Guantánamo

  Discrimination persisted into the Cuban republic and through the second U.S. military occupation of 1906–1909, when U.S. troops returned to Cuba to quash an uprising ignited by the corruption and incompetence of the so-called Moderate Party of President Estrada y Palma. In response to the discrimination, a group of Cuban blacks left the Liberal Party to form the Partido Independiente de Color (PIC), whose exclusive-sounding name belied its ambition for broad social, especially working-class, reform. In the 1908 national election, the PIC fared miserably, proving itself unable to compete with the patronage of the mainstream political parties. When, by 1910, the PIC appeared likely to erode black support among the mainstream Liberal and Conservative constituencies, the parties passed a law outlawing single-race political institutions. PIC’s members were harassed and arrested, its political organs banned. The PIC members preferred “to be blacks rather than Cubans,” one editorial writer warned. The new nation had no place for such “racists.” The PIC, meanwhile, appealed to the United States to intervene under the Platt Amendment, something the new Taft administration was not ready to do.19

  Excluded from political participation and unable to air its grievances, the PIC took matters into its own hands in May 1912. The way to get the United States’ attention, Cubans had learned back in 1906, was to create social upheaval threatening to U.S. property. And so the PIC began to destroy U.S. and foreign property throughout Cuba, but especially in Oriente province, in the vicinity of Guantánamo Bay.

  As early as February 1912, U.S. representatives in Cuba had begun closely following the behavior of PIC leader Evaristo Estenoz, a “troublesome negro.”20 On May 23, U.S. secretary of state Philander Knox ordered his ambassador to Cuba to warn the Cuban government that the U.S. Marines were on the way to Guantánamo, in response to U.S. property being seized and employees of U.S. plantations threatened. The U.S. government took these steps not to intervene in Cuban affairs, Knox insisted, but simply to protect American lives and property.21 And to goad Cuban officials to action. The next day, U.S. ambassador A. M. Beaupré informed his boss that three battleships with 250 marines each had arrived at Guantánamo, making “a very good impression” on Cuban officials, if not on the rebels themselves. Cuban officials had finally assigned guards to the vulnerable American businesses, calming American fears considerably. Tellingly, a day later, Beaupré confessed ignorance about the rebels’ motivation. “It is difficult to say,” he remarked, “what the moral effect the presence of [the American] ships will have upon the irresponsible negroes.” Sizing up the insurrection, Beaupré could say only that it seemed “to be organized and directed by some unknown interest, it being highly probable that the negroes at the head of the Independent Party would be capable of engineering a movement on this scale. The negroes now in revolt are of a very ignorant class.”22

  Beaupré claimed that Cuban officials welcomed the arrival of the U.S. fleet, fully recognizing the distinction between U.S. intervention in Cuba and the protection of U.S. property. A letter from Cuban president José Miguel Gómez to U.S. president William Howard Taft suggests otherwise. That was a distinction without a difference, Gómez wrote Taft. To Cuba, the arrival of the U.S. forces smacked of intervention,

  and the natural development of events, once these foreign troops landed, would accentuate that character, it is my duty to inform you that a determination of this serious character alarms and injures the feelings of a people loving and jealous of their independence, above all when such measures were not even decided upon by previous agreement between both Governments, which places the Government of Cuba in a humiliating inferiority through a neglect of its national rights, causing it discredit within and without the country. 23

  The Cuban military itself was quite prepared to “annihilate” the “negroes” itself.

  In reply, Taft told Gómez that the United States appreciated Cuba’s resolve, and that the ships had sailed to Cuba merely in case of necessity. Gómez responded in turn that the United States was most welcome to observe events in Cuba. Any deployment of U.S. forces should only follow an agreement of both parties.24 In a note to Beaupré, Secretary of State Knox distinguished American intervention in Cuba from police action to protect U.S. property; the government would never consult Cuba on that.25 As they had during the so-called negotiations over the Platt Amendment, U.S. officials continued to talk past their Cuban counterparts. Meanwhile, with marines itching for action aboard battleships anchored at Guantánamo Bay, Secretary Knox became increasingly forthright in dictating the number and location of Cuban troops to be dispersed around the Cuban countryside to protect U.S. and foreign planters.26

  On June 6, 1912, The New York Times announced that American marines had come ashore at the Cuban port of Caimanera, just outside the boundary of the U.S. base. From there they fanned out up the Guantánamo Basin, taking positions around the U.S. estates. Meanwhile, more marines were headed to Cuba from Key West. The larger strategy, according to the Times, was to station an American battleship in each of the major towns along Cuba’s southern coastline, “with the idea that the crew of a thousand bluejackets [sailors] will impress the negroes with the fact that the power of the United States is nearby, and that further acts of lawlessness on their part will lead to their ultimate punishment.” The sailors were to be granted “liberal shore leave, so that the negroes as they come into the towns to get supplies may see them and carry back word to their associates that the forces of the ‘North Americans’ have arrived and are on the alert.”27

  With the U.S. Marines guarding American property, Cuban forces were now free to take the battle to the “troublesome negroes,” which they did with ruthless efficiency. It was bad enough that Afro-Cubans threatened foreign property; their “diabolical assaults upon the honor of white women” were beyond the pale. With marines providing cover, the Cuban military, joined by white vigilantes, massacred black Cubans, ultimately claiming between three and six thousand lives. The vengeance loosed upon the rebels seems out of proportion to their crimes, and calls to mind the violence against African Americans during Reconstruction, when the sanctity of white womanhood was reported to have been similarly imperiled. 28

  Ultimately, the United States was satisfied with the way things turned out. “I beg to express my thorough conviction,” Beaupré wrote his boss, “that the sending of troops was fully warranted by the situation, that the effect of their visit was salutary, and their withdrawal at this time would be a serious mistake.” There was mopping up to do. And then there was the instability in states within sailing distance from Guantánamo, such as black Haiti and the nearby Dominican Republic.29

  In May 1916, in the face of political and social instability in the Dominican Republic, seven hundred marines deployed to the capital, Santo Domingo, to begin an eight-year occupation. Like earlier interventions in Cuba, this occupation handsomely benefited U.S. commercial interests on the island. U.S. sugar producers, for example, increased their holdings nearly twofold, elevating their share of Dominican sugar production to 80 percent by the time U.S. forces pulled out. The occupations of the Dominican Republic and Cuba would become a model for future U.S. policy in Haiti and throughout Latin America for decades to come.30

  In November 1916, Cuban president Mario García Menocal, a member of the Conservative Party, won reelection in a poll in which the number of votes exceeded the number of voters. Liberals protested, prompting Cuba’s Supreme Court to schedule a second vote for the following February. But on the eve of the second election, Liberals revolted and took up arms under the leadership of José Miguel Gómez, like most politicians of this era, a veteran of the War of Independence. By February 1917, the U.S. government was on the verge of declaring war on Germany, and expected a pacified Cuba to serve as a first line of defense of U.S. interests in the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico. As a result, the United States supported President Menocal against the rebels, despite the rebels’ considerable backing in the United States and among some American interests in Orie
nte province. 31

  In mid-February, the U.S. Navy commander at Guantánamo Bay became embroiled in negotiations between Cuban and rebel forces over the fate of the harbor at Santiago de Cuba, which the rebels controlled and threatened to block by sinking vessels across its mouth. As the self-appointed representative of U.S. business interests in the area, Captain Dudley W. Knox did not want to see the harbor closed to U.S. commerce. Knox convinced the rebels to refrain from shutting down the harbor at Santiago in exchange for a promise that the Cuban warships would not force the entrance. Knox’s initiative, undertaken without authorization from Washington, won the enmity of U.S. consular and State Department officials, who supported Menocal against the rebels, with whom they refused to negotiate. Knox returned to Guantánamo after several days. In the ensuing weeks, rebel forces, increasingly desperate and hard-pressed, began to do as Cuban political minorities before them had done in Oriente province, namely, threatening U.S. property in the hopes of triggering a full-scale U.S. occupation of Cuba under the Platt Amendment.32

  But with war against Germany all but inevitable, the U.S. government had its hands full. President Wilson ordered marines from the naval base to guard American and foreign property, while sending sailors from American warships into Santiago, Guantánamo City, and other eastern towns. The presence of U.S. troops in eastern Cuba bolstered weak Cuban government forces. Again, with the Americans guarding their backs, the Cuban Army was able to confine the rebels to an increasingly diminishing area, so that by midsummer 1917, the rebellion was essentially smothered. But not before thousands of U.S. troops had been dispersed throughout southeastern Cuba for the second time in a decade, allowing the corrupt Menocal to be inaugurated for a second term.33

  The social unrest that gripped Oriente province in the first two decades of the twentieth century reflected structural defects in Cuban society traceable to the encomienda system of land and labor distribution introduced onto the island by early colonial Spain. From the arrival of Diego Velázquez in 1511 through the seizure of American assets at the time of the Cuban Revolution, the Cuban economy was dominated by absentee landlords who regarded Cuba as a source of status and wealth rather than as a home. The dissolution of the great cattle estates at the end of the eighteenth century and the simultaneous opening of Cuba to foreign trade gave rise not to the diversified and indigenous free market economy that Havana’s Creole merchants and entrepreneurs anticipated, but to a capital-intensive, foreign-owned, export-oriented sugar monoculture based on plantation slavery and supplemented with Chinese indentured servants.

  The U.S. hijacking of Cuban independence exaggerated these structural flaws. In contrast to the American patriots’ expropriation of British Loyalist property during the American Revolution, the United States allowed no nationalization or redistribution of peninsular (Spanish) or Creole property at the end of the “Spanish-American War.” On the contrary, Spanish loyalists, “peninsulares,” Creoles, Europeans, and Americans retained their property and political and economic influence. In the cases of the few Spaniards or foreigners who did abandon their property during or after the war, an absence of Cuban capital and credit inhibited the disbursement of property to the Cuban people. In fact, in the aftermath of independence, foreign control of Cuba’s economy expanded while Cubans remained essentially sidelined.34

  The ravaging of the Cuban countryside during the war provided the opportunity to decentralize Cuban agriculture. One can imagine the proliferation across Cuba of small and midsize farms producing diversified goods for both local and global markets. But this flew in the face of both U.S. and foreign capital interests in Cuba, as well as global trends. Big is in, Henry Cabot Lodge had announced back in 1895, in reference to America’s new interest in overseas colonies. But Lodge might just as well have been talking about agriculture and industry. The three went handsomely together. Leonard Wood’s first aim as military governor of Cuba was to get the Cuban economy up and running. Wood’s administration underwrote the recapitalization of Cuban agriculture and industry on an ever-larger scale, creating insurmountable barriers to entry for Cuban farmers shy of capital. In his letter to Shafter of July 1898, Cuban general Calixto García expressed dismay that Shafter would leave Spanish officials in charge of Santiago at the end of the war. Something similar happened throughout the Cuban economy. In Cuba’s emerging industrial sector, for example, the influence of Spanish merchants and entrepreneurs actually expanded in the first three decades after Cuban independence. By 1927, foreigners owned two-thirds of Cuba’s general stores, Spaniards themselves roughly 50 percent. Similarly, Spaniards dominated the professions, education, and the clergy.35

  The result was a Cuban economy from which the Cuban middle class was virtually excluded. The lower classes were welcome, but only as laborers. Not even the old Cuban planter elite, small as it was, remained in power. Having tied its fate to the cause of autonomy under Spain, it had no standing when the old political regime fell.36 American and foreign investors were ready to fill the void. In the fertile central province of Camagüey, for example, some seven thousand Americans possessed land titles; in nearby Sancti Spiritus, Americans owned seven-eighths of the land. By 1906 it is estimated that the United States owned 15 percent of Cuba. Put another way, roughly 60 percent of rural property in Cuba was in the possession of foreign companies. Some 15 percent was owned by Spanish residents, leaving approximately 15 percent of Cuban land to Cubans. Similar imbalance prevailed across the Cuban economy, including mining, transportation, and utilities, and the manufacturing, banking, and finance industries.37

  The effect on Cuban morale was devastating. For two generations, Cuban patriots had struggled for control of Cuba. Victory in the War of Independence had brought them nothing. When social alienation bred political upheaval over the fall and winter of 1905–1906, disgruntled Cuban politicians solicited U.S. intervention. If initially reluctant, the Roosevelt administration was at the ready. “I am so angry with that infernal little Cuban republic that I would like to wipe its people off the face of the earth,” Roosevelt told his confidant Whitelaw Reid the following September. “All we have wanted from them is that they would behave themselves and be prosperous and happy so that we would not have to interfere.”38 U.S. policy had made that impossible.

  In the immediate aftermath of war, U.S. officials granted favorable tariff concessions to (largely U.S.- and foreign-based) Cuban sugar producers in exchange for reciprocal benefits for U.S. manufacturers. The cheap U.S.-manufactured goods undercut a nascent Cuban manufacturing sector already suffering from a shortage of investment capital. Naturally, the defects of the sugar monoculture influenced the plight of Cuban labor. In boom times, the sugar industry employed a mostly African- and Chinese-derived labor pool on a seasonal basis and under highly exploitative conditions. In slack times, laid-off sugar workers joined a large pool of under- and unemployed workers.

  The structural flaws in Cuba’s economy affected Cuban politics. With Cuban sugar production dominated by foreigners, and lacking an industrial base, Cuban elites turned to politics as the surest way to make a living. Government became the instrument not for solving the nation’s problems but for distributing political spoils. By the 1920s, as the federal bureaucracy (and payroll) swelled to unimaginable levels, Cuba became a welfare state—for Cuban elites—channeling scarce resources into the pockets of professional politicians.39

  In the early twentieth century the fate of Cuba’s ruling political parties depended on maintaining the good graces of the United States, always ready to intervene under Platt to protect U.S. business interests. More than anything, this meant maintaining law and order, no mean feat in the midst of economic hardship and rampant corruption. It would take Cuba years to descend to the level of political violence that characterized the intimidation and violence (gangsterismo) of the 1940s and ’50s; but by the mid-1920s, dissident labor leaders were literally being fed to sharks as Cuba’s poor confronted the unpalatable choice of participating in the viol
ence as the arm of the ruling party or risking becoming victims of the violence itself.40

  Like the political parties, the Cuban military had a great stake in maintaining the status quo. U.S. intervention jeopardized Cuban Army legitimacy, making the army a force of political stability at the expense of fair elections and political and economic reform. Beginning in the 1910s, when President Mario García Menocal responded to a wave of labor unrest by unleashing the army on workers, the Cuban Army was never far offstage. Far from stabilizing Cuban politics, the rising influence of the army contributed to the social volatility, adding deadly force to an already explosive relationship between government and labor. Despite their differences, the ruling party and the army agreed on maintaining a pliant workforce. In the second decade of the twentieth century, Cuban agricultural and industrial workers began to protest living and working conditions with increasing regularity and forcefulness. With the United States fiercely opposed to even minimal labor concessions (a minimum wage, for instance, or a majority Cuban labor force), Cuban politicians refused to negotiate with workers, which only added to worker unrest.41