Cuba Libre: A 500-Year Quest for Independence

by Philip Brenner

  The collapse generated widespread unemployment,18 which, along with the loss of slaves, significantly reduced planters’ wealth. One-third of all cigar workers lost their jobs; the Havana naval yard closed in 1885; government workers were laid off, resulting in problems of sanitation and public works. Five hundred coffee farms halted operation, and coffee production collapsed. The official end of slavery in 1886 compounded the unemployment problem. Former slaves competed for jobs, and the surplus of willing labor contributed to reducing workers’ wages. Increased mechanization also resulted in less need for labor. On the other hand, with the end of slavery the issue of abolition no longer was a source of division among independentistas. They had more reason to form a cohesive opposition to Spanish domination.

  Meanwhile the United States had become Cuba’s major trading partner and source of foreign investment. Cuba’s trade with the United States was six times greater than with Spain in 1881. By the end of the 1880s, the northern neighbor was essentially the sole purchaser of Cuban sugar—94 percent of Cuba’s sugar exports went to the United States. Cuba’s increased dependence on the United States meant that problems in the US economy would be magnified on the island. And in the 1880s and early 1890s the problems were enormous, as the United States entered into a prolonged depression.

  US economic problems were one reason investors looked to Cuba. At first, they partnered with existing Cuban land and mill owners. But the North Americans quickly began to acquire bankrupted estates outright. By 1895, US investments in Cuba totaled at least $50 million, and only 20 percent of the mills were owned by Cuban families of the former planter class.19 The new foreign investors combined smaller farms into larger operations, known as ingenios and centrales, the latter acting as a central agricultural facility that generally produced more than just sugar. As investments spurred increased mechanization, there was less need for labor. So while the increased efficiency helped to restore the macro Cuban economy in the 1890s, the spread of capital-intensive processes produced unemployment and discontent.

  A new boost for Cuban sugar production came when the US Congress passed the US Tariff Act of 1890, which removed the duty on raw sugar imports into the United States. Exports jumped from 632,000 tons in 1890 to more than one million tons in 1894. It was a sign that Cuba was becoming more than just dependent on the United States for its economic health; the relationship led to total Cuban integration into the US economy.20 This state of affairs ran both ways; Cuban economic health depended on US purchasing power. At the same time, political changes in Cuba had a greater impact than ever before on US investors and therefore on US politics.

  Class relations in Cuba changed correspondingly as economic ties with the United States tightened. The takeover by foreign investors meant that “Cuba would no longer possess a wealthy class that was independent of US capital,” historian Jules Benjamin explains. As a result, no large and self-conscious Cuban class existed to oppose the ownership of land or basic infrastructure by capitalists from the United States and Canada.21 One sign of Cuban dependency appeared in the early 1890s when another wave of economic depression hit the United States. The US government raised sugar tariffs once more, sending Cuban revenues and the overall economy tumbling as well.

  The Independence War

  While the Cuban business sector’s ardor for independence was tempered by its subservience to foreign investors, the longtime demands for ending colonial rule among other sectors of the population were reaching heights not seen since the Ten-Year War. The unlikely leader who brought together the various factions was a five-foot-tall essayist, journalist, and poet who lived in New York, José Martí. Born in Havana in 1853 to poor Spanish immigrants, Martí began his first attacks on Spanish colonial rule in La Patria Libre (The Free Homeland), a newspaper he started at the age of sixteen, during the Ten-Year War. Today, Cubans of all political leanings regard him as the father of Cuban independence because of his devotion to the fight for Cuba’s sovereignty.

  “Our America” by José Martí*

  And in what patria can a man take greater pride than in our long-suffering republics of America . . . ? Never before have such advanced and consolidated nations been created from such disparate factors in less historical time. . . . The colony lives on in the republic. . . . Therefore the urgent duty of our America is to show herself as she is, one in soul and intent, rapidly overcoming the crushing weight of her past and stained only by the fertile blood spilled by hands that do battle against ruins and by veins that were punctured by our former masters.

  The disdain of the formidable neighbor who does not know her is our America’s greatest danger, and it is urgent—for the day of the visit is near—that her neighbor come to know her, and quickly, so that he will not disdain her. Out of ignorance, he may perhaps begin to covet her. But when he knows her, he will remove his hands from her in respect. One must have faith in the best in man and distrust the worst. One must give the best every opportunity, so that the worst will be laid bare and overcome. If not, the worst will prevail. . . . There is no racial hatred, because there are no races. . . . The soul, equal and eternal, emanates from bodies that are diverse in form and color. Anyone who promotes and disseminates opposition or hatred among races is committing a sin against humanity.

  * * *

  *Published in El Partido Liberal (Mexico City, March 5, 1892), trans. Jerry A. Sierra; reprinted from HistoryofCuba.com, http://www.historyofcuba.com/history/marti/America.htm.

  Martí gathered independentistas under the banner of the Cuban Revolutionary Party in 1892. With Máximo Gómez, Antonio Maceo, and other veterans of the Ten-Year War, he began to coordinate preparations for what the group hoped would be a final struggle to achieve independence. Their campaign (in Cuba it is often called “The Necessary War”) opened on February 24, 1895, in the eastern province of Oriente, the cradle of Cuban insurrections. The Spanish Army had put down a number of other small insurrections since the Little War of 1879–1880. But this time the insurgents were better prepared and organized. By the end of 1895, the struggle for independence had engulfed the entire island. Scattered insurgencies had coalesced into a coherent force of 50,000 fighters organized into twelve divisions and eighty-five regiments.22

  Six weeks after returning to Cuba via the Dominican Republic with General Gómez, Martí was killed in combat on May 19, 1895. As a martyr, Martí continued to inspire the new Mambises as they rallied around his notions of Cuba libre. These emphasized the unity of the nation, the creation of a republic that would serve all Cubans equally, and the ability of Cuba to act independently in its own interests. This platform set the stage for an inevitable clash with the United States because the insurgents not only demanded Cuban independence from Spain, they sought to make Cuba sovereign and uncontrolled by any foreigners—“Cuba for Cubans,” as Louis Pérez summarized the goal.23

  The 200,000-soldier Spanish garrison at first seemed sufficient to counter the independentistas. Spain fought back against the revolutionaries with enormous brutality, razing villages and driving Cubans out of their homes. This became the typical Spanish mode of warfare, especially after General Valeriano Weyler arrived in February 1896. Known as “The Butcher,” Weyler was the personification of inhumane and ruthless counterinsurgency warfare.24 Asserting that “I believe that war should be answered with war,”25 Weyler began with a tactic that he called “reconcentration.” He ordered his soldiers to forcibly relocate peasants from the countryside into towns and then to destroy their crops, cattle, and houses so that revolutionaries would not be able to live off the land.

  Weyler focused initially on the western province of Pinar del Río where Antonio Maceo, the resolute general of the Ten-Year War, had returned from seventeen years in exile to join the new revolution. At first Weyler’s tactics produced some victories, despite widespread criticism of his methods. But public opinion turned decisively against him when his troops killed M
aceo in cold blood on December 7, 1896. Weyler denied charges about the manner of Maceo’s death, but editorialists in the United States doubted his word. The New York Times wrote: “There is a multitude of circumstances confirmatory of the report that Maceo was invited to a parley by the Spaniards and murdered. Such a story would not be believed of the English or the French or the Germans. . . . It is believed of Weyler.”26

  Faced with unrelenting criticism, Spain recalled Weyler at the end of 1897, canceled the reconcentration program, and proclaimed a new policy of home rule with limited autonomy for Cuba. An “Autonomist” colonial government was formed in January 1898, following the lines of the liberal Autonomist Party, which had argued for twenty years that such reforms would prevent bloodshed and insurrection. But the Spanish gesture came too late, especially because Weyler had targeted Autonomists for imprisonment and deportation. In addition, the Spanish army’s morale was low and its losses were crippling. Of the 200,000 Spanish troops deployed to the war, 11,000 had been wounded, 4,000 were killed in battle, and 41,000 died from dysentery, malaria, yellow fever, and other diseases.27 Weyler’s repressive tactics also stimulated broad support for the revolutionaries.

  The new government gained little support from Spaniards on the island who had given up hope for a Spanish solution. The only viable solution they now envisioned was US intervention. Indeed, assessments of the war by both Madrid and Washington predicted that the rebels would likely win the war by the end of 1898.28 Business leaders and property owners in Cuba also anticipated an insurgent victory and appealed to the United States either to annex Cuba or “to save us.” “The Mother Country cannot protect us,” declared a group of business leaders. “If left to the insurgents our property is lost.”29

  Notes

  1. José Martí, “To Manuel Mercado,” trans. Eliana Loveluck, in The Cuba Reader: The Making of a Revolutionary Society, ed. Philip Brenner et al. (New York: Grove, 1988), 28–29.

  2. D. R. Murray, “Statistics of the Slave Trade to Cuba, 1790–1867,” Journal of Latin American Studies 3, no. 2 (1971): 134, http://latinamericanstudies.org/slavery/Cuba-slave-trade.pdf.

  3. The 1842 census counted 1,037,624 inhabitants: 436,495 black slaves, 152,838 free blacks, and 448,291 whites. Philip S. Foner, Antonio Maceo: The ‘Bronze Titan’ of Cuba’s Struggle for Independence (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), 10–11; Pérez, Cuba, 70–73, 80–82.

  4. Quoted in Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Cuba and the United States: Ties of Singular Intimacy (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 42.

  5. Pérez, Cuba and the United States, 50.

  6. Pérez, Cuba, 94.

  7. Quoted in Foner, Antonio Maceo, 15.

  8. An alternate explanation of the derivation of the name is provided in Teresa Prados-Torreira, Mambisas: Rebel Women in Nineteenth-Century Cuba (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), 1. She attributes mambisa to the distortion by Spanish soldiers of a common Yoruba prefix, mbi.

  9. Prados-Torreira, Mambisas, 151; K. Lynn Stoner, “Militant Heroines and the Consecration of the Patriarchal State: The Glorification of Loyalty, Combat, and National Suicide in the Making of Cuban National Identity,” Cuban Studies 34 (2003): 92.

  10. Quoted in Prados-Torreira, Mambisas, 84.

  11. Patricia Weiss Fagen, “Antonio Maceo: Heroes, History, and Historiography,” Latin American Research Review 11, no. 3 (1976).

  12. Pérez, Cuba, 96–97.

  13. Quoted in Foner. Antonio Maceo, 81.

  14. For example, Fidel Castro Ruz, “Discurso En el Acto de Conmemoracion del Centenario de la Protesta de Baraguá, Santiago de Cuba,” March 15, 1978, http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1978/esp/f150378e.html. Authors’ translation.

  15. Fagen, “Antonio Maceo,” 71.

  16. Foner, Antonio Maceo, 94–97.

  17. Pérez, Cuba, 100, 107.

  18. Pérez, Cuba, 101–3. There actually was an increase in total exports from $51 million in 1885 to $67 million in 1890, but the one-third increase in the value of exports masked systemic weaknesses in key sectors.

  19. Pérez, Cuba and the United States, 60–61.

  20. Pérez, Cuba and the United States, 62–63.

  21. Jules Robert Benjamin, The United States and Cuba: Hegemony and Dependent Development, 1880–1934 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977), 4.

  22. Louis A. Pérez, Jr., The War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and Historiography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 7.

  23. Pérez, Cuba and the United States, 81.

  24. John Lawrence Tone, War and Genocide in Cuba, 1895–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 156–60, 184.

  25. Pérez, Cuba, 130.

  26. “Weyler’s Denials,” New York Times, December 16, 1896.

  27. Tone, War and Genocide in Cuba, 9–10.

  28. Pérez, Cuba, 139–40.

  29. Quoted in Pérez, Cuba, 89.

  Chapter 4

  Cuban Independence War and US Occupation

  When the revolution in Cuba broke out young [Adolfo] Rodríguez joined the insurgents, leaving his father and mother and two sisters at the farm. He was taken, in December of 1896, by a force of the Guardia Civil, the corps d’élite of the Spanish army, and defended himself when they tried to capture him, wounding three of them with his machete. He was tried by a military court for bearing arms against the government, and sentenced to be shot by a fusillade some morning before sunrise. . . . He made a picture of such pathetic helplessness, but of such courage and dignity, that he reminded me on the instant of that statue of Nathan Hale which stands in the City Hall Park, above the roar of Broadway. The Cuban’s arms were bound, as are those of the statue, and he stood firmly, with his weight resting on his heels like a soldier on parade, and with his face held up fearlessly, as is that of the statue. But there was this difference, that Rodríguez, while probably as willing to give six lives for his country as was the American rebel, being only a peasant, did not think to say so, and he will not, in consequence, live in bronze during the lives of many men, but will be remembered only as one of thirty Cubans, one of whom was shot at Santa Clara on each succeeding day at sunrise.

  —Richard Harding Davis1

  US Intervention in the Cuban Independence War

  Popular US sentiment to intervene in Cuba’s independence war grew steadily in 1896. As the violence spread, and as Spain’s powerlessness became more evident, US investors feared the economic result of a rebel victory. A fully independent Cuba seemed to be a serious threat to their investments, trade privileges, and dominance in the region. Yet the protection of property owned by US companies was not the only reason the United States was now inclining itself toward intervention.

  Multiple Motivations for Intervention

  In the 1890s, the United States underwent a series of debilitating shocks.2 First, the 1890 US census reported the “frontier” no longer existed—settlements now occupied nearly all unclaimed land. The concept of the frontier had contributed to a common narrative that the United States was exceptional, a country of unbounded opportunity where individuals could succeed based on their own merits and self-reliance. The frontier also had served as an escape valve from the oppression of early industrialization, which delayed the formation of meaningful trade unions in the United States. Notably, the American Federation of Labor was founded at this time, in 1886, long after trade unions were active in Europe.

  The closing of the frontier, only a generation after the Homestead Act had offered free land to anyone, had a psychologically demoralizing effect on the country. But the widespread foreclosure sales of the farms acquired by homesteaders were even more debilitating. Their outrage fueled the Populist Movement, which arose in this period. In part, the farmers’ losses were due to the collusion of large banks, railroad companies, and an emerging agribusiness industry
that had provided easy loans for seeds, machinery, and other supplies collateralized by the farms.

  Debtors soon began demanding that the government reduce the value of their loans by inflating the US currency, circulating dollars that had no backing (“greenbacks”) or that were backed by both silver and gold (“bimetallism”). At the same time, millions of factory workers had no escape valve when they lost their jobs during the economic depression that began in 1893, which was even more severe than the deep recession of the 1880s.3 The country seemed as if it was on the verge of a revolution as striking workers battled company guards, police forces, and sometimes the national guard.

  The collusion and greed of the new captains of industry provided an easy explanation for the economic chaos. A more complex analysis pointed to technological advances that had made US companies so efficient that they were producing more goods than could be consumed by the US market. The culprit of overproduction had validity and appealed to a group of political leaders who believed US greatness could be achieved only by expanding the country’s influence globally. Their primary targets were markets in Asia.4 This objective also seemed to provide a solution to the economic problems at home.

  The Route to Asia Lies via Cuba

  But US entry into Asia was blocked by the colonized outposts—such as India, Indonesia, and Indo-China—of European imperial powers who also had carved up China with closed deals. Of the remaining countries still available, the Philippines was the most desirable because Spain was having difficulty in suppressing an independence struggle there.5 Coincidentally, Spain was having the same problem in Cuba.

  Cuba itself had long appealed to dreamers of American expansion. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams famously asserted in 1823 that “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.”6 Cubans disdainfully call his statement the “ripe fruit theory.” Thomas Jefferson wrote to President James Monroe in 1824 that “I candidly confess, that I have ever looked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of States.”7 William Henry Seward, Secretary of State from 1861 to 1869, reasoned that the United States should annex Cuba because “every rock and every grain of sand in that island were drifted and washed out from American soil by the floods of the Mississippi, and the other estuaries of the Gulf of Mexico.”8