Cuba Libre: A 500-Year Quest for Independence

by Philip Brenner

  But President William McKinley was reluctant to engage with Spain and sought other ways to fix the lagging US economy. In part, he was concerned that the end of Spanish control over Cuba would create complications others had not foreseen.9 Annexing Cuba was undesirable, McKinley thought, because the island’s population was dominantly of African origin. Instead he supported Spanish rule and urged Spain both to end the insurrection quickly and to protect US property. He also urged the dismissal of General Weyler, an end to the abuses characteristic of Weyler’s command, and home rule reforms.

  As 1897 morphed into 1898, McKinley realized that Spain was losing the war in Cuba. In an attempt to forestall the inevitable, he dispatched the USS Maine to Cuba in January 1898 as a way to bolster flagging Spanish morale and as a warning to the rebels not to harm US citizens or property owned by US companies. The move came too late. Several US political leaders saw in the Cuban independence war an opportunity to demonstrate that the United States had reached the point where it could play a new world role, despite the depression.

  The Maine Explodes

  The Maine sailed into Havana harbor on January 25, 1898. In one of the most storied incidents in early US naval history, a blast ripped through the battleship three weeks later. Two hundred sixty-six sailors died. A 1975 US naval inquiry determined that the explosion was probably the result of “heat from a fire in the coal bunker adjacent to the 6-inch magazine,” not an external source such as a Spanish mine.10

  But in 1898, the theories and rumors about what had happened focused on Spain. The yellow journalism of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer’s competing newspapers, which claimed that Spanish saboteurs had blown up the ship, fueled a burst of popular passion in the United States. Cries of “Remember the Maine” brought demands of US retaliation against Spain. Hearst’s New York Morning Journal was the first paper in the United States to sell one million copies in one day—the day after the Maine’s explosion.11 Figure 4.1 displays a depiction of Spaniards that would have been commonplace during this time period.

  Figure 4.1. The July 9, 1898, issue of Judge was typical in the way it portrayed to a US audience the nature of Spain’s cruelty in Cuba.

  The anti-Spanish narrative followed naturally from depictions of Weyler’s brutality and cartoons of Cuba as a damsel in distress who called for help from the United States. Pro-interventionists took up the cry, asserting that US intervention would be a noble and selfless action.12 For those who also favored expansion into Asia, a war against Spain offered an opportunity to gain a foothold in Asia by taking advantage of Spain’s declining fortunes in the Philippine Independence War.

  McKinley responded to the Maine explosion by beefing up Admiral George Dewey’s US Navy fleet in the Pacific and approved an order, issued originally by Assistant Navy Secretary Theodore Roosevelt, that if the United States declared war against Spain, Dewey should attack the Spanish fleet at Manila. After two months of unrelenting reports and editorials by the newspaper barons, and demands from members of Congress responding to the popular calls for retaliation, the president asked Congress for a declaration of war on April 11, 1898.

  The resulting congressional debate lasted more than a week and revealed basic disagreements about US war aims. Some favored taking Cuba as a US territory. Notably, McKinley’s war message made no reference to Cuban independence. Three groups opposed that position. One did not want a territory predominantly populated by blacks to seek statehood. A second objected to imperial interventions that seemed to mimic European practices. The third group in effect represented the US sugar beet industry, which feared competition from Cuban sugar if the island were annexed.13 Their leader was Senator Henry M. Teller (D-CO), whose successful amendment to the war declaration prohibited the United States from exercising “sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control over said Island [Cuba] except for the pacification thereof,” and asserted the US determination “to leave the government and control of the Island to its people” after pacification was achieved.

  The United States Denies Independence to Cuba

  “A Splendid Little War”

  Despite passage of the Teller Amendment, US engagement in the conflict effectively stole Cuban independence from the Cubans. Consider how even the name commonly applied to the conflict in the United States, “Spanish-American War,” disregards the role of Cubans and betrays an ignorance about the limited importance of the US contribution in securing victory against Spain. In Cuba, the conflict is called the Spanish–Cuban–North American conflict and is viewed as a continuation of the 1868 Cuban War of Independence.14 As a parallel, imagine the US reaction if the French, because of their contributions to the victory over Britain in 1783, referred to the US War of Independence as the Franco-British War.

  McKinley called for 125,000 volunteers to supplement the 30,000-person regular army. More than one million men answered the call. Ultimately, about 180,000 volunteers were mustered into service and received a scant few days of training. Theodore Roosevelt, one of the ardent advocates of the war, resigned his post at the Navy Department and received a commission as an army officer. Focusing on style along with substance as he gathered a fighting force, Roosevelt immediately placed an order with Brooks Brothers for an “ordinary cavalry lieutenant colonel’s uniform in blue Cravenette.”15 Many of his recruits were Native Americans and cowboys from South Dakota, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona, along with personal friends from New York’s high society.

  Roosevelt dubbed his 1,060-member unit the “Rough Riders” (officially it was the 1st United States Volunteer Cavalry). “In all the world,” he wrote, “there could be no better material for soldiers than that afforded by these grim of the mountains, these wild rough riders of the plains.”16 In fact, like most members of the expeditionary army, the Rough Riders were poorly trained and equipped. Fewer than three-quarters of the original group set off for Cuba, and many arrived without horses, which could not be accommodated on the boats.

  While the future president made sure he would receive good press, a balanced look at the record showed that Roosevelt did not wage his battles brilliantly. In the famous charge up “San Juan Hill”—it actually occurred on Kettle Hill in the San Juan Mountains—Roosevelt ignored warnings from a few Cuban fighters with him that Spanish scouts had spotted them. They were lucky to escape alive, thanks to the poor aim of Spanish rifles and the arrival of reinforcements who brought rapid-fire Gatling guns. The Gatlings wreaked havoc against the Spanish forces, discharging 18,000 rounds in less than nine minutes.

  The US military involvement did not last long; the Spanish were essentially routed by July 1898. US warships ran Spain’s four best battleships aground in Santiago harbor as they tried to flee, and the city fell to US troops two weeks later. Though a ceasefire would not take effect until August 12, US Secretary of State John Hay wrote to Roosevelt from London on July 27, “It has been a splendid little war; begun with the highest motives, carried on with magnificent intelligence and spirit, favored by that Fortune which loves the brave.”17

  In fact, “splendid” was far from an accurate characterization of the conflict. During the three-month campaign, US soldiers suffered 385 battle deaths, 2,061 deaths from other causes (mainly from yellow fever and malaria), and 1,662 wounded. During the three years of fighting from 1895 to 1898, more than 60,000 Spanish soldiers died. Cuban deaths and injuries in the thirty years of independence wars from 1868 to 1898 remain uncertain, though it is likely that several thousand were killed in battle and hundreds of thousands died because of the problems caused by conflict. One-third of the generals in the Cuban Liberation Army died. As an indication of deaths alone, Cuba’s population in 1868 was 1.8 million; in 1898, it was 1.5 million. An 1899 count found that one of every two wives in Cuba was a widow.18

  US Occupation Follows the Treaty of Paris

  The war ended with a US-Spanish treaty that Cuba did not sign. The United States and Spain
excluded Cuban representatives from the negotiations in Paris and even from the signing ceremony on December 10, 1898. The Treaty of Paris provided for the formal surrender of Spanish sovereignty over Cuba to the United States on January 1, 1899. The US attitude toward the Cubans remained exactly what it had been during the war—contempt toward their national aspirations for Cuba’s full independence and sovereignty. The first US military governor of Cuba, General John Brooke, made that explicit. Cubans “cannot now, or I believe in the immediate future, be entrusted with their own government.”19 A New York Times news story reported that “the Cubans who have made a pretense of fighting with us have proved worthless in the field and unappreciative of modern conditions and humanity and justice in war. It would be a tragedy, a crime, to deliver the island into their hands.” The article’s headline was, “Cubans Not Fit to Govern.”20

  Notes

  1. Richard Harding Davis, The Death of Rodriguez, A Year from a Reporter’s Note Book (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1897).

  2. Key points in this subsection are drawn from Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963), 63–72, 176–203, 379–406.

  3. The national unemployment rate went from 3.7 percent in 1892 to 8.1 percent in 1893 and 12.3 percent in 1894. See Christina Romer, “Spurious Volatility in Historical Unemployment Data,” Journal of Political Economy 94, no. 1 (February 1986): 31.

  4. Richard H. Immerman, Empire for Liberty: A History of American Imperialism from Benjamin Franklin to Paul Wolfowitz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), chapters 3–4.

  5. Richard Hofstadter, “Cuba, the Philippines and Manifest Destiny,” in The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 147–48.

  6. John Quincy Adams, “Letter to Hugh Nelson, April 28, 1823,” in Writings of John Quincy Adams, ed. Worthington Chauncey Ford (New York: Macmillan, 1913), vol. 7, 373.

  7. Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to James Monroe, October 24, 1824,” in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb (Washington, DC: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1904), vol. 15, 479.

  8. As quoted in Walter LaFeber, The American Age: United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad Since 1750, second edition (New York: Norton, 1989), 144.

  9. Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Cuba between Empires, 1878–1902 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983), 170–74; LaFeber, The American Age, 185–90.

  10. Hyman George Rickover, How the Battleship Maine Was Destroyed (Washington, DC: Department of the Navy, 1976), 128, http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015004705649;view=1up;seq=7.

  11. Lars Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 17.

  12. Pérez, Cuba between Empires, 138.

  13. Carmen Diana Deere, “Here Come the Yankees! The Rise and Decline of United States Colonies in Cuba, 1898–1930,” Hispanic American Historical Review 78, no. 4 (November 1998): 732.

  14. Carlos Alzugaray Treto, “Is Normalization Possible in Cuban-US Relations after 100 Years of History?” Research Report no. 6 (Havana: Instituto Superior de Relaciones Internacionales, 2002), https://www.ecured.cu/Guerra_de_los_Diez_A%C3%B1os.

  15. LaFeber, The American Age, 194.

  16. Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1900), 24.

  17. Letter from John Hay to Theodore Roosevelt, July 27, 1898; reprinted in Scribner’s Magazine 66 (July–December 1919), 533, https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=peU-AQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&hl=en&pg=GBS.PA533.

  18. Pérez, To Die in Cuba, 79.

  19. Quoted in Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Cuba in the American Imagination (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 114 [emphasis in original].

  20. Stanhope Sams, “Cubans Not Fit to Govern; This Is the Opinion of an Observer Who Accompanied Shafter’s Army to Santiago,” New York Times, July 29, 1898, 4.

  Chapter 5

  From Occupation to “Good Neighbor”

  Whereas the Congress of the United States of America, by an Act approved March 2, 1901, provided as follows:

  [T]he President is hereby authorized to “leave the government and control of the island of Cuba to its people” so soon as a government shall have been established in said island under a constitution which, either as a part thereof or in an ordinance appended thereto, shall define the future relations of the United States with Cuba, substantially as follows:

  That the government of Cuba consents that the United States may exercise the right to intervene for the preservation of Cuban independence, the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty, and for discharging the obligations with respect to Cuba imposed by the treaty of Paris on the United States, now to be assumed and undertaken by the government of Cuba.

  That to enable the United States to maintain the independence of Cuba, and to protect the people thereof, as well as for its own defense, the government of Cuba will sell or lease to the United States lands necessary for coaling or naval stations at certain specified points to be agreed upon with the President of the United States.

  —Platt Amendment (excerpts)

  US Occupation

  Preparing Cuba for US Economic Domination

  With the rationale that the Cubans had to be instructed in the ways of “civilization,” US colonial administrators established Cuba’s rules of commerce, remarking that “we are dealing with a race that has steadily been going down for a hundred years and into which we have to infuse new life, new principles and new methods of doing things.”1

  The resulting policy was the opposite of independence, wrote one Cuban economist. Rather it was intended to prepare Cuba for US “economic penetration.”2 The US military government ordered the Cuban Liberation Army to disarm and the provisional government and Cuban Revolutionary Party to disband. It mandated that a newly elected assembly could not make laws that contravened US military decisions.

  US corporations readily took advantage of the opportunity that the occupation provided, expanding their investments in sugar, tobacco, and land.3 Approximately 13,000 people from the United States had acquired land titles by 1905. US individuals owned 60 percent of Cuba’s rural land; Cubans owned 25 percent. Foreign capital flooded Cuba, and favored US-owned operations, driving Cubans further out of business. Iron mines in Oriente Province were almost all US owned.

  Opponents of the US occupation in Congress soon demanded an end to the US presence as specified in the 1898 Teller Amendment, while the Cubans themselves called for US troops to leave. Meanwhile the McKinley administration accepted plans for a new Cuban constitution to be written by an elected assembly, but sought continued control by designating a list of acceptable candidates who could be chosen. In the election to create a constituent assembly in 1900, Cuban voters refused to select the US candidates and instead chose an independent slate to draft the new constitution.

  US officials said the election proved their point of view that Cubans were irresponsible and unfit for self-government. General Leonard Wood, the US military governor, said those chosen to write the constitution were among the “worst agitators and political radicals in Cuba.”4 The result was an impasse in which opponents of Cuban annexation continued to pressure for withdrawal, while administration officials in Washington agreed with business leaders that US departure would threaten US property interests and influence.

  The Platt Amendment

  Secretary of War Elihu Root, a former Wall Street lawyer, crafted a seeming compromise that would adhere to the requirements of the Teller Amendment but vitiate the essence of Cuban independence. Senator Orville Platt (R-CT) added Root’s clever loophole as an amendment to an army appropriation bill that Congress
passed in 1901.

  The Platt Amendment stipulated, among other things, that the United States could intervene in Cuba to restore order whenever it saw fit; that Cuba lease territory to the United States for up to three naval coaling stations; and that Cuba could not enter into a treaty that offered a military base to any other country. The legislation also required Cuba to include the amendment in its new constitution as a condition for the end of US occupation.

  Cubans staged demonstrations in Havana and Santiago to protest the Platt Amendment. The constituent assembly rejected its inclusion in the new Cuban constitution by a 14–2 vote. Members of the assembly, however, changed their minds after they sent a delegation to Washington to meet with US officials. Root, calling the Cubans “ingrates,” was adamant that the US occupation would not end unless Cuba acquiesced.5 Other US officials echoed his position, telling the Cuban delegation that if the Platt Amendment was not included in Cuba’s constitution, the United States would not grant freedom to Cuba. Despite such a seemingly firm US stance, the constituent assembly approved including the Platt Amendment in the new Cuban constitution by only one vote.