This is the second installment of the series on twentieth century relations between Cuba and the United States. The initial diary of this series covered some important aspects of the aftermath of the Spanish American War and the U.S. occupation of the island. This diary picks up where the previous one left off.
Following some brief notes about the current Cuban transition to a new leadership, we go back in time to examine the infamous Platt Amendment, which compounded the already deteriorating relations between the island and its North American occupier following the war.
The usual disclaimer that I am not a historian holds for the entire series.
(The above photo is of the Havana waterfront taken during my 1979 visit)
Speculation abounds in the press of the United States regarding the possible fate(s) of Cuba following Fidel Castro’s decision to step down due to illness. Although he appears to be making a slow but steady recovery, it is evident he will no longer be able to hold the island’s foremost leadership position. What seems to have escaped the US media in its unbound enthusiasm for a radical change in the political direction of the country is the fact, apparent to anyone who cares to analyze the situation seriously, that an orderly transition to a new leadership under the aegis of the Communist Party has already taken place.
People in the know like Nelson and David Rockefeller Senior Fellow and Director of Latin American Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, Julia E. Sweig (who not only has publications about Cuba but has traveled to the island some 30 times over the past 23 years, meeting with a wide spectrum of people from Fidel Castro to his regime’s political prisoners) are aware that despite not being a US style Jeffersonian democracy, Cuba:
... is a functioning country with highly opinionated citizens where locally elected officials (albeit all from one party) worry about issues such as garbage collection, public transportation, employment, education, health care, and safety. Although plagued by worsening corruption, Cuban institutions are staffed by an educated civil service, battle-tested military officers, a capable diplomatic corps, and a skilled work force. Cuban citizens are highly literate, cosmopolitan, endlessly entrepreneurial, and by global standards quite healthy.
This panorama is seldom acknowledged by the Cuban government’s (exiled) detractors, which at times seem to have an all-too-privileged access to the halls of power in the United States. People without such blinders would readily acknowledge what Sweig has concluded: that the Cuban government has garnered sufficient legitimacy over the years to undertake a smooth leadership transition:
People at all levels of the Cuban government and the Communist Party were enormously confident of the regime's ability to survive Fidel's passing. In and out of government circles, critics and supporters alike -- including in the state-run press -- readily acknowledge major problems with productivity and the delivery of goods and services. But the regime's still-viable entitlement programs and a widespread sense that Raúl is the right man to confront corruption and bring accountable governance give the current leadership more legitimacy than it could possibly derive from repression alone (the usual explanation foreigners give for the regime's staying power).
This should get some people thinking. The Cuban leadership has maintained itself defiant towards the US throughout its nearly 50 year history. If it is still in power and enjoys such a level of legitimacy as to be able to guarantee continuity of the Revolution via a smooth transition to a new leadership, maybe there is something to all the anti US government rhetoric (please notice, again, that I am using the phrase anti US government , instead of anti US). As Sweig again acknowledges:
In Cuba's national narrative, outside powers -- whether Spain in the nineteenth century or the United States in the twentieth -- have preyed on Cuba's internal division to dominate Cuban politics. Revolutionary ideology emphasizes this history of thwarted independence and imperialist meddling, from the Spanish-American War to the Bay of Pigs, to sustain a national consensus. Unity at home, the message goes, is the best defense against the only external power Cuba still regards as a threat -- the United States.
THE PLATT AMENDMENT
On November 5, 1900, Governor-General Leonard Wood (who, as noted in my previous diary, would rise to further notoriety in the Philippines) called for a constitutional convention in Cuba’s capital. However, just four months later the Cuban constitutional convention was given a set of articles which had originated as a US legislative amendment to the Army Appropriation Act of 1901, sponsored by Senator Orville Platt of Connecticut.
What became known as the Platt Amendment reflected US President McKinley’s Secretary of War, Elihu Root’s and General Wood’s (both annexationists) prescriptions for future Cuban-US relations. It placed onerous restrictions on Cuban sovereignty and was immediately rejected by the constituent assembly as well as sectors of the Cuban population. Two provisions of the amendment are of particular importance:
Article III. 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.
Article VII. 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 Cuban Government will sell or lease to the United States the land necessary for coaling or naval stations, at certain specified points, to be agreed upon with the President of the United States. (As reproduced in: Leo Huberman & Paul M. Sweezy, Cuba: Anatomy of a Revolution, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1960: page 15)
As Lars Schoultz explains:
Once McKinley had signed the Platt Amendment into law, ...Root informed the Cubans that they were obliged to append it to their new constitution. When the constituent assembly refused by a vote of 24 to 2, he instructed Wood to tell the Cubans that the US occupation would continue indefinitely ‘if they continue to exhibit ingratitude and entire lack of appreciation of the expenditure of blood and treasure of the United States to secure their freedom from Spain’. [Elihu Root papers cited by Schoultz] With no alternative but capitulation, the constituent assembly grudgingly added the Amendment’s eight articles to their constitution; in return, Governor General Wood presided over Cuba’s first transition to Democracy, then sailed for home. Shortly before leaving he wrote to assure his new President, Theodore Roosevelt, that ‘there is, of course, little or no independence left Cuba under the Platt Amendment’. (Blessings of Liberty: The United States and the Promotion of Democracy in Cuba, Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 34, Part 2, May 2002, page 402)
Lester Langley adds some more detail to the reaction the Platt Amendment elicited from Cubans:
In Havana it precipitated widespread, but not universal, disapproval; when a Cuban group presented Wood with a formal protest, he privately characterized its members as ungrateful. The Cuban convention resolved to oppose the amendment as a violation of national sovereignty and dispatched a delegation to Washington. It arrived only to discover that McKinley had already signed the act into law. Root mollified the Cubans with a sumptuous dinner and a soothing explanation that the amendment would be interpreted narrowly and would not be exploited to impair Cuban sovereignty. Six hours of discussion ensued, during which Root reminded them that the Monroe Doctrine already gave the United States the right to intervene in Cuban affairs. (Lester D. Langley. The United States and the Caribbean in the Twentieth Century, Fourth Ed., U. of Georgia Press, 1989: page 21)
Thus on June 12, 1901, the Platt Amendment was written into the Cuban Constitution by a vote of 17 to 11 (it would be further formalized two years later by a permanent treaty between both countries). Although the US military occupation of the island "officially ended" on May 20, 1902, the US used article VII of the Platt Amendment to lease (for $2,000 a year) the land for what today is the naval station at Guantanamo Bay. The US wasn’t gone for long, either. As I will discuss in future installments of this series, the US returned to occupy Cuba between 1906 and 1909, sent troops in 1917 and continued interfering in the conduct of Cuba’s internal affairs up until the July 26 Revolution (and beyond).
(The respected popular Cuban journal Bohemia has more detail on the Platt Amendment – in Spanish).
Instead of continuing on to take a look at post-occupation Cuba, I will make a brief digression, before concluding, to examine why there wasn’t a stiff and violent resistance to the US occupation once the Spanish American War ended.
Why Didn’t Cubans Resist the Occupation?
First of all, to answer the question outright, Cubans did resist the occupation but not violently as did the Philippines. As Robert Whitney asserts in a recent round-up of Cuban scholarship before 1959:
Historians ... know that despite the long and violent independence struggles, when US troops occupied their island in 1898, many Cuban political leaders readily accepted US hegemony. Many members of Cuba’s upper classes had reluctantly joined the independence movement and had always been skeptical about the ability of Cubans to be a sovereign people. (History or Teleology? Recent Scholarship on Cuba before 1959, Latin American Research Review, Volume 36, Num. 2, 2001: pg. 222)
There was also an element of fear among the upper classes that the lower classes (and especially the blacks) would become empowered and threaten their privileged position in a post-colonial Cuban society. This angle has not been fully explored in the past and is now being pursued by scholarship from such notable researchers as Ada Ferrer (who I mentioned in the first installment of this series). Commenting on her book Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898, Robert Whitney says:
Ferrer shows how in both wars for independence, the simultaneous struggle against racism and colonialism fueled an insurgent energy that threatened both Cuban Creole domination and Spanish colonial rule. This revolutionary threat from the poorest sectors of the Cuban population also alarmed US leaders, and one objective of US intervention in 1898 was to block this revolution. Ferrer reveals just how revolutionary Cuba’s independence wars were. A multiracial fighting force, integrated at all ranks, carried forward a message of racial equality, land and work for the poor and total independence for Cuba.
Just as was the case in Puerto Rico (speaking from my own common knowledge), the United States represented progress, modernity and freedom to Cuba’s Creole elites, while Spain was looked upon as backwards and decadent. What was not perceived at the time (or was ignored by some) was that the United States was entering its full imperialist phase. C. Friedrich Katz notes that:
While US economic expansion into Latin America, above all into Mexico and Cuba, had begun shortly after the Civil War, political and military expansion only began in 1898. In that year, the Spanish American War, the United States easily defeated Spain and occupied its colonies on the American continent: Puerto Rico and Cuba, as well as the Philippines. (From paper entitled: US Imperial Expansion into the Caribbean and Mexico, 1898 – 1920)
(Note: For those of you more historically inclined than myself, there are some good sources which flesh out the different historical interpretations of the period and discuss the US’s emergence as an imperial power. For the time being, I’ll just recommend this one (pdf).)
I think it is important to include a note or two about the role of the Cuban exiles when discussing the lack of a fierce resistance to the US occupation. The Cuban patriot Jose Marti spent a good deal of time in exile and is probably best known for his essay Our America (pdf). Despite his strong anti-imperialist credentials, author Rodrigo Lazo notes in the introduction to his book Writing to Cuba:
In the mid-nineteenth century, Cuba's exiled writers were in many cases willing to embrace U.S. constitutional principles, if not the United States itself. They drew inspiration and political ideals from the writings of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and Samuel Adams and from the U.S. Declaration of Independence. In addition to the content of U.S. revolutionary documents, exiles were captivated by the relationship between text and revolution exemplified by a pamphlet such as Common Sense. Their wish to recreate el sentido común for Cuba is an example of what Michael Warner describes as the "far-reaching impact both on the continent and in the New World" of the U.S. paper war waged by men of letters in the eighteenth century
Nevertheless, he says the following about what is indeed a very complex topic:
The attitudes of Cubans toward the United States, as I show throughout this study, were neither monolithic nor static. As a culture of exile and print developed in the antebellum period, some Cubans adopted expansionist positions, while others challenged the ascendancy of the United States and its slave-based economy. Thus, while the dominant strain in writings by Cuban exiles during the antebellum period is pro-United States, heterogeneous and contradictory discourses circulated as a result of the complex relationships and political alliances prompted by U.S. expansionism and Spanish colonialism.
This diary is cross-posted at Progressive Historians