the ideology—a civilizing mission—remains largely hidden, embedded in a human rights context. Only occasionally does direct evidence of its existence pop to the surface, generally in an unscripted comment such as when a reporter asked the first President Bush if he intended to engage Fidel Castro now that the Soviet threat had disappeared. What’s the point of my talking to him? Bush replied. All I’d tell him is what I’m telling you, to give the people the freedom that they want. And then you’ll see the United States do exactly what we should: Go down and lift those people up.¹² President Bush’s immediate predecessor, Ronald Reagan, always answered that Cuba first had to end its alliance with Moscow, but here in 1991 how effortlessly a three-decade-long policy justified by the need to contain communism was replaced by a policy based on a conviction that Cubans’ lack of freedom triggered an obligation to help, to uplift. Washington’s new policy was to insist that the island’s government be less repressive of its citizens’ human rights.

    Revealing as it may have been, President Bush’s comment was a rarity— rare because it sounds bad to our postcolonial ears. Today we no longer feel comfortable about uplifting underdeveloped peoples, about the white man’s burden. Now we have to examine behavior and then infer the commitment to a civilizing mission. This examination consumes a good many of the pages that follow, including a discussion of Washington’s most recent plan for Cuba’s uplifting, unveiled in 2004 by the President’s Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba. It identified six major areas where Cubans could benefit from U.S. assistance, the first and most important of which was in selecting their leaders. This has been an especially consistent part of Washington’s policy toward Cuba, stretching back to 1901, when Governor-General Leonard Wood, writing from Havana, put his pro-consular finger squarely on the problem: No one wants more than I a good and stable government, of and by the people here, but we must see that the right class are in office.¹³

    That also sounds presumptuous to us, so now we use a euphemism: Hastening Cuba’s Transition is the title of Chapter 1 of the plan President Bush unveiled; it specified sixty-two steps the United States intended to take to oust Cuba’s current repressive leaders. Then, after they have been replaced by the right class of people, it will be on to the uplifting: Chapter 2, Meeting Basic Human Needs; Chapter 3, Establishing Democratic Institutions; Chapter 4, Establishing the Core Institutions of a Free Economy; Chapter 5, Modernizing Infrastructure; and Chapter 6, Addressing Environmental Degradation. And since some of the island’s volatile residents might refuse to watch quietly while the United States sets everything straight, the plan also contains a still-classified security appendix, the gist of which is probably captured by an unclassified sentence indicating that some part of the U.S. government—the Pentagon?—will be standing by if needed to keep all schools open during an emergency phase of the transition in order to keep children and teenagers off the streets.¹⁴

    The unspoken conceptual framework—the mentalité—of the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba is that only a few die-hard revolutionaries and perhaps some immature adolescents would want to live in today’s Cuba if, with Washington’s help, they could meet basic needs, establish both democratic institutions and a free economy, build a modern infrastructure, and even tackle the problem of environmental degradation. Since this is so obvious, simply to decline Washington’s offer of uplifting is to set off an alarm: Why are Cubans behaving in an irrational way?

    Cold War geopolitics at first dictated communism as the answer—it is impossible to work through the archives of the Eisenhower and Kennedy years and fail to be impressed by how genuinely worried everyone was. It was not simply a convenient justification for our hostility. In the apocalyptic version then common in the United States, communism threatened us with death and destruction, probably not with a direct attack but by slowly undermining vulnerable allies, one by one, until the United States stood alone in a hostile world. Then Nikita Khrushchev would have his way. We will bury you, he had boasted in 1956, just as Cuba’s rebels were planning their campaign against Fulgencio Batista’s army. And, we need to remind ourselves, that was not said by someone whose best shot was to fly hijacked airliners into skyscrapers, however horrible that was. Khrushchev’s finger rested on a nuclear button.¹⁵

    With Moscow intent on depositing the Free World in the dustbin of history, the United States had to be particularly vigilant in the Caribbean, where physical proximity would make a communist beachhead especially threatening. Central Intelligence Agency (Cia) director Allen Dulles insisted that the United States could not allow the establishment of such a beachhead: As the evidence of a communist attempt at takeover is uncovered, it is vital to deal with it before it has permeated the society which it is attacking. . . . The longer one waits the more drastic must be the medicine. It is like cancer.¹⁶ Cuba was far too close for comfort, and the island’s new leaders were declining every well-intentioned offer of uplifting; instead, they made no secret of their intention to reform Cuban society without Washington’s assistance and to do so in the broadest sense of the word— to re-form more or less everything, including many things belonging to powerful U.S. citizens who liked their belongings just as they were.

    When U.S. diplomats brought these investors’ concerns to the attention of the new Cuban government, the country’s leaders insisted that the United States respect their sovereign right to reform their own society: The Cuban people are anxious to live in peace and harmony with the Government and the people of the United States, Cuba’s revolutionaries said in a formal diplomatic note, and they are also desirous of intensifying their diplomatic and economic relations, but on the basis of mutual respect. Thucydides did not believe in mutual respect between unequals, and the obvious asymmetries between the United States and Cuba led Washingtonton’s realists to believe they could do whatever they wanted. But then came the cold shower we call the Bay of Pigs, and thereafter a reasonable sense of proportion mandated caution. A final solution by U.S. forces—an invasion— would have grave political dangers to our position throughout the Western hemisphere, the State Department warned JFK in 1961.¹⁷ The world had changed since the Peloponnesian Wars, and by the mid–twentieth century, the leader of the Free World was not allowed to select the parking-lot option without incurring significant costs. Moscow used that approach for its neighbors, like Hungary, and U.S. citizens saw the difference as their trump card. And so Washington selected nut-pinching—an embargo that would make life as miserable as possible for everyday Cubans. Strangle the island’s economy and eventually the regime would collapse; in the interim, Washington could focus on its many more important problems.

    So far it has not worked, and your grandchildren will probably want to know if it ever will. Change is certain to come, but you should point out that the future is for others to narrate; for now, you can explain why the United States doggedly pursued one of the most unproductive policies in the history of U.S. foreign relations—a policy that has included everything from a CIA assassination plot featuring a ballpoint pen rigged with a hypodermic needle so fine that Fidel Castro would not notice he was being injected with poison (1963) to a U.S. Interests Section in Havana with a Times Square– style streaming electronic ticker running across its facade. The State Department uses the ticker to acquaint Cubans with the wisdom of representative U.S. thinkers such as rocker Frank Zappa: Communism doesn’t work because people like to own stuff (2006).

    You can talk until you are blue in the face about how every country protects its economic, security, and political interests and about how a half century of hostility really did not cost very much, but your grandchildren will find it difficult to understand what your elected representatives could have been thinking when they used even a modest part of your taxes to pay for the ballpoint pen and the ticker and everything that came in between. There is no quick answer. First you will have to tell them about the Cuba that existed before 1959, which explains why there was a revolution and helps explain why the revolution seemed so unwilling to accommodate Washington. Then you can mention Thucydides, but quickly point out how two millennia of amendments to his version of the law of the jungle have constrained superpowers; they now have to maintain a sense of proportion about small neighboring countries. They always have much larger fish to fry, and always with a limited supply of political capital. Tell your grandchildren that superpowers sometimes do not get along with their small neighbors, but that does not mean you can turn their property into a parking lot. Most important, try to place all this in a long-term perspective, just as Fidel Castro did in a 1974 interview: We cannot move, nor can the United States. Speaking realistically, someday some sort of ties will be established. After all, he pointed out, We are neighbors.¹⁸

    1 HERITAGE

    It is next to impossible to make them believe that we have only their own interests at heart

    —Governor-General Leonard Wood, 1901

    Exactly when Cubans began to irritate the United States remains an unsettled question, but it was in the nineteenth century and perhaps as early as the 1820s, when the village of Regla in Havana’s harbor became a resale shop for pirates who had plundered U.S. shipping. That forced Secretary of State John Quincy Adams to stop more important work (he was just getting started on the Monroe Doctrine) and instruct his envoy in Madrid to lodge a formal complaint. It is surely within the competency of the government of Cuba to put down that open market, he wrote, but he clearly had no intention of relying on Spain’s colonial authorities: U.S. Marines had already been sent to do the job, landing six times along the Cuban coast, and they would land again six months later and once more in early 1825, making Cuba the site of eight of the first nine deployments of U.S. forces in what we today call Latin America.¹

    These events were hardly worth mentioning when compared to what occurred when an unsuccessful ten-year struggle for Cuban independence broke out just prior to Ulysses Grant’s 1868 election, and Hamilton Fish had barely managed to warm the secretary of state’s chair before some members of Congress began to argue that the war offered the United States an opportunity to seize the island. With the administration focused on domestic reconstruction and with the State Department concentrating on how to react to the Senate’s rejection of the Alabama claims treaty with Great Britain, the last thing on Secretary Fish’s mind during his first month in office was the acquisition of a Caribbean island, but he, too, had to stop his more important work to muster the administration’s forces in Congress. Responding to his call, one ally in the House of Representatives made fun of the ‘manifest destiny’ men [who] would make American citizens alike of the Esquimaux toward the north pole and the naked natives of the tropics. Another stood up to argue against a further introduction of the African element by annexation, followed by agreement from a third: We have enough of inferior races in our midst without absorbing and not assimilating the Creoles and blacks of Cuba.²

    With annexation quashed, Fish still had to reply to Spain’s complaints that U.S. citizens were aiding Cuba’s rebels—the departure of various filibustering expeditions in broad day-light, and unmolested, from New York and other federal ports, the Spanish claimed.³ The initial response to Madrid was handled by an assistant, but then the rebels purchased a U.S. steamship, the Virginius, that dodged around the Caribbean carrying supplies and messages until the Spanish finally captured it and summarily executed the ship’s captain and thirty-six crew members, most of them U.S. citizens. As would be the case today, the dead sailors’ relatives descended on their representatives in Congress, demanding revenge and restitution. Legislators, in turn, proposed everything from a full investigation to a declaration of war, and the secretary of state again had to drop everything and prepare two lengthy reports to mollify Congress. This, the Virginius incident, was only the most grievous of many, and Fish soon concluded that close ties with Cuba would be an unmitigated calamity.

    After ten years the Cuban rebellion faltered, although enough sporadic violence continued into the 1880s for U.S. consul Adam Badeau to urge caution when Washington, intent on expanding exports, began to consider an agreement to liberalize trade with Spanish Cuba. Badeau admitted that he was torn: on the one hand, he asked, why bother to establish closer relations with an island where Spain’s corrupt rule was leading to the misery and anxiety of all, condemned alike to poverty and ruin; on the other hand, was not facilitating trade a consul’s primary responsibility? In the end, he came down in favor of an agreement, concluding that U.S. merchants would extend to the country and its inhabitants the advantages of contact with the higher civilization, the greater energy, the purer morality of America.

    There the matter rested until 1895, when the New York–based Cuban Revolutionary Party issued a new call for independence, and soon Antonio Maceo, José Martí, and Máximo Gómez had returned to lead the fight against Spanish colonialism. As usual, Grover Cleveland’s State Department was preoccupied by a much larger problem—the Venezuelan boundary dispute with Great Britain—but Secretary of State Richard Olney soon was approached by a U.S. investor, said to be one of the largest landed proprietors of Cuba, a man of great wealth and clearly a rebel sympathizer. After their meeting, Olney sent the president a lengthy memo arguing that the rebels have a right to ask, I think, that we inform ourselves upon the point, whether they are merely gangs of roving banditti, or are a substantial portion of the community revolting against intolerable conditions.

    The British soon expressed a willingness to negotiate an end to the Venezuelan dispute, and Olney was free to give Cuba more attention. He composed a lengthy diplomatic note describing the disruptive effect of the conflict on U.S. economic interests and the dangers faced by U.S. citizens residing in Cuba, and he warned Madrid that the United States can not contemplate with complacency another ten years of Cuban insurrection. The Spanish replied with a conciliatory message expressing a willingness to adopt such reforms as may be useful or necessary, but only after the rebels had laid down their arms. Spain’s envoy noted tactfully that the rebels would do so more quickly if all the people of the United States …will completely cease to extend unlawful aid to the insurgents.⁷ Little more was said during President Cleveland’s ten remaining months in the White House, but in his final message to Congress he cautioned that it can not be reasonably assumed that the hitherto expectant attitude of the United States will be indefinitely maintained. His solution was a measure of home rule . . . while preserving the sovereignty of Spain.

    The McKinley administration thus inherited what has remained a recurring problem of U.S. relations with its Caribbean neighbors: instability was both damaging U.S. economic interests and arousing U.S. humanitarian concern. While refusing to be swept up by the rising clamor for action, the new president accepted the platform on which he had run—The United States should actively use its influence and good offices to restore peace— and in late 1897 a combination of Washington’s pressure and the insurgents’ successes convinced the Spanish government to put reform before pacification.⁹ McKinley responded with guarded optimism; Spain should be given a reasonable chance, he wrote in his first annual message, but if the reforms failed, other action by the United States will remain to be taken.¹⁰

    McKinley was also doing his best to calm a rising generation of U.S. politicians intent on picking up where the pre–Civil War advocates of Manifest Destiny had left off. By the mid-1890s, these jingoes had largely taken over the Republican Party, and with a colonial war just over the southern horizon, jingo leader Theodore Roosevelt saw his generation’s opportunity to do what civilization demanded—earlier, he had characterized the Mexican-American War of the 1840s as an example of nature’s guiding principle: It was inevitable, as well as in the highest degree desirable for the good of humanity at large, that the American people should ultimately crowd out the Mexicans. . . . It was out of the question that the Texans should long continue under Mexican rule; and it would have been a great misfortune if they had. It was out of the question to expect them to submit to the mastery of the weaker race. Now, eight years later, just as Cuba’s war for independence was resuming, Roosevelt picked up the same pen to write that all the great masterful races have been fighting races, and the minute that a race loses the hard fighting virtues, then, no matter what else it may retain, no matter how skilled in commerce and finance, in science or art, it has lost its proud right to stand as the equal of the best. Cowardice in a race, as in an individual, is the unpardonable sin.¹¹

    Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill suggests that this was more than a politician’s bluster; it was his creed. The truth is he believes in war, concluded William Howard Taft. He has the spirit of the old Berserkers.¹² And Roosevelt was not alone. As the Cuban insurrection was getting under way, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge reminded citizens that the United States had a proud heritage of conquest, colonization, and territorial expansion unequalled by any people in the nineteenth century—and, he added, we are not to be curbed now.¹³ A Civil War hero who had watched friends die in combat, the older McKinley disagreed: in his first annual message to Congress he rejected the growing chorus pushing to annex Cuba, and at about the same time he told a former secretary of state that these people will have a different view of the question when their sons are dying in Cuba.¹⁴

    Meanwhile, Cuban émigrés were doing their best to support the jingoes. Former President Cleveland recalled being time and again threatened by frenzied men and women with dire calamities to be visited upon myself and children because of what they saw fit to assert was my enmity to the Cuban cause,¹⁵ but most Cuban leaders in the United States were much more sophisticated; in particular, the leaders of the New York–based junta focused their lobbying on the media, virtually writing the war news for a number of major dailies. One such story exploded in the headlines at a critical moment in early 1898, when the junta destroyed the credibility of the Spanish minister in Washington, Enrique Dupuy de Lôme, who in a private letter characterized President McKinley as a pandering politician. There are various explanations of how the letter found its way into the hands of the junta’s legal counsel, Horatio Rubens, but there is no doubt that Rubens gave it to the New York Journal, which published a facsimile of the letter on its front page.¹⁶ Understandably offended, McKinley demanded the envoy’s recall, and a week later, Spain had only a chargé in Washington when the USSMaine exploded in Havana’s harbor.

    Cuba’s New York junta developed its partnership with jingo journalism soon after a young Californian purchased the ailing New York Journal in 1895 and promptly launched a circulation war with Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. Like Pulitzer, who needed no instruction in sensationalism, William Randolph Hearst sought to capture the mass market of unsophisticated readers by dramatizing the news with little regard to the accuracy of the stories he printed—Senator George Norris was not far off the mark when he characterized the Hearst organization as the sewer system of American journalism.¹⁷ Searching for copy that would excite their readers, Hearst and Pulitzer locked their sights on the colonial war in Cuba, converting the rebellion into a modern-day morality play, with daily reports of pitched battles, fictional and real, often supplemented by first-person accounts of questionable authenticity, all focusing on Spanish abuse of liberty-loving Cubans and, when possible, on Spanish slights to U.S. virility—Does Our Flag Protect Women? was a characteristically inflammatory headline, subtitled Indignities Practiced by Spanish Officials on Board American Vessels. Refined Young Women Stripped and Searched by Brutal Spaniards While Under Our Flag on the Olivette. And that was only the headline; readers who turned the page could find a Frederic Remington drawing of Spanish officials leering at a naked young Cuban woman and reporter Richard Harding Davis demanding that the president retaliate: War is a dreadful thing, but there are things more dreadful, and one of them is dishonor.¹⁸

    Did this type of coverage encourage the march to war? Opinion polling had not yet been invented, but we know that the public was paying attention, since Hearst, Pulitzer, and their imitators sold more papers as they published more news about Spanish atrocities in Cuba—the Journal saw its circulation jump from thirty thousand in 1895 to four hundred thousand in 1897, and it became the first U.S. newspaper to sell a million copies in a single day after the Maine sank in Havana’s harbor, when the paper devoted an average of eight pages to the tragedy every day for a week, turning this single incident, probably an accident, into that generation’s equivalent of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center.

    Both the public and their elected officials undoubtedly recognized that much of this news was fabricated or exaggerated beyond recognition, but that was not the point. Rather, as Senator Orville Platt observed, the coverage was affecting public opinion: The newspaper rot about what is going on there, though published one day and contradicted the next, seems to stir up all the aggressive spirit in the minds of the people. By the time war finally erupted, even McKinley’s pacific predecessor, Grover Cleveland, had been convinced that the Spaniards were the most inhuman and barbarous cut-throats in the world.¹⁹

    All of this pressure—jingoism, Cuban lobbying, yellow journalism—may have dragged the nation into war, but it is at best an incomplete explanation, as Louis A. Pérez Jr. has emphasized, for the McKinley administration also had concrete concerns about endangered U.S. economic interests. These interests had been growing since the eighteenth century, when New England traders began exchanging salted cod (bacalao) for molasses, and this trade had expanded significantly in the nineteenth century, when investors were searching for raw materials to fuel a rapidly industrializing economy. By the 1890s, the U.S. consul in eastern Cuba reported that U.S. companies were shipping up to fifty thousand tons of iron ore a month and that further expansion was anticipated since the ore of these mines is among the richest in the world. President Cleveland was not exaggerating when he told Congress that our actual pecuniary interest in [Cuba] is second only to that of the people and government of Spain, and this fact, Pérez argues, remained on McKinley’s mind two years later when he cited endangered American interests as one of the reasons for declaring war.²⁰

    BUT WE ARE GETTING AHEAD OF OURSELVES. As they opened the files to brief themselves on the conflict they inherited after the 1896 election, the new administration’s officials discovered two themes tightly woven into the fabric of U.S.-Cuban relations. The first was a presumption of ownership, a presumption based on geostrategic principles and captured perfectly by secretary of state John Quincy Adams when he wrote of Cuba and Puerto Rico as natural appendages to the North American continent, insisting that the annexation of Cuba to our federal republic will be indispensable to the continuance and integrity of the Union itself. And inevitable: There are laws of political as well as of physical gravitation, and if an apple severed by the tempest from its native tree, cannot choose but fall to the ground, Cuba, forcibly disjoined from its own unnatural connection with Spain, and incapable of self-support, can gravitate only towards the North American Union, which by the same law of nature cannot cast her off from its bosom.²¹ An aging Thomas Jefferson was telling President James Monroe the same thing: Cuba’s addition to our confederacy is exactly what is wanting to round our power as a nation. A few months later, Jefferson wrote again: I have ever looked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of States. The control which, with Florida Point, this island would give us over the Gulf of Mexico, and the countries and isthmus bordering on it, as well as all those whose waters flow into it, would fill up the measure of our political well-being.²²

    But Jefferson’s and then John Quincy Adams’s generations were willing to leave well enough alone, and neither would move to acquire Cuba as long as the island remained a possession of Spain, an increasingly impotent European power. When these leaders slowly faded out of the picture, however, a new generation, emboldened by a successful war against Mexico, decided that the apple was ripe. The issue arose during an 1848 debate over a proposed military occupation of the Yucatán, which focused on preempting British expansion. We have seen Great Britain year after year extending her naval stations, until, by a line of circumvallation, she almost surrounds the Gulf of Mexico, complained Mississippi’s Jefferson Davis, who saw Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula and Cuba as the salient points commanding the Gulf of Mexico, which I hold to be a basin of water belonging to the United States. Whenever the question arises whether the United States shall seize these gates of entrance from the south and east, or allow them to pass into the possession of any maritime Power, I am ready, for one, to declare that my step will be forward, and that the cape of Yucatán and the island of Cuba must be ours. John Calhoun agreed: It is indispensable to the safety of the United States that this island should not be in certain hands. If it were, our coasting trade between the Gulf and the Atlantic would, in case of war, be cut in twain, to be followed by convulsive effects.²³

    Some of this geostrategic hand-wringing focused on the possibility that Spain might cede Cuba to a major European power, but most of it was a subterfuge for a southern effort to acquire more slave states. The Civil War ended that effort, however, and reconstruction and industrialization occupied the nation’s attention until the next generation of expansionists began to worry, as did Senator Lodge in 1895, that England has studded the West Indies with strong places which are a standing menace to our Atlantic seaboard. We should have among those islands at least one strong naval station, and when the Nicaragua canal is built, the island of Cuba . . . will become to us a necessity. And, he added, helping to create a coalition between security concerns and economic interests, Cuba was still sparsely settled and of almost unbounded fertility.²⁴ With the demand for sugar, tobacco, and industrial raw materials growing daily, many people conceived of Cuba as a beggar sitting on a golden throne—the soil is a marvel of richness, a U.S. consul reported in early 1897, and if all the land suitable to the growth of sugar cane were devoted to that industry, it is estimated that Cuba might supply the entire Western Hemisphere. As for its mineral wealth, the U.S.-owned iron mines represented only the tip of the iceberg: There are numerous underdeveloped mines of equal value in this region.²⁵

    Cuba’s strategic location and its value to the U.S. economy may be sufficient to explain why late-nineteenth-century jingoes extracted a declaration of war from doubters like McKinley, but their task was made easier—much easier—by the second theme the new administration’s officials found in the files they inherited: Cuba’s 1.6 million residents needed uplifting. For a century, northern visitors had noted what a U.S. consul described in 1848: the listless, timid character of the population, great distrust of each other, and fear of loss of property, and risque of life, characteristics unworthy of those who are capable of a love of liberty. Cubans, he continued, are not animated by those high impulses of Patriotism which prompt to great, daring, and generous undertakings; on the contrary, the Creoles have an abiding conviction of their utter incapacity for self government, a conviction which must be felt by any one who has had opportunities of studying or even observing their character. As in politics, so in economics. "In the hands of an industrious, thrifty and go-ahead population, Cuba would blossom like the rose, wrote a visiting Yankee businessman just before the Civil War. But now it is a garden growing wild, cultivated here and there in patches, but capable at least of supporting in ease a population of ten times its present number. Not just any population, however: What is needed here is an infusion of blood and nerve of a more enterprising and sterner race of men."²⁶

    President Millard Fillmore would not be tempted. He conceded that were this island comparatively destitute of inhabitants, or occupied by a kindred race, I should regard it, if voluntarily ceded by Spain, as a most desirable acquisition. But given its current population, I should look upon its incorporation into our Union as a very hazardous measure.²⁷

    Kentucky senator John Crittenden reused Fillmore’s argument seven years later, when Congress was considering a bill to authorize Cuba’s purchase to protect the nation’s southern flank: Tell me that Cuba is necessary, absolutely necessary to the preservation of this Government! Why, sir, my national pride as an American revolts at the idea. . . . I do not want to see our Anglo-Saxon race; I do not want to see our American tribe, mingled up with that sort of evil communication. Maryland senator Anthony Kennedy was equally repelled by the thought of a wholesale naturalization of five or six hundred thousand Cubans, utterly ignorant of the institutions of this country, utterly unfit to exercise the rights of a republican government. Once again, much of this talk had a subtext—Crittenden and Kennedy were abolitionists determined to prevent the South from acquiring more slave territory, and both knew nothing about Cuba and probably had never met one of its inhabitants. But the Civil War was two decades in the past when someone who knew plenty of Cubans, U.S. consul Adam Badeau, characterized the island’s residents as a heterogeneous and foreign people, unused to republicanism and many of them either to civilization or Christianity.²⁸

    So when Cubans rekindled their war for independence a few years later, the first challenge facing the acquisition-oriented jingoes was to reassure the public, as Senator Lodge did, that among the principal military officers there are only three of negro blood, while the rest were white men, and of good family and position. They could control their uncivilized people much as southern elites had learned to control their societies after Reconstruction. Perhaps. Or perhaps Lodge lacked the knowledge needed to make such a judgment. At the same time the jingoes were puffing up the rebels as white, liberty-loving patriots, a sugar magnate who lived on the island was warning Grover Cleveland’s secretary of state that the insurgency was built on the Negro element, together with adventurers from abroad.²⁹

    WHOEVER THEY WERE, they needed help, or so the jingoes eventually— but not immediately—convinced President McKinley. For his initial policy in 1897, he returned to the pre–Civil War effort to purchase Cuba but found the Spanish unwilling to give up their colony; instead, Madrid granted Cubans substantial home rule, just as President Cleveland had suggested. That action only prompted Havana’s Tories to protest: Mobs, led by Spanish officers, attacked today the offices of the four newspapers here advocating autonomy, reported Consul-General Fitzhugh Lee in the early days of 1898. Excitement and uncertainty predominates everywhere, he reported in one of several similar cables, including one urging that ships must be sent.³⁰ McKinley’s response was to move the battleship Maine from Key West to Havana’s harbor, where it sat quietly at anchor until the night of 15 February, when an explosion tore open the ship’s hull, sending it to the bottom of the harbor and killing 260 U.S. sailors.

    The Whole Country Thrills with War Fever, trumpeted the New York Journal, and this time it may not have been exaggerating. Senator Orville Platt complained privately that those who have been clamoring for liberty and freedom and war, have worked up a spirit in the country that something must be done and done quickly to stop the condition of things in Cuba. Then he publicly declared that "when, by accident or design, the good ship Maine, with its American sailors on board, was blown into the air, and its sailors found a grave in the harbor of Habana, there was no power on earth that could prevent the war. Others shared Platt’s position: I have no doubt at all that the war would have been averted had not the Maine been destroyed in Havana harbor, wrote Senator Shelby Cullom. The country forced us into it after that appalling catastrophe. Even the long-resisting Democrats were ready to fight, with McKinley’s 1896 opponent, William Jennings Bryan, finally agreeing that the time for intervention has arrived. Humanity demands that we shall act."³¹

    The war was over in three months. U.S. casualties were light (about three hundred dead), citizens at home were elated, and Theodore Roosevelt was on the fast track to the White House. Meeting in Paris, U.S. and Spanish negotiators quickly hammered out a peace treaty stipulating that Cuba is, upon evacuation by Spain, to be occupied by the United States.³²

    Now began the first civilizing mission. Acceptance of a practical protectorate over Cuba seems to me very like the assumption of the responsible care of a madhouse, wrote the U.S. minister from Madrid, warning McKinley that the island’s substantial nonwhite population, its bitter divisions between peninsulares and creoles, and its history of inept government and official corruption pointed to the need for U.S. control. Cubans are generally of little good, wrote one army general, and no more capable of self government than the savages of Africa. The average Cuban is of a very low order of mankind . . . [a] mixture of Spanish, Indian, Italian and negro, and he inherits the bad qualities of all.³³ But the congressional war resolution—a declaration known as the Teller Amendment—had specifically rejected annexation, and McKinley acknowledged this commitment to Cuba’s independence in his year-end annual message to Congress, but only after order had been restored and a government created.³⁴

    Doing so took until 1902. The transition might have been quicker had the jingoes not been determined to annex Cuba. They had accepted the Teller Amendment only reluctantly, and now, lacking the votes to rescind it, they tried a different tactic: working through the like-minded governor-general of Cuba, Leonard Wood, they sought to convince the Cubans to request annexation. That should not be difficult, Wood told Roosevelt: Clean government, quick decisive action and absolute control in the hands of trustworthy men, establishment of needed legal and education reforms and I do not believe you could shake Cuba loose if you wanted to. Roosevelt assured Senator Lodge that in two or three years they will insist on being part of us.³⁵

    But General Wood soon discovered that Cubans could not be convinced so quickly to become part of the United States, and he needed to extend the transition period. We are going ahead as fast as we can, he wrote to McKinley in 1900, but we are dealing with a race that has steadily been going down for a hundred years into which we have got to infuse new life, new principles and new methods of doing things. This is not the work of a day or of a year, but of a longer period. At this point, it was easy to understand why José Martí had warned that the scorn of our formidable neighbor who does not know us is our America’s greatest danger.³⁶

    Wood’s letter arrived in Washington at a moment when McKinley’s thoughts were turning to reelection, and the rival Democrats were already making political capital out of his administration’s rapidly escalating counterinsurgency problem in the Philippines, another part of the spoils seized from Spain. Seeking to balance that quagmire with progress in Cuba, the president ordered Wood to accelerate the transition. Accepting his instructions, Wood drew up the first U.S. plan for Cuba’s transition to democracy. Its initial step was to disenfranchise that part of the Cuban population that had gone furthest downhill—by decree, he eliminated the voting rights of two-thirds of Cuba’s adult males, and Secretary of War Elihu Root sent his congratulations when he learned that whites so greatly outnumbered blacks in the truncated electorate: When the history of the new Cuba comes to be written the establishment of popular self-government, based on a limited suffrage, excluding so great a proportion of the elements which have brought ruin to Hayti and San Domingo, will be regarded as an event of first importance.³⁷

    The wisdom of McKinley’s decision to push toward Cuban independence became apparent after the rival Democrats wrote a platform identifying imperialism as the paramount issue of the campaign. The Republican platform responded by conceding Cuban independence and arguing that the struggle against Aguinaldo’s Philippine rebels was a selfless effort to confer the blessings of liberty and civilization upon all the rescued peoples.³⁸ Then, in a contest that soon moved away from imperialism to a number of unrelated issues, in 1900 the Democrats lost more heavily than in 1896, and the victors now claimed a mandate for the continued occupation of the Philippines (which lasted until 1946) and for the protectorate they were about to impose on Cuba.

    When General Wood had gaveled Cuba’s first constituent assembly to order—not coincidentally, one day before the U.S. presidential election—he could see that Washington’s first effort at democracy building had run into trouble: Cubans had elected the wrong individuals. The dominant party in the Convention today contains probably the worst political element in the Island. Since this body would write Cuba’s first constitution and since the U.S. election was over, Wood’s first reaction was to press for a delay, promising that at the next municipal elections we shall get hold of a better class of people. He also reopened the issue of keeping the island, citing the concerns of local property owners, who, he reported, are very reluctant to see a change of government, unless it be annexation to the United States. But the Philippine insurgency remained a nagging front-page problem, and the Republican platform had made an unambiguous commitment to Cuban independence, so the jingoes turned to their fallback position—the Platt Amendment, named after Connecticut Senator Orville Platt, chair of the Senate Committee on Relations with Cuba. It prohibited the withdrawal of U.S. troops until the Cubans had granted the United States the constitutional right to intervene for the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty.³⁹

    Cuba’s constituent assembly initially refused to append the amendment to the country’s new constitution. It is next to impossible to make them believe that we have only their own interests at heart, Wood told Roosevelt, brushing opponents aside by noting that they were led by a little negro of the name of Juan Gualberto Gomez; a man with an unsavory reputation both morally and politically. Following Washington’s instructions, Wood announced that the U.S. occupation would continue until the amendment was accepted.⁴⁰ Seeing no alternative, the Cubans capitulated.

    In return, Wood presided over Cuba’s first transition to democracy, then sailed for home. Shortly before leaving, he wrote to assure Roosevelt, now president after McKinley’s assassination, that there is, of course, little or no independence left Cuba under the Platt Amendment. Such had been the plan all along, as Senator Platt noted in a reassuring letter to a major U.S. investor on the island: The United States will always, under the socalled called Platt Amendment, be in a position to straighten out things if they get seriously bad. A century later, Fidel Castro offered much the same interpretation: with the Platt Amendment, he said, the United States converted the country into a neocolony.⁴¹

    ROOSEVELT’S REPUBLICANS congratulated themselves in their 1904 party platform—We set Cuba free—but the president clearly spoke too soon when he wished that every country washed by Caribbean waters would show the progress in stable and just civilization which with the aid of the Platt amendment Cuba has shown since our troops left the island. Barely a year later, the fraudulent reelection of President Tomás Estrada Palma provoked an armed uprising by the opposition, and the rebels were soon poised to seize power, leading U.S. consul Frank Steinhart

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