Intervention and Occupation: Chapter 4 of Cuba and the United States: Ties of Singular Intimacy

This chapter is drawn from Cuba and the United States: Ties of Singular Intimacy by Louis A. Pérez Jr.

I

The new separatist war began in February 1895, in much the same fashion as others before it, with localized skirmishes, mostly in remote mountain folds of eastern Cuba, initially too distant to cause planters and politicians in western Cuba much concern. Rebellion in eastern Cuba was not uncommon, and no one in power or with property had any reason to believe that the “Grito de Baire” of February 24 would end in any way other than its countless predecessors: a matter of no consequence.

But in early summer matters assumed a sudden gravity, and what began as a local affair became national. The insurgent armies marched out of the eastern mountains into the rich cattle-grazing ranges of Camagüey in the summer, through the fertile sugar land of Matanzas and Havana in the autumn, and into the lush tobacco fields of Pinar del Río by winter. In the course of ten months, the insurrection had reached regions never before disturbed by the armed stirrings of nationality. The presence of separatist armies in the west, coincident with preparations for the 1896 sugar harvest, stunned local elites, peninsular and Creole alike. Prospects for the harvest were bleak, and when it was completed, even the pessimists were shown to have been overconfident: from a record 1-million-ton crop in 1894 the harvest fell to 225,000 tons in 1896. Not since the 1840s had Cuban sugar production been so low. And in 1897 it dropped again, to 212,000 tons.

Indeed, the purpose of the uprising was to disrupt the sugar economy. As early as July 1895, insurgent General Máximo Gómez proclaimed a moratorium on all economic activity—commerce, manufacturing, agriculture, ranching, but most of all and especially sugar production. There was to be no planting, no harvesting, no grinding, no marketing. Any estate found in violation of the ban, Gómez vowed, would be destroyed and its owner tried for treason. “All sugar plantations will be destroyed, the standing cane set fire and the factory buildings and railroads destroyed,” the decree warned. “Any worker assisting the operation of the sugar factories will be considered an enemy of his country… and will be executed.”¹

The attack against property set the stage for the redistribution of property as a design for peace and gave decisive expression to the social content of Cuba Libre. The insurgent leadership committed itself to a nation of small landowners, each farmer to enjoy security derived from direct and independent ownership of land. In 1896 the insurgent army command issued an expropriation decree, pledging at the end of the war to redistribute among defenders of Cuba Libre all properties belonging to peninsulares and Creoles who supported Spanish rule. The war thus provided more than the opportunity to end colonial rule: it created the occasion to destroy one social class to benefit another.

II

Creole elites held few illusions after 1896. For decades local property owners had clung to the colonial regime for protection, and now in the waning years of the nineteenth century, Spain was at the verge of defaulting on the sole raison d’être for its existence in Cuba. Members of the beleaguered bourgeoisie contemplated their impending extinction with despair. Growing more certain in their conviction that Spain’s hold over Cuba was slipping, they were now prepared to sacrifice traditional colonial relationships for an alternative source of protection and patronage. They confronted what they had feared most through the nineteenth century—a successful uprising of the underclasses—and they needed assistance quickly.

Only U.S. intervention, many concluded, might end the insurrectionary challenge and redeem the beleaguered social order. As early as June 1896, nearly one hundred planters, lawyers, and industrialists petitioned President Grover Cleveland for North American intervention to end the crisis. “We cannot,” the petitioners wrote, “express our opinion openly and formally, for he who should dare, whilst living in Cuba, to protest against Spain, would, undoubtedly, be made a victim, both in his person and his property, to the most ferocious persecution at the hands of the government.” Spain, the petition continued, could offer Cuba nothing for the future except continued destruction and ruin. Nor did property owners find comfort in the thought of independence. If continued Spanish rule threatened to result in ruin, independence promised to lead to havoc. “Can there be no intermediate solution?” the petitioners asked. Without confidence in Spain, and uncertain about the future under Cuban rule, property owners asked Washington to intercede on their behalf: “We would ask that the party responsible to us should be the United States. In them we have confidence, and in them only.”² “The worst thing that could happen to Cuba,” another planter wrote a year later, “would be independence.” Cubans, he added, “cannot bring a firm and stable government to the island.”³ In early 1897, a U.S. correspondent in Havana reported that planters, merchants, and businessmen had concluded that Cuba was lost to Spain and hoped for U.S. intervention and, ultimately, annexation of the island.⁴ Later that year, William H. Calhoun, a special agent in Cuba, commented that “Cuban planters and Spanish property holders are now satisfied that the island must soon slip from Spain’s grasp, and would welcome immediate American intervention.”⁵

III

From the outset of the war, the Cleveland administration upheld the government’s long-standing policy toward Cuba: opposition to independence and support of Spanish sovereignty. The reasons were familiar: Cuban independence would result in political instability, social conflict, and economic chaos. That Afro-Cubans in such numbers and with such prominence filled insurgent ranks and that arms had been distributed so widely to the population at large were further reasons to fear the end of Spanish rule in Cuba. Even the “most devoted friend of Cuba” and the “most enthusiastic advocate of popular government,” Secretary of State Richard B. Olney insisted, could not look at developments in Cuba “except with the gravest apprehension”:

There are only too strong reasons to fear that, once Spain were withdrawn from the island, the sole bond of union between the different factions of the insurgents would disappear; that a war of races would be precipitated, all the more sanguinary for the discipline and experience acquired during the insurrection, and that, even if there were to be temporary peace, it could only be through the establishment of a white and black republic, which, even if agreeing at the outset upon a division of the island between them, would be enemies from the start, and would never rest until the one had been completely vanquished and subdued by the other.⁶

The United States quickly proclaimed its support of Spanish sovereignty. As early as 1895 Cleveland demanded adherence to U.S. neutrality laws and vigorously pursued their enforcement. Washington also cooperated with Spain to combat Cuban filibustering expeditions organized from the United States. Between 1895 and 1896, North American authorities intercepted more than half the Cuban expeditions fitted in the United States and vigorously prosecuted offenders. Only one-third of the seventy expeditions organized in the United States during the war reached Cuba.⁷

But the United States was also certain that Spanish military efforts to end the insurgency—even if Madrid possessed the means, and especially because it did not—were doomed to failure. “While the insurrectionary forces to be dealt with are more formidable than ever before,” Secretary of State Olney wrote in September 1895, “the ability of Spain to cope with them has visibly and greatly decreased. She is straining every nerve to stamp out the insurrection within the next few months. For what obvious reason? Because she is almost at the end of her resources.” Olney concluded: “Spain cannot possibly succeed.”⁸

The expansion of the insurgency westward confirmed North Americans’ worst fears. “It can hardly be questioned,” Olney explained to Spanish Minister Enrique Dupuy de Lôme in April 1896, “that the insurrection, instead of being quelled, is today more formidable than ever and enters upon the second year of its existence with decidedly improved prospects of success.”⁹ Only a political solution, Washington insisted, based on reforms and including autonomy in some form, held any promise of ending the insurrection with Spanish sovereignty intact. The United States advocated reform as a means to end the revolution and supported autonomy as an alternative to independence. “It would seem,” Cleveland predicted in 1896, “that if Spain should offer to Cuba genuine autonomy—a measure of home rule which, while preserving the sovereignty of Spain, would satisfy all rational requirements of her Spanish subjects—there should be no just reason why the pacification of the island might not be effected on that basis.”¹⁰ The administration offered the good offices of the United States to mediate a settlement based on reform. “What the United States desires to do,” Olney assured the Spanish minister, “is to cooperate with Spain in the immediate pacification of the island on such a plan as, leaving Spain her rights of sovereignty… shall yet secure to the people of the island all such rights and powers of local self-government as they can reasonably ask.”¹¹

But Spain was confident that repression, not reform, was the way to settle Cuban disorders. Speaking for the Spanish court, the Duke of Tetuán rejected Washington’s offer, arguing that the island already enjoyed “one of the most liberal political systems in the world.” An end to the Cuban rebellion based on anything other than a triumph of Spanish arms, Tetuán suggested, would doom all future efforts to establish peace on a long-standing basis and condemn the island to a recurring cycle of periodic uprisings. Moreover, Tetuán added tersely, if conditions in the future warranted the introduction of new reforms, Spain was fully capable of meeting its responsibilities without assistance from the United States.¹²

IV

Certainly not all North Americans shared the opinion of the administration. On the contrary, the cause of Cuba Libre found widespread support in the United States. Not a few North Americans, like Frederick Funston, rushed to volunteer their services to the insurgent forces in Cuba. Many more participated in fund-raising activities and lobbying efforts in the United States. The cause of Cuba Libre also found widespread support in Congress, and very early the course for collision was set between the legislature and the executive.

In 1897 a new Republican administration in Washington under William McKinley pressed colonial reforms with new vigor and a new Liberal ministry in Madrid under Práxedes Mateo Sagasta ceased to oppose reforms, both for the same reason: to prolong Spanish sovereignty. The war had stalled into a campaign of attrition that Spain could not win. The Spanish army was on the defensive and confined to the principal cities; the Cuban army was on the offensive and controlled the countryside. The economies of both Cuba and Spain were approaching collapse.

In the autumn of 1897, in part because of U.S. pressure, in part as a response to deteriorating conditions in Cuba, the new Liberal ministry undertook a series of far-reaching reforms. In October, Madrid appointed moderate Ramón Blanco as governor general. Amnesty was issued and political prisoners were released. In December, Spain announced a new Autonomist constitution and on January 1, 1898, installed a liberal Creole government.

Colonial reforms had the net effect of sealing the doom of Spanish rule in Cuba. Indeed, had the United States been deliberately seeking to dislodge Spain from the island, it could not have come upon better means. For the defenders of Cuba Española reforms assumed the proportions of treason. Loyalists denounced the establishment of a Creole autonomist government, insisting that reforms served only to open the back door to power for Cuban subversives. Radicals would quickly overrun moderates, revolution would overtake reform, and autonomy would become independence.

That resident Spaniards lost exclusive control over colonial administration was cause enough to arouse peninsular ire and indignation. It mattered little that autonomists were politically moderate, often men of means, and ideologically allied to Spain. The Creole-peninsular schism persisted unabated to the very end of the colonial regime. Peninsulares now became advocates of North American intervention, preferring rule by the United States to government by Cubans. “All classes of the Spanish citizens,” U.S. Consul Fitzhugh Lee reported in late 1897, “are violently opposed to real or genuine autonomy because it would throw the control of the island into the hands of the Cubans and rather than that, they would prefer annexation to the United States or some form of an American protectorate.”¹³

But it was not only a question of nationality. The establishment of a liberal government convinced loyalists, peninsulares and Creoles alike, that Spain had lost the will to defend its sovereignty in Cuba. Many detected in this changed attitude evidence that Spain was preparing to abandon the island. The more thoughtful among peninsulares and Creoles understood, too, that the new autonomist government lacked the means to wage war and was without authority to make peace. The establishment of a government of Creole moderates dealt the final body blows to conservative resolve in Cuba. Events in late 1897 and early 1898 undermined the morale of the only forces in Cuba who, except for the insurgents, still retained the loyalty and will to win.

Certain now that Spain no longer controlled events at home or abroad, convinced that Madrid possessed neither the means nor—after 1897—the will to defend the status quo, local elites acted to shed a metropolis incapable of protecting their interests. Loyalists found themselves caught between the ebbing of metropolitan authority and the advancing tide of colonial rebellion. Political separation from Spain became necessary to forestall independence under Cubans.

Rallies and mass meetings across the island denounced the new autonomist government. Appeals for U.S. intervention increased. In November 1897, the U.S. vice-consul in Matanzas reported that “nearly all Spaniards, businessmen, and property holders in this province wish and pray for annexation to the United States.”¹⁴ “Property holders, without distinction of nationality, and with but few exceptions,” Consul Pulaski F. Hyatt cabled from Santiago, “strongly desire annexation, having but little hope of a stable government under either of the contending forces.”¹⁵ Fitzhugh Lee reported similar sentiments in Havana. “A large majority of the Spanish subjects,” he wrote in November 1897, “who have commercial and business interests and own property here will not accept Autonomy, but prefer annexation to the United States, rather than an independent republic or genuine autonomy under the Spanish flag.”¹⁶

By the end of the year sentiment for U.S. intervention had become public. In December 1897, a statement published in Havana and signed by businessmen and property owners claiming to represent 80 percent of the island’s wealth denounced the autonomist regime.¹⁷ In the same month, a meeting of property owners in Cienfuegos concluded with a resolution urging President McKinley to establish a protectorate over Cuba. In February 1898, leading peninsulares established a formal commission for the purpose of securing North American assistance. “The Mother country cannot protect us,” one spokesman insisted. “Blanco will not protect us. If left to the insurgents our property is lost. Therefore, we want the United States to save us.”¹⁸

V

Reforms that were excessive for loyalists were not enough for separatists. Insurgent Cubans denounced autonomy and rejected accommodation with Spain based on anything less than complete independence. “It is the firm resolution of the army and people of Cuba,” vowed General Máximo Gómez, “who have shed so much blood in order to conquer their independence, not to falter in their just cause until triumph or death crowns their efforts.”¹⁹ Two weeks later, Gómez reiterated the Cuban position: “We no longer ask concessions…. Even were Spain’s proposals bona fide, nothing could tempt us to treat with her. We are for liberty, not for Spanish reforms.”²⁰

Rather than making Cubans more conciliatory, reforms actually made them more intransigent. Separatist morale soared. Spanish concessions were evidence of Spain’s impending defeat, Cubans were certain. “Spain’s offer of autonomy is a sign of her weakening,” Provisional President Bartolomé Masó proclaimed.²¹ General Calixto García agreed: “I regard autonomy only as a sign of Spain’s weakening power and an indication that the end is not far off.”²²

Reforms had failed. As a last resort, Spain had made the ultimate concession to empire and found it wanting. Spanish sovereignty over Cuba was coming to an end. Cubans now prepared for the final campaign. A new optimism lifted insurgent morale to an all-time high. Never before had separatists been so certain of triumph as they were in early 1898. Preparations for the last desperate battles began. In eastern Cuba General Calixto García prepared to lay siege to Santiago. In the western zones, insurgent commanders began to encircle the larger inland provincial cities. Máximo Gómez now wrote confidently about preparations for the final assault against Spanish strongholds. With “cannons and a great deal of dynamite,” Gómez predicted, “we can expel them by fire and steel from the towns.”²³

The United States also understood that the failure of reforms ended any reasonable likelihood that Madrid would reestablish sovereignty over the island. Cuba was lost to Spain. Cuban successes had all but nullified Spanish claims to sovereignty and thus neutralized North American efforts to underwrite that sovereignty. “Spain will lose Cuba,” Secretary of State John Sherman concluded bluntly. “That seems to me to be certain. She cannot continue the struggle.”²⁴ Assistant Secretary of State William R. Day concurred. “The Spanish Government,” he wrote in March, “seems unable to conquer the insurgents.”²⁵ In a confidential memorandum, Day went further:

Today the strength of the Cubans [is] nearly double … and [they] occupy and control virtually all the territory outside the heavily garrisoned coast cities and a few interior towns. There are no active operations by the Spaniards…. The eastern provinces are admittedly “Free Cuba.” In view of these statements alone, it is now evident that Spain’s struggle in Cuba has become absolutely hopeless…. Spain is exhausted financially and physically, while the Cubans are stronger.²⁶

Against the landscape created by the receding tide of Spanish sovereignty, Washington confronted in Cuba the anathema of all U.S. policy makers since Jefferson—the specter of Cuban independence. The implications of the “no transfer” policy were now carried to the logical conclusion. If the United States could not permit Spain to transfer sovereignty over Cuba to another power, neither could it permit Spain to cede sovereignty to Cubans.

VI

The lapse of Spanish sovereignty in 1898 released the United States from any further obligations to Spain. But if Spanish sovereignty was untenable, Cuban pretensions to sovereignty were unacceptable. Washington now applied pressure on Madrid to settle the status of Cuba politically with the United States before Cubans settled it militarily with Spain. A sudden urgency now drove the North American purpose. A settlement had to be reached before summer, the onset of the rainy season, when Cuban military operations would intensify. The summer of 1898, everyone sensed, would be decisive. Cubans were preparing for the final offensive, and no one doubted that they would succeed.

Efforts to negotiate a settlement with Spain were based on a transfer of the island to the United States. In January President McKinley appointed Whitelaw Reid to undertake private negotiations with Madrid and a month later informed ranking members of the Senate of administration plans to purchase the island. In Spain, Ambassador Stewart L. Woodford concluded that the transfer of the island had to be made as soon as possible—peacefully if possible, with Spanish honor preserved if it could be, but above all quickly and absolutely.²⁷ On March 17, Woodford reported on a lengthy discussion with Colonial Minister Segismundo Moret. Spain had lost Cuba, Woodford stressed to Moret, but Cuban independence was not acceptable. Woodford doubted that the “insurgents can secure peace and good order in Cuba under a free or independent government” and concluded: “Some way must be found by which Spain can part with Cuba without loss of self-respect and with certainty of American control so that we may give that protection to loyal Spaniards and rebels alike.” The United States was prepared to purchase the island for “a fixed sum,” Woodford indicated, part of which would be retained as a fund to settle war claims.²⁸

Spain equivocated and delayed, and increasingly it became apparent in Washington that Madrid had little intention of transferring the island to the United States. On March 27, Washington delivered a three-part ultimatum to Spain demanding an armistice until October 5, an end to resettlement programs and permission to distribute relief supplies, and the participation of President McKinley as mediator to end the dispute. In return, the United States promised to use its “friendly offices to get insurgents to accept the plan.”²⁹ After another ten days of frantic negotiations, Spain capitulated. On April 5, the queen regent personally interceded and proclaimed a unilateral cease-fire in Cuba, effective immediately and lasting through October. On April 10, Washington received Spain’s formal acceptance of the essential provisions of McKinley’s March 27 ultimatum.³⁰ On the same day, in Havana, Governor General Blanco ordered all Spanish forces to halt operations.³¹

McKinley had scored a diplomatic victory on all fronts but one—he failed to make good on the North American part of the March 27 ultimatum: to use U.S. “friendly offices to get insurgents to accept the plan.” Indeed, the collapse of the North American proposal was due less to Spanish equivocation than to the U.S. inability to obtain Cuban acquiescence to the cease-fire. In early April, McKinley summoned Horatio Rubens, the Cubans’ legal counsel in New York, to the White House to discuss the terms of the impending settlement. Rubens later recalled the meeting:

“You must,” he clipped out at me, “accept an immediate armistice with Spain.”

“To what end, Mr. President?”

“To settle the strife in Cuba,” he cried.

“But is Spain ready to grant Cuba independence?” I asked.

“That isn’t the question now,” he exclaimed, his voice rising. “We may discuss that later. The thing for the moment is an armistice.”

Rubens rejected the cease-fire on the grounds that it promised to benefit only Spain and would have calamitous consequences for the Cuban war effort:

The reason is a practical one, Mr. President. Nothing you could propose would be so beneficial to Spain and so detrimental to Cuba as an armistice. If an armistice is carried out in good faith, it means the dissolution and disintegration of the Cuban army. There is no commissary for it even now; it must live, poorly and precariously, on the country. If an armistice is accepted the army cannot obtain its food supplies; it will starve. Furthermore, in the natural uncertainty pending negotiations, the men would scatter, going to their homes…. If, on the other hand, having accepted the armistice, the Cubans continued to live on the country they would be loudly charged with breach of faith.³²

In Cuba, separatist army chieftains denounced the cease-fire and ordered the insurgent forces to continue operations. “They have to be hit hard and at the head, day and night,” General Calixto García exhorted his troops. “In order to suspend hostilities, an agreement is necessary with our Government and this will have to be based on independence.” “More than ever before,” Máximo Gómez proclaimed, “the war must continue in full force.”³³

Cuban rejection of the Spanish cease-fire ended hopes in the United States that the dreaded summer campaign could be averted. Spain had attached only one condition to its agreement: that Cubans observe the cease-fire. Spain now had no choice but to resume field operations and face inevitable military defeat.

At the same time, events in Cuba and the U.S. policy response were increasingly the object of conflict between Congress and the president. Partisan politics was one source of conflict. Another was competition for control over foreign policy. Clashing points of view transformed a difficult situation into a nearly impossible one between legislators sympathetic to the Cuban cause and the executive hostile to Cuba Libre.

In the early spring, events were being shaped by forces beyond the control of the United States and Spain: Cubans were determining the course. Once Spain refused to transfer sovereignty over Cuba to the United States, and once Cubans rejected the continuation of Spanish sovereignty in any form, North Americans faced two prospects: Cuban independence or U.S. intervention.

The Cuban revolution threatened more than the propriety of colonial rule or property relations in the colonial regime. It also challenged the U.S. expectation of colonial succession, for in ending Spanish sovereignty in 1898, Cubans endangered the North American claim of sovereignty. Acquisition of Cuba was envisaged always as an act of colonial continuity, formally transferred and legitimately ceded by Spain to the United States—an assumption of sovereignty over a territory presumed incapable of a separate nationhood. The success of the Cuban rebellion changed all this. The United States prepared for intervention as alarmed at the prospect of a Cuban victory as it was exasperated at Spain’s inability to end the war. Neither the force of Spanish repression nor the concession of Spanish reforms had checked the advance of Cuban arms. Spanish sovereignty was beyond recovery. In 1898 Cuba was lost to Spain, and if Washington did not act, it would be lost to the United States.

VII

In April 1898 President William McKinley requested of Congress authority to intervene militarily in Cuba. Ostensibly the war was against Spain, but in fact it was against Cubans.

The president’s war message provided portents of policy: there was no mention of Cuban independence, nothing about recognition of the Cuban provisional government, not a hint of sympathy with Cuba Libre, nowhere even an allusion to the renunciation of territorial aggrandizement—only a request for congressional authorization “to take measures to secure a full and final termination of hostilities between the Government of Spain and the people of Cuba, and to secure in the island the establishment of a stable government, capable of maintaining order and observing its international obligations.” The U.S. purpose in Cuba, McKinley emphasized in his war message, consisted of a “forcible intervention as a neutral to stop the war.” McKinley explained: “The forcible intervention of the United States … involves … hostile constraint upon both the parties to the contest.”³⁴ The war was to be directed against both Spaniards and Cubans to establish the grounds upon which to neutralize the two competing claims of sovereignty and establish by superior force of arms a third.

This was the outstanding virtue of the “neutral intervention” to which the United States had committed itself by April. “We have already canvassed recognition of independence,” the State Department reported on April 7, “with an adverse conclusion.” The “neutral intervention” would effectively concede to the United States control of the island. “It would make a notable difference in our conduct of hostilities in Cuba if we were to operate in territory transiently ours by conquest, instead of operating in the territory of a recognized sovereign with whom we maintain alliance.” Nor was the State Department unmindful of the long-term advantages of transient conquest: “We would be free, if successful, to dictate the terms of peace and control the organization of an independent government in Cuba. We could hold the Cuban territory in trust until, with restored tranquility a government could be constitutionally organized which we could formally recognize and with which we could conclude a treaty regulating our future relations to and guarantee of the Republic.”³⁵

McKinley’s proposed intervention was immediately denounced by the Cuban junta in the United States. What possible reason could the administration have for withholding recognition of independence, Cubans asked, unless its goal was annexation? “We will oppose any intervention which does not have for its expressed and declared object the independence of Cuba,” junta spokesman Gonzalo de Quesada proclaimed.³⁶ Speaking on behalf of the insurgent provisional government and the Liberation Army, counsel Horatio S. Rubens announced the necessity of having “to go a step further” and bluntly warned that intervention as suggested by McKinley would be regarded as “nothing less than a declaration of war by the United States against the Cuban revolutionists.”³⁷ He added:

If intervention shall take place on that basis, and the United States shall land an armed force on Cuban soil, we shall treat that force as an enemy to be opposed, and, if possible, expelled, so long as the recognition of a free Cuban republic is withheld. I do not mean to say that the Cuban army will assemble on the coast to resist the landing of Federal troops, but that it will remain in the interior, refusing to cooperate, declining to acknowledge any American authority, ignoring and rejecting the intervention to every possible extent. Should the United States troops succeed in expelling the Spanish; should the United States then declare a protectorate over the island—however provisional or tentative—and seek to extend its authority over the government of Cuba and the army of liberation, we would resist with force of arms as bitterly and tenaciously as we have fought the armies of Spain.

Administration opponents in Congress also made repeated attempts to secure recognition of the Cuban provisional republic, and by mid-April McKinley yielded to compromise. Congress agreed to forgo recognition in exchange for the president’s acceptance of a disclaimer. Article IV of the congressional resolution, the Teller Amendment, specified that the United States “hereby disclaims any disposition or intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control over said island except for pacification thereof, and asserts its determination, when that is accomplished, to leave the government and control of the island to its people.”³⁸

The Joint Resolution calmed Cuban misgivings. Satisfied that the intervention made common cause with separatist goals, Cubans prepared to coordinate joint military operations with their allies. It did not matter that the North Americans refused to recognize the republic, as long as Washington endorsed the goals for which the republic stood. “It is true,” Calixto García conceded, “that they have not entered into an accord with our government; but they have recognized our right to be free and independent and that is enough for me.”³⁹

VIII

The intervention transformed a Cuban war of liberation into a U.S. war of conquest. And it was the victory to which the United States first laid claim and from which so much else would flow. The Cuban war for national liberation became the “Spanish-American War,” nomenclature that in more than symbolic terms ignored Cuban participation and announced the next series of developments. The construct legitimized the U.S. claim over the island as a spoil of victory. The North Americans had not arrived as allies of Cubans or as agents of Cuban independence. They had gone to war, as they always said they would, to prevent the transfer of sovereignty of Cuba to a third party.

The exclusion of the Cubans began early. North American commanders moved insurgent forces behind front lines, principally in support roles. Cuban commanders were ignored. Negotiations for the surrender of Santiago de Cuba in July were conducted without Cuban participation, and by the terms of the surrender Cubans were barred from entering the city. Cuban commander Calixto García was astonished and asked U.S. army leader William R. Shafter for clarification of the agreement. He learned that Santiago was now considered territory conquered by the United States and “part of the Union.”⁴⁰ The decision to deny Cubans access to the city, General Shafter explained publicly, was based on the fear that insurgents could not be restrained from attacking unarmed Spanish soldiers, abusing women, and plundering the city.⁴¹

Indignation swept across Cuban camps. General García denounced the idea that Santiago was “part of the Union.” “I will never accept,” the Cuban commander vowed, “that our country be considered as conquered territory.”⁴² García bristled at the charge that the Cuban army could not be trusted to enter Santiago. “Allow me to protest against even a shadow of such an idea,” García wrote Shafter; “we are not savages who ignore the principles of civilized warfare. We respect too much our cause to stain it with barbarity and cowardice.”⁴³

This conflict gave early form to the fundamental cross-purposes at which Cubans and North Americans found themselves in 1898. Cuban suspicions deepened, and by war’s end the estrangement was all but complete. Insurgent commanders became sullen and noncooperative. Some withdrew from joint operations and broke off relations with North American forces. Calixto García resigned, proclaiming that he was “no longer disposed to continue obeying the orders and cooperating with the plans of the American Army,” and warned his comrades against relinquishing any authority to the “army of the intervention.”⁴⁴

Cuban actions, in turn, antagonized North Americans. When Cubans balked at assignments of menial tasks behind the lines, they were denounced as shirkers and slackers. When they repudiated the terms of the Santiago surrender, they were portrayed as willful and arrogant. Resentment spread among the North Americans. By late summer, contempt for Cubans had become commonplace behind U.S. lines. “The Cubans are a dirty filthy lot,” one officer complained.⁴⁵ Cuban insurgents “hear nothing but words of scorn from our men as they pass,” the Associated Press correspondent in Santiago de Cuba reported. “Even our officers no longer conceal their disgust for their allies, and it is understood that the warm friendship displayed toward them at first has now turned into contempt.”⁴⁶

Exclusion from the negotiations for the surrender of Santiago in July was only the first in a series of rebuffs to Cubans. The terms of the peace protocol in August were also negotiated without Cuban participation, as was the peace treaty in Paris later that autumn. Nor did it take long for the North Americans to come around to the views of the old colonial elites. United States authorities came into direct contact with those social groups most hostile to Cuba Libre, and they confirmed the North Americans’ worst impressions of insurgent Cubans. Contemptuous of the insurrectos, often hysterical in their opposition to Cuban independence, local elites denied that Cubans possessed the aptitude for self-government. They warned that pillage, race war, and endless vendettas by vengeful Cubans were certain to follow in the wake of independence. Businessmen, merchants, and landowners flocked around the newly arrived North Americans hoping for salvation from Cuban independence.

Their views quickly gained currency among North Americans. The “higher classes,” a New York Times reporter wrote, “are opposed, above all things, to an out and out Cuban Government. … If the Cuban revolutionists get control, there will be a long reign of terror in which all who have opposed the insurrection will suffer greatly.” Another correspondent predicted that independence “would mean to turn over the island to a worse condition of anarchy from which we are seeking to rescue it.” The Associated Press correspondent wrote of the “dread” in Santiago de Cuba at the prospect of independence and concluded that the “better classes… fervently hope that the United States will retain the reins of government in the island, as the only guarantee of stability and prosperity.”⁴⁷

In fact, North Americans needed little encouragement to oppose Cuban independence. Nearly a century of maligning the Cuban capacity for self-government had more than adequately prepared the United States to believe the worst about its erstwhile allies. That persons in a position really to know—residents with property and prestige, senior Spanish civil and military authorities, church officials, newspaper editors—also opposed independence corroborated North American suspicions.

Almost from the outset of the intervention, the proposition of independence was scorned and its proponents discredited. Cuban motives for independence were suspect, almost as if opposition to the North American presence was evidence enough that self-serving if not sinister motives lurked behind separatist strivings. Cubans were not inspired by love of liberty but by the lure of looting. “From the highest officer to the lowliest ‘soldier,’” one traveler wrote, “they were there for personal gain.”⁴⁸ The Cuban desire for independence, North Americans concluded, was motivated by a wish to plunder and exact reprisals. Cubans were possessed, one observer reported, by the “sole active desire to murder and pillage.”⁴⁹ “If we are to save Cuba,” a New York journalist exhorted, “we must hold it. If we leave it to the Cubans, we give it over to a reign of terror—to the machete and the torch, to insurrection and assassination.”⁵⁰

This was a proposition from which the North Americans drew a number of inferences: first, Cubans were not prepared for self-government. Again, again, and again they struck the same theme. The ideological imperative of empire took hold early and deeply. The consensus was striking. Admiral William T. Sampson, a member of the United States evacuation commission, insisted that Cubans had no idea of self-government—and “it will take a long time to teach them.”⁵¹ Some North American officials believed Cubans incapable of self-government at any time. “Self-government!” General William R. Shafter protested. “Why those people are no more fit for self-government than gunpowder is for hell.”⁵² General Samuel B. M. Young concluded after the war that the “insurgents are a lot of degenerates, absolutely devoid of honor or gratitude. They are no more capable of self-government than the savages of Africa.”⁵³ A similar note was struck by Major George M. Barbour, the United States sanitary commissioner in Santiago de Cuba. The Cubans, he insisted, “are stupid, given to lying and doing all things in the wrong way…. Under our supervision, and with firm and honest care for the future, the people of Cuba may become a useful race and a credit to the world; but to attempt to set them afloat as a nation, during this generation, would be a great mistake.”⁵⁴

Independence was as implausible a proposition as its proponents were unfit to govern, and in the North American mind both were linked. Only the “ignorant masses,” the “unruly rabble,” and “trouble makers”—“the element,” Governor General Leonard Wood warned, “absolutely without any conception of its responsibilities or duties as citizens”—advocated independence. “The only people who are howling for [independence],” Wood concluded with undisguised contempt, “are those whose antecedents and actions demonstrate the impossibility of self-government at present.”⁵⁵

IX

The independentista ideal was popular, however, and most North Americans in Cuba conceded, if only in private, that a majority of Cubans were devoted to Cuba Libre. But numbers alone, they were quick to counter, could not be permitted to determine the fate of Cuba—particularly when the sentiment of the majority was identified with disruption, disorder, and chaos. That large numbers of Cubans opposed annexation was cause enough to distrust and discredit independence sentiment. If there were people who opposed U.S. rule, they were probably led by wicked men, or knew no better. In either case, opposition to the United States from this source served only to confirm Cuban incapacity for self-government.

If the United States found no support in the independentista majority, it derived some consolation in the quality of the anti-independence minority. The “better classes,” the propertied, the educated, the white—those sectors, in short, most deserving of North American solicitude—were desirous of close and permanent ties with the United States. “The real voice of the people of Cuba,” Governor General Leonard Wood reassured the White House in late 1899, “has not been heard because they have not spoken and, unless I am entirely mistaken, when they do speak there will be many more voices for annexation than there is at present any idea of.” There was, certainly, “much plausibility,” correspondent Herbert P. Williams learned during his travels in Cuba, that the large majority of the “half-barbarous rabble in a vote would request us to leave the island.” It was “probably true,” too, that “the Cubans who want us to go outnumber those who want us to stay.” But mere numbers were inconsequential, Williams insisted. Conceding that the United States “ought not go into the business of government without the consent of the governed,” Williams nevertheless concluded: “The point is that if all, or nearly all, the people whose convictions deserve respect are on one side, mere numbers should not be allowed to decide the matter.”⁵⁶

These were considerations of great concern to North American authorities. Indeed, a political eclipse of the representatives of the “better classes” was no less a threat to U.S. interests, for it was upon the political ascendancy of the local elites that U.S. hopes for sway over Cuba rested. Both opposed Cuban independence. Both opposed Cuban government. Policy makers needed supporters, property owners needed security. North Americans searched for a substitute for independence, local elites sought a substitute for colonialism. The logic of collaboration was compelling and compulsory. Old colonial elites in need of protection and new colonial rulers in need of allies arrived at an understanding. Indeed, the political ascendancy of the “better classes” promised not only to obstruct the rise of independentismo but also to institutionalize U.S. influence from within. It mattered slightly less if Cuba were independent, if that independence was under the auspices of a client political class whose own social salvation was a function of and dependent on U.S. hegemony.

North American efforts centered initially on fostering the ascendancy of the old colonial elites as a political surrogate in opposition to the independentista polity. Preparations for municipal elections in June 1900 required first the restriction of suffrage to exclude, in the words of Secretary of War Elihu Root, the “mass of ignorant and incompetent” so as to promote “a conservative and thoughtful control of Cuba by Cubans” and “avoid the kind of control which leads to perpetual revolutions of Central America and other West India islands.”⁵⁷

Having limited the franchise, the United States next turned its attention to organizing its local political allies. Governor General Leonard Wood labored diligently on behalf of conservative candidates, seeking to forge the “better classes” into a political coalition capable of competing electorally with the “extreme and revolutionary element.” He gave private encouragement to conservative candidates, repeatedly reassuring them of U.S. support while seeking to neutralize the opposition. “Of course,” Wood acknowledged, “the usual opposition party will gradually develop, but I shall endeavor to give them as slender a foundation as possible to stand on.”⁵⁸

The balloting in the 1900 municipal election dealt U.S. efforts a rude blow. Almost everywhere U.S.-backed candidates went down to defeat. Independentistas triumphed and, flushed with victory, stepped up their demands for U.S. evacuation of the island.

Disheartened but undaunted, Wood turned his attention to preparations for the next round of balloting, elections scheduled for December 1900 to select a constituent assembly. This time Wood participated more actively on behalf of conservative candidates. In August, he undertook an arduous tour of the island to campaign for the election of the “better classes.” In Santiago de Cuba, Wood publicly appealed for the election of the “best men” and drew his moral with a familiar metaphor: “Bear in mind that no constitution which does not provide for a stable government will be accepted by the United States. I wish to avoid making Cuba into a second Haiti.” In Puerto Príncipe, Wood warned that if Cubans elected delegates who failed to support order, the United States would not withdraw its military forces. In Cienfuegos he reported confidently that the “better class of men [are] coming to the front daily for candidates to the convention.” In his final pre-election report to the White House, Wood detailed the achievements of his travels around the island. “I have seen most of the prominent men,” he explained, “using every effort to have them send the best and ablest men to the Constitutional Convention without consideration to political parties. Some of the men nominated are excellent, others are bad. I hope, however, that the latter will be defeated.” Nevertheless, he struck a note of caution and appealed to McKinley to proceed slowly with plans for evacuation “until we see what class are coming to the front for the offices called for under the Constitution.”⁵⁹

Independentistas prevailed again. “I regret to inform you,” a disappointed Wood wrote Senator Orville H. Platt in December 1900, “that the dominant party in the convention to-day contains probably the worst political element in the Island and they will bear careful watching.” He lamented:

The men whom I had hoped to see take leadership have been forced into the background by the absolutely irresponsible and unreliable element. … There are a number of excellent men in the Convention; there are also some of the most unprincipled rascals who walk the Island. The only fear in Cuba to-day is not that we shall stay, but that we shall leave too soon. The elements desiring our immediate departure are the men whose only capacity will be demonstrated as a capacity for destroying all hopes for the future.

And he made his point: “The class to whom we must look for the stable government in Cuba are not as yet sufficiently well represented to give us that security and confidence which we desire.”⁶⁰

Wood shared his despair with the secretary of war. “I am disappointed in the composition of the Convention,” he confided ruefully to Root. The responsibility of framing a new constitution had fallen to some of the “worst agitators and political radicals in Cuba.” Wood questioned again the wisdom of proceeding with plans for evacuation. “None of the more intelligent men claim that the people are yet ready for self-government,” Wood wrote plaintively. “In case we withdraw,” he warned, the members of the convention represented “the class to whom Cuba would have to be turned over… for the highly intelligent Cubans of the land owning, industrial and commercial classes are not in politics.” Two-thirds of the convention delegates were “adventurers pure and simple,” not “representatives of Cuba” and “not safe leaders.”⁶¹

As 1900 drew to an end, the United States found itself in possession of an island that it could neither fully retain nor completely release, confronting the imminent ascendancy of the very political forces that the intervention had been designed to contain. The way Cubans had responded to democratic elections, North American officials concluded, confirmed Cuban incapacity for self-governance. By failing to elect the candidates acceptable to the United States, Cubans had demonstrated themselves ill-suited to assume the responsibility of independence. Cubans’ judgment was flawed; they simply could not be trusted to elect the “best men.” Some conclusions seemed in order. The elections revealed Cubans to lack political maturity. They were swayed easily by emotions and led readily by demagogues, which to North Americans meant that they were not ready to assume full responsibility for sovereignty. Under the circumstances, the United States could not withdraw from Cuba without reserving for itself some means through which to guarantee order and stability.

The rationale for a continued exercise of U.S. authority found sanction in revised interpretations of the Joint Resolution. If the principle of the Teller Amendment could not be repudiated, its meaning would be revised. “The United States,” the Teller Amendment stipulated, “hereby disclaims any disposition or intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control over said island except for pacification thereof.” The new official interpretation of the Teller Amendment insisted that the “pacification” required conditions of stability. But “stability” and “stable government,” too, were many things to many people. “What does ‘pacification’ mean in that clause?” Senator Platt asked rhetorically in mid-1900. “We became responsible for the establishment of a government there, which we would be willing to endorse to the people of the world—a stable government, a government for which we would be willing to be responsible in the eyes of the world.”⁶² And at another point, Platt insisted: " ‘Pacification’ of the ‘island’ manifestly meant the establishment in that island of a government capable of adequately protecting life, liberty and property."⁶³

Once stability was subsumed into the meaning of the Joint Resolution, independence became a condition which the United States claimed authorization to recognize, or restrict, or revoke—however circumstances warranted. Stability, like pacification, however, also underwent repeated ideological transformations, and it soon became clear that in its final form it was not a condition unlike that of a protectorate to the United States. When asked during congressional hearings if Cubans should be “entirely independent in the administration of their own local affairs,” General James H. Wilson answered unequivocally: “Only so far as they are willing to bind themselves to manage their own affairs, in a way that would be acceptable and agreeable to us.”⁶⁴ Wood agreed: “When the Spanish-American war was declared the United States took a step forward, and assumed a position as protector of the interests of Cuba. It became responsible for the welfare of the people, politically, mentally and morally.”⁶⁵

XII

By the third year of the military occupation, the United States had failed to diminish the appeal of Cuba Libre. Independentismo persisted as a potent political force. The inability of the old colonial elites to win political control required the United States to seek alternative means of hegemony. The “better classes” had shown themselves to be of limited political value. They had fared poorly at the polls, and no amount of North American backing, it seemed, could elevate them to power. “I think we are in great danger of finding ourselves in a very awkward and untenable position,” Root warned in early 1901.⁶⁶ The administration was prepared, even anxious, to end the occupation, but not without first securing guarantees necessary to U.S. interests. Root sought to give U.S. authority legal form, something in the way of binding political relations based on the Monroe Doctrine.

In January 1901, Root outlined four provisions he deemed essential to U.S. interests. First, that “in transferring the control of Cuba to the Government established under the new constitution the United States reserves and retains the right of intervention for the preservation of Cuban independence and the maintenance of a stable Government adequately protecting life, property and individual liberty.” Second, that “no Government organized under the constitution shall be deemed to have authority to enter into any treaty or engagement with any foreign power which may tend to impair or interfere with the independence of Cuba.” Root also insisted that to perform “such duties as may devolve upon her under the foregoing provisions and for her own defense,” the United States “may acquire and hold the title to land, and maintain naval stations at certain specified points.” Last, that “all the acts of the Military Government, and all rights acquired thereunder, shall be valid and be maintained and protected.”⁶⁷

These were not entirely new policy formulations. They had been discussed earlier in one form or another. Root acknowledged that his proposals owed some inspiration to England’s relations with Egypt, which seemed to allow “England to retire and still maintain her moral control.”⁶⁸ His urgency, however, was new. New, too, was the means by which Root proposed to fix the terms of political relations. Only eighteen months earlier he had envisioned the question of political relations between Cuba and the United States as a proper subject of future negotiations. “When that government is established,” Root had asserted in 1899, “the relations which exist between it and the United States will be a matter for free and uncontrolled discussion between the two parties.” After 1900, however, Root decided to impose unilaterally on the Cuban constituent assembly the formal terms of Cuba’s relations to the United States as part of the “fundamental law of Cuba.”⁶⁹

In large measure, the decision to fix the nature of relations between Cuba and the United States even as the island was occupied militarily and governed by the United States signaled the failure of U.S. designs. The independentista ideal proved stronger than North Americans had anticipated, and once it assumed institutional forms, principally through political parties, party programs, and duly elected officeholders, it expanded into a force of even greater popular appeal. The decision to press for binding relations, even while the island remained under military occupation, further underscored the realization in the United States that once achieving independence Cubans would not acquiesce to the proposed limitations upon their sovereignty. The original expectation in 1899 that political relations would be the subject of “free and uncontrolled discussion” between both governments rested on the assumption that the United States would be negotiating with representatives of the old colonial elites who depended on North American hegemony as the source of their local ascendancy. After 1900, however, the results of local elections raised the real possibility that the island would pass wholly under the control of the independentista coalition, ill-disposed to compromise national sovereignty to accommodate North American needs.

It was thus necessary to use the military occupation as the means to exact Cuban acquiescence in U.S. demands. Otherwise, North Americans faced the improbable situation of having to negotiate with Cuba on a parity of sovereignty the restriction of its national sovereignty. This was the “great danger” to which Root alluded that would place the United States in “a very awkward and untenable position.” The “most obvious meaning” of the Joint Resolution, Root conceded confidentially in early 1901, called first for the establishment of an independent government in Cuba, followed by the negotiation of a treaty of relations between Cuba and the United States. “Yet,” Root hastened to add, “it is plain that such a course would leave the United States in a worse position as to her own interests than she was when Spain held the sovereignty of Cuba and would be an abandonment both of our interests and the safety of Cuba herself.” United States interests required “constitutional limitations which would never be put into the [Cuban] Constitution except upon our insistence or suggestion.” Senator Platt agreed. To defer the issue of relations until the inauguration of a Cuban government, he warned, risked surrendering “any right to be heard as to what relations shall be” and further risked having to be “contented with nothing at all.”⁷⁰

Wood responded to the proposed relations with enthusiasm. The stipulations, he was certain, would over the long run serve to promote the political ascendancy of the better classes. The relationship between the poor political showing of local elites in Cuba, on one hand, and the lack of a stated U.S. policy, on the other, Wood argued, was self-evident. “Our policy towards Cuba,” he complained, “has rendered it impossible for business and conservative elements to state frankly what they desire, they fearing to be left in the lurch by our Government’s sudden withdrawal.” Wood returned to his enduring concern:

It must not be forgotten for a moment that the present dominant political elements are not representative of the Cuban people as a whole. In general terms they are a lot of adventurers and to turn the country over to them before a better element has come to the front will be nothing more or less in effect than turning the island over to spoliation. It would be a terrific blow to civilization here. I believe in establishing a government of and by the people of Cuba and a free government, because we have promised it, but I do not believe in surrendering the present Government to the adventurers who are now in the Convention and in many of the municipalities. Let Congress set a definite date of withdrawal provided a suitable government exists and I will make every effort to bring the conservative and representative elements to the front…. I have started the new year with a systematic policy of urging and encouraging by all proper means, the conservative element to come forward and interest themselves in the political situation.⁷¹

XIII

In its essential features, the Platt Amendment, enacted into law by Congress in February 1901, addressed the central elements of U.S. objectives through the course of the nineteenth century. An adequate if imperfect substitute for annexation, it served to transform the substance of Cuban sovereignty into an extension of the U.S. national system. Restrictions imposed upon the conduct of foreign relations, specifically the denial of treaty authority and debt restrictions, as well as the prohibition against the cession of national territory, were designed to minimize Cuban international entanglement:

• I. That the government of Cuba shall never enter into any treaty or other compact with any foreign power or powers which will impair or tend to impair the independence of Cuba, or in any manner authorize or permit any foreign power or powers to obtain by colonization or, for military or naval purposes or otherwise, lodgment in or control over any portion of said island.
• II. That said government shall not assume or contract any public debt, to pay the interest upon which, and to make reasonable sinking fund provision for the ultimate discharge of which, the ordinary revenues of the island, after defraying the current expenses of government shall be inadequate.
• III. 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.
• IV. That all Acts of the United States in Cuba during its military occupancy thereof are ratified and validated, and all lawful rights acquired thereunder shall be maintained and protected.
• V. That the government of Cuba will execute and as far as necessary extend, the plans already devised or other plans to be mutually agreed upon, for the sanitation of the cities of the island, to the end that a recurrence of epidemic and infectious diseases may be prevented, thereby assuring protection to the people and commerce of Cuba, as well as to the commerce of the southern ports of the United States and of the people residing therein.
• VI. That the Isle of Pines shall be omitted from the proposed constitutional boundaries of Cuba, the title thereto being left to future adjustment by treaty.
• VII. 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 land necessary for coaling or naval stations at certain specified points, to be agreed upon with the President of the United States.
• VIII. That by way of further assurance the government of Cuba will embody the foregoing provisions in a permanent treaty with the United States.⁷²

The failure to install the better classes in power meant an uncertain future in the organization of the new republic. Clearly if the authority and resources of the United States could not contain the potency of the revolutionary ideal during the occupation, what would follow the evacuation? Elections had underscored the uncertainty if not inefficacy of the democratic process, and the point was not lost on North Americans. The Platt Amendment rested on the central if not fully stated premise that the principal danger to U.S. interests in Cuba originated with Cubans themselves, or at least those Cubans in the independentista camp. Whether in the direction of foreign affairs, or in the management of public funds, or in the conduct of national politics, government by Cubans remained always a dubious proposition, an enterprise as unsound in its premises as it was uncertain in its permanence. Root was blunt. The proposed relations represented “the extreme limit of this country’s indulgence in the matter of the independence of Cuba.” The political leadership emerging in Havana did not inspire confidence in the United States. “The character of the ruling class,” Root acknowledged, “is such that their administration of the affairs of the island will require the restraining influence of the United States government for many years to come, even if it does not eventually become necessary for this government to take direct and absolute control of Cuban affairs.”⁷³

XIV

News of the Platt Amendment provoked widespread popular protests in Cuba. Anti-U.S. demonstrations were held across the island. Former insurgent chieftains denounced the proposed relations and alluded to the necessity of returning to the field of armed struggle to vindicate the independentista ideal. Municipal councils, civic organizations, and veterans associations cabled protests to North American authorities in Havana and Washington. This show of popular opposition encouraged the constituent assembly to balk at enacting the amendment as part of the new constitution. Apprehension increased among North American officials. A naval squadron was prepared for a “courtesy call” to Havana. Yet Wood fretted and cabled Root: “Can you indicate our action in case Convention should refuse to accept Platt Amendment?”⁷⁴

Root was unmoved. There would be neither compromise on the congressional amendment nor concession to Cuban independence, he warned, until Cubans ratified the proposed relations. He was adamant. “Under the act of Congress they never can have any further government in Cuba, except the intervening Government of the United States, until they have acted.” The members of the constituent convention “should have sufficient intelligence to understand that they cannot escape their responsibility except by a refusal to act, which will necessarily require the convening of another Convention which will act.” “No constitution can be put into effect in Cuba,” Root warned directly, “and no government can be elected under it, no electoral law by the Convention can be put into effect, and no election held under it until they have acted upon this question of relations in conformity with this act of Congress.” Continued resistance to U.S. demands, Root warned ominously, would have dire consequences. “There is only one possible way for them to bring about the termination of the military government and make either the constitution or electoral law effective; that is to do the whole duty they were elected for.”⁷⁵

In early June, Cubans ceased to resist. It was apparent that the choice before the convention was limited sovereignty or no sovereignty. It accepted the Platt Amendment as an appendix to the new 1901 constitution by a sixteen-to-eleven vote.

About the Author

Louis A. Pérez Jr.: One of the world’s foremost scholars of Cuba. Operating out of the U.S., his prolific body of work—including The Structure of Cuban History—analyzes the social, political, and cultural evolution of the nation.