As early as 1845 the purchase of Cuba was discussed in Washington. The famous "Ostend manifesto" (1854) issued by the American diplomatists, expounded their right to seize the island in case Spain should refuse to sell it. This resolution to give independence to a country they despaired of buying was therefore only the end of a long campaign.
Certainly in 1898, once peace was signed and Porto Rico conquered, they respected this independence. But their detachment was incomplete; they occupied the island, sent governors thither, and generously reformed the finances, education, and hygiene of the country. A provisional tutelage, soon followed by the proclamation of the Republic. Was this the independence of which Marti had dreamed? The treaty which proclaimed it also limited it; the Platt amendment found its way into the margin of a liberal text, reserving to the United States the right of intervention to remedy any possible anarchy. A strange severity, to demand of an untried tropical republic, where the hostility of castes was extreme, a serene and untroubled existence! Eventual military occupation for the purpose of suppressing revolts would be a dangerous snare to independence. Intervention in the public affairs of the old Spanish colony, twice repeated, was both times followed by a campaign of annexation in the Yellow Press. It is difficult to guess whether Yankee imperialism, with its ever-increasing appetite, will respect the autonomy of the island in the face of periodic occupations. It will probably prefer a protectorate or a final conquest when wearied of the turbulence of a democracy incapable of self-government.
Will this beautiful island one day become a State of the Anglo-Saxon or Federal Union? The accession of the Cubans to this democracy would cause a disturbance in the political and social world as profound as that created by Japanese immigration in the Far West. The plutocrats of the States have too much contempt for half-breeds and negroes willingly to accept deputies from a country where the profound admixture of races contains an important African element; a society which despises the negro cannot wholly agree with one ruled largely by Spanish half-castes of Indian and African ancestry. The protectorate would be a step toward the control of the Tropics which Mr. Benjamin Kidd and other English sociologists imagine to be the appanage of their race.
The civilising work of the United States has been admirable. Once Spain was defeated and her colony conquered, they transformed the education, finance, and hygiene of the island to prepare the people for the liberty they ignored. It was four years before they gave it; four years of pedagogy, of which Brigadier-General Wood, military and civil chief, was in charge, until on the 20th of May, 1902, "thanks to the goodwill of President Roosevelt, we were recognised as having attained our majority."[[2]]
Four years of extraordinary activity transformed the exhausted island into a prosperous country, a reform which we may follow in the memoirs of General Wood. Two years of endeavour extirpated the yellow fever, which had prevailed in Havana since 1762. The Yankees fought the mosquitos, the vehicles of the disease, and their sanitary works and measures decreased the death-rate from 91.3 per 1,000 in 1898 to 20.63 in 1902. In the same period the deaths among the American troops fell from 91.03 to 20.68. They also attacked malaria and tuberculosis, until Havana, as one of them proudly writes, became one of the healthiest cities of America.
Pavements, gutters, sewers, the demolition of old buildings and the construction of new; asylums, hospitals, and prisons, gave the island an aspect at once modern and sanitary. The fiscal revenues, formerly badly employed by an unskilful bureaucracy, found useful employment; dilapidations were noted and a railway statute was passed. The Yankees opened up new roads, knowing how far the prosperity of the island depended on them; in 1906, the second year of the occupation, there were only 610 kilometres of carriage-roads in Cuba, while Jamaica, with one-fifth the area, had 10,113.[[3]]
Communications being thus improved, the sugar industry, on which the prosperity of the island depends, developed rapidly. The visitors did not forget to attract immigrants and to reconstruct the ports.
The government of General Wood installed modern schools in the old Spanish school-houses, while it built special schools, kindergartens, and technical colleges in the large towns.
Under the Spaniards education was obligatory, no doubt, but it was the Americans who brought a lapsed law into force. Fines punished parental neglect. A thousand teachers went to Harvard, in the year 1900 alone, sent thither by General Wood to improve their methods of teaching; new pedagogic methods and a wider culture strongly modified social and political life. The Americans left ten times as many schools as they found, and an education adequate to the race and the Cuban child, who is "impressionable, nervous, and furiously imaginative."
Governor Wood requested his country to reduce by one-half the customs rates upon the coffee, fruits, and sugar which the island produced, as the basis of a Zollverein profitable to both countries. He complained, in his memoir, of the indifference of the wealthy towards the communal and political life, which he wished to render more active. A law passed by him regulated the elections in the new Republic.