George Kennan on the Spanish-American War

A Critical Edition of "Cuba and the Cubans"

Frank Jacob

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783319674537
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

This book presents a critical edition of the lecture "Cuba and the Cubans" by George Kennan the Elder, with a wide-ranging introduction examining its influence on American public opinion of the Spanish-American War. A well-known journalist and travel writer, George Kennan went to Cuba in 1898 to report on the war and conditions on the island for American readers. After the war, he delivered his lecture "Cuba and the Cubans" to audiences across the United States, depicting a backwards, inferior culture unprepared for independence. Frank Jacob's introduction offers rich context for his life, lecture, and influence, arguing that he contributed to the shift in public perception of Cuba from respected ally to wayward neighbor in need of American intervention. This critical edition illuminates the interaction between journalism, public opinion, and U.S. foreign policy at a key moment in the U.S.-Cuban relationship that still reverberates today.

© The Author(s) 2018

Frank Jacob (ed.)George Kennan on the Spanish-American Warhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67453-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Frank Jacob¹

(1)

History, Queensborough Community College, Bayside, NY, USA

Abstract

The introduction provides a survey of George Kennan’s (1845–1924) vita and works until the outbreak of the Spanish–American War (1898). It furthermore provides a discussion of the context of the war within Cuban and American histories. The developments on Cuba as well as the U.S. discussion about a military intervention on the island are analyzed and different perspectives on the issue critically explained. Furthermore, a short description and analysis of the main contents of Kennan’s lecture “Cuba and the Cubansˮ are given.

Keywords

George KennanSpanish–American WarCubaCuban independence

A shorter and different version of this introduction was published in Gilmar Visoni-Alonzo and Frank Jacob, ed. Latin America’s Martial Age: Conflict and Warfare in the Long Nineteenth Century (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2017). I thank my co-editor and the publisher for the permission to republish a variation of the chapter in the present book. I would also like to thank the anonymous peer reviewer for his comments that helped me to further improve the present chapter, and my colleague Gilmar Visoni-Alonzo for his critical reading of the final draft.

End Abstract

The Spanish–American War ¹ was often called a “Splendid Little War” that finally ended the remains of Spanish imperial pretensions in the Caribbean and Latin America and replaced the former colonial power in this region with a new imperial great power, the United States of America. While the U.S. perspective and the perception of Cuba in the works of George Kennan the Elder (1845–1924) will be of special interest in the present book, a few words about the Cuban context are needed to understand what happened before U.S. interests in the country developed. A short survey of the events leading up to the Spanish–American War is therefore necessary before returning to the perception of the conflict in the United States.

As recent research has shown, the history of Cuba must be researched in its Caribbean context to understand the economic and social transitions that determine the history of the island in the “long” nineteenth century.² German historian Michael Zeuske argues that the “point of no return in the relationship between ‘African’ ethnicity, slavery as labor system, and constructed blackness seems to have come in the English, Dutch, and Danish Caribbean at the end of the first half of the sixteenth century; eighty years earlier in Brazil ; and somewhat later in North America, the French Caribbean , and the Spanish Caribbean ”.³ While a first wave of abolition swept through Saint Domingue , the British colonies and Latin America (1650–1850), as Zeuske continues the periodization, “An overlapping third stage of expanding slavery begins with the Haitian Revolution and lasts until the last New World abolitions in the southern United States in 1865, Cuba in 1886, and Brazil in 1888.”⁴ This third period caused an economic and social transformation on the island, where “the leading role of Hispano-Cuban planters led to the creation of an explicitly white model of the nation”.⁵ The Cuban struggle against Spanish colonial rule between 1868 and 1898 was therefore not only a struggle against a foreign ruler but also an internal one between the white ruling class and the people of color, which was particularly stimulated by a crisis of the existing political system on the island.⁶

The economic elite until the 1820s had been the large landowners (hacendados), who, for example, had gained money from crown privileges within the tobacco trade.⁷ In the nineteenth century, however, a process of class and social diversification began, which opened the stage for those of modest social origin, who were able to increase their wealth as a consequence of economic, techonological, and demographic change on the island and in the region. In the 1860s a period of technological development is followed by a concentration of capital, which stimulated a “formation of an independent consciousness”, because the changes caused a reconfiguration of the Cuban elites between 1868 and 1898, which would eventually have a direct impact on the louder demands for independence from Spain .⁸

At the same time, race, as the Afro-Cuban intellectual Esteban Morales Domínguez emphasized, is “a problem of vital importance”⁹ on the island. In order to understand Cuba’s history in the “long” nineteenth century and beyond, one has to highlight that “Racism arose from slavery”, because “For generations, blacks and their descendants occupied the lowest rung in Cuban society.”¹⁰ While slavery was not only related to the cultivation of sugar , as well as tobacco ,¹¹ it was the revolution on St. Domingue that would tremendously change Cuban demographics and the economy that previously existed. Following the independence of Haiti, Cuba would become the leading exporter of sugar in the Caribbean, and slavery would became the determining factor for the island’s history until 1886, when it was formally abolished, and beyond.¹² Between 1816 and 1867 more than 595,000 slaves were brought to Cuba, and with 17% of the island’s population being free people of color, the white population became a minority.¹³ These demographics would increase the white elite’s fear of a slave rebellion, such as the one that swept over St. Domingue, and made them support the Spanish colonial rule at a time when other colonies in Spanish America were considering greater autonomy or outright independence.¹⁴

It was the global impact of the French Revolution in the Caribbean, the violent transformation of the sugar colony of St. Domingue to the free nation state of Haiti that stimulated a colonial paranoia in Cuba as well.¹⁵ We can consequently identify three main problems for the Cuban upper classes related to the events in the French colony. The elites needed to (1) keep the colonial status of the island in existence in order to preserve their own privileged status, (2) expand the plantation system to take advantage of shortfall in sugar production the revolution on St. Domingue had created, and hoped for (3) the end of French exports from the region due to the involvement of the French Republic in the First Coalition War between 1793 and 1795.¹⁶ The end of the plantation system on St. Domingue consequently marked the beginning of the Cuban transformation, because the continuation of slavery on the island made the takeover of the economic potential of the former French colony possible. While fear existed for a possible consequence of the extension of the plantation system on Cuba, the economic impact was tremendously bigger than this fear.¹⁷

The demographic changes since the early nineteenth century would later impact the history of Cuban emanciptation, which, as Rebecca J. Scott and Michael Zeuske have correctly argued “took place during a period of intense competition for popular loyalty between the Spanish colonial state and Cuban separatists”.¹⁸ The Cuban struggle for independence can therefore not solely be understood as one of colonized people against their colonizers, but is far more complex, as different interest groups within the Cuban society would determine the course of the events. While the emancipation of the slaves was a complex process that would take decades to gain the legal freedom of this group in 1886, the wars between 1868 and 1898 served as catalyzers to achieve this aim.¹⁹ Eventually, the struggle for the abolition of slavery became closely linked to the struggle for Cuban independence and the idea of the establishment of a free nation state.²⁰ The final defeat of Spain in 1898 marked what Rebecca J....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. CUBA AND THE CUBANS
• Backmatter