US cynicism and insincerity outraged Cubans. The amendment mocked terms such as “liberty” and “independence,” even though Platt asserted in a 1901 article that with his codicil “the United States set a high and new example to the nations of the world and gave a mighty impetus to the cause of free government.”6 He argued that the United States, in his estimation, became the first conquering nation in history to relinquish territory without giving up responsibility for those whom it had conquered. More candidly—until May 9, 2017—in its official history, the US State Department acknowledged that the real goal of the Platt Amendment was to deny effective independence to Cuba:
The rationale behind the Platt Amendment was straightforward. The United States Government had intervened in Cuba in order to safeguard its significant commercial interests on the island in the wake of Spain’s inability to preserve law and order. . . . By directly incorporating the requirements of the Platt Amendment into the Cuban constitution, the McKinley Administration was able to shape Cuban affairs without violating the Teller Amendment.7
Roosevelt’s rise to power was one of the most meteoric in US history up to that time, and closely meshed with US plans for Cuba. As assistant secretary of the navy in 1897 and 1898, he had advocated a new role for the United States in the world and promoted war with Spain. Within months of his vaunted charge at the head of the Rough Riders, he was elected governor of New York. He served two years of his term, then won the vice presidency on November 6, 1900, as President McKinley’s running mate. When McKinley died from an assassin’s gunshot wounds on September 14, 1901, Roosevelt, at the age of forty-two, became the youngest person ever to be president of the United States.
The Pseudo-Republic
A “Special Relationship” with the United States
The US occupation formally ended on May 20, 1902, a date the new Cuban government designated as “independence day” and which is still recognized as such today by some Cuban-Americans and the US government. Yet the departing troops left Cuba with only limited possibilities for self-determination. US military and economic interests would continue to govern the fortunes of the island for the next half century. Generations of Cubans would look to the Platt Amendment as an example of US duplicity that would justify their distrust of the United States a century later. While President McKinley’s prediction would prove true—Cuba and the United States would develop a “special relationship” with “ties of singular intimacy”—each country interpreted the significance of his forecast in ways that were polar opposites.
For North Americans, Cuba became a neo-colony, a superficially sovereign country whose politics were controlled by the White House, US Congress, and US ambassador, and whose economic fortunes were controlled by US companies. Within months of Tomás Estrada Palma’s inauguration as the first president of Cuba, on May 20, 1902, he signed a reciprocal trade treaty with the United States under which Cuban sugar and tobacco exports to the United States received a 20 percent tariff reduction, and 497 categories of US products exported to Cuba received tariff reductions that ranged from 20 to 40 percent.8 Thus began “independent” Cuba’s “special relationship” with the United States. The preferential tariff for Cuban sugar essentially linked Cuba’s main source of export earnings to a single buyer, the United States, and the treaty opened the doors exclusively to US corporations to sell agricultural and manufactured goods to Cuba at such low prices that they were able to stifle the development of Cuban enterprises. The course of events gave life to Martí’s admonition that Cuba needed to develop its own infrastructure: “The nation that buys, commands. The nation that sells, serves. . . . Only a nation that wishes to die will sell to a single nation. . . . The excessive influence of one nation on the commerce of another is quickly transformed into political influence.”9
For Cubans, the “special relationship” led to a transformation of its culture. A new elite emerged, based on its members’ connections to North America. They sent their children to US universities and even high schools so that they subsequently could take up management positions with US companies on the island. As the Americanization of Cuba took hold in the twentieth century, baseball became the national pastime, the use of US products conveyed a sense of higher status, and soon anything American was deemed better than anything Cuban.10
While some Cubans heralded Estrada Palma’s assumption of the presidency as the official end to the four-year US occupation, others protested the legitimacy of his election. Key leaders of the 1895–1898 struggle—notably General Máximo Gómez—refused to be candidates for the presidency on grounds that the ballot had been rigged by the United States. There was evidence for that charge: Governor-General Leonard Wood had appointed a majority of the electoral commission that set the rules for the balloting and then designated Estrada Palma as the preferred candidate.
The new president had been an early independence leader and briefly even the president of the rebel government during the Ten-Year War. He had been living in exile for almost three decades, working as a schoolteacher in New York, though he also was a member of the Cuban Revolutionary Party and helped to obtain guns and ammunition for the fighters.
Unlike Martí, though, Estrada Palma had become a naturalized US citizen. He accepted the Platt Amendment’s legitimacy and pledged that US troops would be welcome to return if they were needed to maintain order. Educated at Columbia University, Estrada Palma was a member of the Cuban bicultural elite who traveled freely and easily between the island and the United States.11 As journalist Richard Gott notes, “American intervention in Cuban affairs was not an insult for such people; they welcomed it, and often requested it.”12
Such members of the Cuban elite, along with North Americans who had settled in the country and others who obtained semipermanent residency status because of their commercial interests, fully expected that the Roosevelt administration would provide a safe climate for them. US corporations and citizens were coming to the country in increasing numbers, and they saw no way to guarantee their investments without the security umbrella a potential US intervention provided.
A Kleptocracy Emerges
Cuba under Estrada Palma amounted to a kleptocracy. While he was able to assuage the fears of US investors, the new president established a climate of corruption. The public payroll expanded by thousands as senior members of the new government used public funds for patronage as a way to build their own fiefdoms. Estrada Palma knew that staying in office meant maintaining strong, positive ties with the United States, and US companies assumed primary control over banking, land development, and construction. For example, the North American Trust Company of New York, which had been the fiscal agent for the US occupation forces, reorganized itself as Cuba’s Central Bank.
In July 1903, Estrada Palma signed a treaty with the United States that paved the way for the construction of the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in southeastern Cuba. Six months later, on December 10, 1903, he stood with Roosevelt at the ceremony marking the formal transfer of control over the base to the United States.13 But no other high-ranking Cubans attended.
Cubans close to Estrada Palma, meanwhile, were not the only ones taking advantage of the friendly business climate and largesse of the new government. By 1905, 13,000 North Americans had acquired titles to land in Cuba. Five years later, US companies and individuals owned about 60 percent of all available rural properties on the island.14
In 1900, a group of US and Canadian corporate moguls formed the Cuba Company to undertake the largest foreign investment project in Cuban history, a 350-mile rail line between Santa Clara and Santiago. Based in New Jersey because of the state’s lax restrictions on corporations, the firm was the brainchild of Sir William Cornelius Van Horne, a Canadian railroad baron who recruited other wealthy investors, including former Secretary of State William R. Day, US railroad tycoon E. H. Harriman, and Levi Morton, a former governor of New York.15 The Cuba Company acquired thousands of acres o
f land on the Santa Clara-Santiago route and around railroad stations. By 1915, the Cuba Company was the largest single foreign investor and largest company in the country. Historian Juan Santamarina asserts that by forging informal networks among US and Cuban businessmen and government officials, it established “the framework for US investment in Cuba that fundamentally influenced Cuba’s economic, political, and social development.”16
Spanish émigrés also were active in the rush to Cuba. The population of white Spaniards tripled between 1899 and 1920, from about 100,000 to 300,000. New investments by US companies, particularly in eastern Oriente Province, attracted those from poorer, rural areas of Spain with the hope of jobs and even property ownership. One typical Spaniard who came to Cuba during the period was Ángel Castro, who fought for the Spanish in the Independence War, then returned to his home in Galicia.17
When he came back to Cuba around 1904, he first worked as a laborer for the United Fruit Company and then took out a loan to establish a midsized plantation in Oriente. Castro had two children with his first wife, fell in love with a young servant, Lina Ruz Gonzalez, and had seven children with her, including three sons: Ramón, born in 1924; Fidel, in 1926; and Raúl, in 1931.18
As foreigners bought land, the remnants of the original Cuban landowning class—the criollas—were overshadowed by the foreigners’ presence and tended to fall into line with US economic control. It was the final step in ceding political and economic power and Cuban sovereignty to interests totally enmeshed with the United States.
While Estrada Palma had taken office as a nonpartisan, he soon aligned himself with the more conservative Republican Party and used their control of local politics throughout the country to protect his chances for reelection. Together Estrada Palma and the Republicans proved more adept at voter fraud than their opponents, the National Liberal Party, and the Republicans established a majority in Cuba’s first congressional elections, held in February 1904.
Fraud was also widespread in Estrada Palma’s successful and unopposed reelection bid in 1905. The Liberals were so outmatched that they withdrew from the balloting. They then organized a 4,000-member army and a Central Revolutionary Committee dedicated to overthrowing the Estrada Palma government.
The Liberals began the revolt in August 1906 with a series of small attacks as they marched toward Havana. The Cuban army of only 3,000 troops was unable to quell the insurrection, and Estrada Palma asked the United States to intervene under the Platt Amendment. President Roosevelt, however, had to contend with opposition at home to what was being called gunboat diplomacy, and he hesitated to intervene.
Instead, the president dispatched Secretary of War William Howard Taft, whom Roosevelt was already promoting as his successor, and instructed him to find a political compromise to end the spreading Liberal revolt. In private, Roosevelt railed: “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 that we wanted was that they should behave themselves. . . . And now, lo and behold . . . we have no alternative [but] to intervene.”19
US Troops Return to Cuba
Magoon’s “Reforms”
By September 21, 1906, Taft had determined that Estrada Palma could not withstand the rebellion, that negotiations were futile, and that military intervention was the only alternative. The Cuban president resigned on September 28, and Roosevelt sent the first 2,000 of an eventual 5,000-member US occupation force that would remain on the island for three years. Today Estrada Palma’s tenure in office is reviled in Cuba. A statue that had commemorated his presidency was toppled from its pedestal and carted away after the 1959 Cuban revolution.
Once the reluctant decision had been made, the United States moved to assume full economic and political control of the island. Roosevelt chose Charles Magoon as the new governor general. Magoon was a lawyer and diplomat who had served as the colonial governor of the recently acquired Panama Canal Zone, and Roosevelt viewed him as an adept administrator. With a charge from Roosevelt to clean up Cuba, Magoon ousted both the ministry officials who had benefited most from cronyism under Estrada Palma and the Republican Party government bureaucracy. Members of the Liberal Party took their place and received key patronage jobs of their own. Magoon, meanwhile, expanded the size of the army, established a professional civil service, and initiated major public works programs, including a road expansion program.
Yet Cubans today characterize Magoon as a master of US treachery and domination. While he carried out Roosevelt’s policies without benefiting himself—unlike many other Americans—during his three-year rule there was no semblance of self-determination in Cuba. Under Magoon’s direction, the 1908 election led to the victory of Liberals José Miguel Gómez as president and Alfredo Zayas as vice president. The two had withdrawn from the 1905 election after objecting to corruption and violence during the campaign, and their rise to power comforted US officials. Satisfied that he had reformed the government and created a new system friendlier than ever to US interests, President Taft withdrew the occupation forces in 1909.
US corporations fared even better than Liberal Party operatives during the occupation—they won broad concessions for doing business on the island, including subsidies for US-owned Cuban businesses. This changing landscape of Cuba’s economy also affected Cuban values. As was often the case under colonial rule, so too under neocolonialism, people in the dependent country shaped their aspirations in accord with the mother country. Cuban tastes also began to reflect those of the United States as US-based companies determined the architecture of new buildings, wealthy Americans defined what passed for high fashion, and even popular foods began to reflect the preferences of North Americans.20
Sugar Reinforces Neo-Colonization
Above all other ties, the Cuban sugar industry was the dominant factor in US planning, decision-making, and economic and political influence. The largest sugar producer, the Cuba Cane Sugar Company, was founded in 1915 by US bankers who were eager to profit from the shortages created by World War I. The company’s investors came into the business at the right time—the price of sugar increased more than 600 percent in five years, from three cents to twenty cents per pound during World War I.
The Cuba Cane Sugar Company and its competitors were regulated by US-dominated Cuban officials. While the Cuban government formally organized the hiring for the sugar mills, the survival of both the mills and the workers depended on decisions made in Washington. To protect domestic cane and beet sugar owners, the United States had established a quota on imported sugar that determined how much and under what terms foreign sugar could be sold.
Moreover, sugar was produced in centrales, essentially company towns that fostered vertical integration, which gave a company total control over the lives of sugar workers. It also gave sugar companies an incentive to seek cooperative arrangements with other major industries. Before long, US bankers and industrialists were running interlocking companies in Cuba, sat on the boards of more than one company, and effectively controlled most aspects of Cuba’s economy. Successive Cuban governments, as well as the US occupation authorities, also had granted so much control of iron mining on the island to US firms that they owned nearly all the mines. All of Cuba’s railroad companies had a majority US ownership and interlocking directorates with key US financial institutions. A hallmark of Cuba’s economy—tobacco—also fell under US domination. The Tobacco Trust, a New Jersey–based corporation, controlled 90 percent of Cuba’s cigar and cigarette business after 1902.21
With the flood of US investments, there was little chance for the development of a homegrown manufacturing sector in Cuba. North Americans determined what Cuba would produce, and they did not want the island’s products competing with those made in the United States. Their decisions insured that the Cuban economy would remain underdeveloped as a monoculture dependent on sugar exports to the United States.
Indeed, the US sugar q
uota determined the health of Cuba’s economy and the survival of workers well beyond the sugar industry, and US politics became a key factor in Cuban development. For example, Cuba had the potential of developing a commercial tomato and catsup business for domestic consumption and even export. But the island was forced to import both the fruit and the manufactured product from the United States in order to placate members of the US Congress representing farming districts.
The system worked well enough to avoid widespread opposition only as long as sugar was in demand at a decent price. That was the situation for a seven-year period starting with World War I, when sugar beets were unavailable. Cane sugar prices rose from 1.9 cents per pound in 1914 to 22.5 cents in 1920, a year dubbed “the dance of the millions.” But within months of its zenith, the market plummeted back to old levels, below four cents per pound, which led to the collapse of the Cuban banking system in June 1921.22
The Rise of the Machado Dictatorship
Depression in the Early 1920s
Alfredo Zayas had been elected president seven months earlier on a platform that opposed US intervention. But his opponent disputed the election’s validity, throwing the government into a stalemate. It was precisely the kind of circumstance that previously had led the United States to intervene, and in January 1921 President Woodrow Wilson dispatched General Enoch H. Crowder to Havana aboard the USS Minnesota.23 But Wilson ordered him not to intervene. Instead, Crowder took on the role of mediator to help resolve the election dispute. He then stayed in Cuba another two years as US ambassador and de facto consul general. Crowder effectively ruled over President Zayas, who was powerless in the face of the financial disaster, and even named the key government ministers.
With nearly all of its banks failing, Cuba was forced to seek emergency help from US financial institutions, but they refused. Reluctantly Cuba turned to the US government, which provided a major loan under terms that enabled US banks and investors to gain further control of the island’s affairs.
Cuba Libre: A 500-Year Quest for Independence Page 7
