That Infernal Little Cuban Republic

The United States and the Cuban Revolution

Lars Schoultz

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780807888605
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

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

1 HERITAGE

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

—Governor-General Leonard Wood, 1901

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

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

With annexation quashed, Fish still had to reply to Spain’s complaints that U.S. citizens were aiding Cuba’s rebels—”the departure of various filibustering expeditions in broad day-light, and unmolested, from New York and other federal ports,” the Spanish claimed.³ The initial response to Madrid was handled by an assistant, but then the rebels purchased a U.S. steamship, the Virginius, that dodged around the Caribbean carrying supplies and messages until the Spanish finally captured it and summarily executed the ship’s captain and thirty-six crew members, most of them U.S. citizens. As would be the case today, the dead sailors’ relatives descended on their representatives in Congress, demanding revenge and restitution. Legislators, in turn, proposed everything from a full investigation to a declaration of war, and the secretary of state again had to drop everything and prepare two lengthy reports to mollify Congress. This, the Virginius incident, was only the most grievous of many, and Fish soon concluded that close ties with Cuba would be an “unmitigated calamity.”⁴

After ten years the Cuban rebellion faltered, although enough sporadic violence continued into the 1880s for U.S. consul Adam Badeau to urge caution when Washington, intent on expanding exports, began to consider an agreement to liberalize trade with Spanish Cuba. Badeau admitted that he was torn: on the one hand, he asked, why bother to establish closer relations with an island where Spain’s corrupt rule was leading to “the misery and anxiety of all, condemned alike to poverty and ruin”; on the other hand, was not facilitating trade a consul’s primary responsibility? In the end, he came down in favor of an agreement, concluding that U.S. merchants would “extend to the country and its inhabitants the advantages of contact with the higher civilization, the greater energy, the purer morality of America.”⁵

There the matter rested until 1895, when the New York–based Cuban Revolutionary Party issued a new call for independence, and soon Antonio Maceo, José Martí, and Máximo Gómez had returned to lead the fight against Spanish colonialism. As usual, Grover Cleveland’s State Department was preoccupied by a much larger problem—the Venezuelan boundary dispute with Great Britain—but Secretary of State Richard Olney soon was approached by a U.S. investor, said to be “one of the largest landed proprietors of Cuba, a man of great wealth” and clearly a rebel sympathizer. After their meeting, Olney sent the president a lengthy memo arguing that the rebels “have a right to ask, I think, that we inform ourselves upon the point, whether they are merely gangs of roving banditti, or are a substantial portion of the community revolting against intolerable conditions.”⁶

The British soon expressed a willingness to negotiate an end to the Venezuelan dispute, and Olney was free to give Cuba more attention. He composed a lengthy diplomatic note describing the disruptive effect of the conflict on U.S. economic interests and the dangers faced by U.S. citizens residing in Cuba, and he warned Madrid that “the United States can not contemplate with complacency another ten years of Cuban insurrection.” The Spanish replied with a conciliatory message expressing a willingness “to adopt such reforms as may be useful or necessary,” but only after the rebels had laid down their arms. Spain’s envoy noted tactfully that the rebels would do so more quickly if “all the people of the United States …will completely cease to extend unlawful aid to the insurgents.”⁷ Little more was said during President Cleveland’s ten remaining months in the White House, but in his final message to Congress he cautioned that “it can not be reasonably assumed that the hitherto expectant attitude of the United States will be indefinitely maintained.” His solution was “a measure of home rule . . . while preserving the sovereignty of Spain.”⁸

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• THAT INFERNAL LITTLE CUBAN REPUBLIC
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION NEIGHBORS
• 1 HERITAGE
• 2 PRELUDE THE TRUMAN YEARS
• 3 AROUSAL THE EISENHOWER YEARS, 1953-1958
• 4 WATCHING AND WAITING THE EISENHOWER ADMINISTRATION, 1959
• 5 1960 THE YEAR OF PUSHING AND SHOVING
• 6 THE BAY OF PIGS
• 7 STATE-SPONSORED TERRORISM
• 8 HE’S GOING TO BE THERE UNTIL HE DIES THE JOHNSON ADMINISTRATION
• 9 MUTUAL HOSTILITY AS A FACT OF LIFE THE NIXON-FORD YEARS
• 10 RECONCILIATION AND ESTRANGEMENT THE CARTER YEARS
• 11 BACK TO SQUARE ONE THE REAGAN YEARS
• 12 UNWAVERING HOSTILITY THE GEORGE H. W. BUSH ADMINISTRATION
• 13 BLESSINGS OF LIBERTY THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION
• 14 MORE BLESSINGS OF LIBERTY THE GEORGE W. BUSH ADMINISTRATION
• CONCLUSION BENEVOLENT DOMINATION
• NOTES
• INDEX