The History of Cuba, vol. 1

by Willis Fletcher Johnson

It was the interesting fortune of Cuba, therefore, not only to engage the early and earnest diplomatic interest of the United States in her behalf, but also to afford to that country occasion for the conception, formulation and promulgation of perhaps the most important of all the fundamental principles of its state policy in international affairs. We have suggested, in anticipation of the narrative, that Cuba was largely to be credited with the inception of the impulse for the prompt construction of the Isthmian Canal. In a far more valid and direct sense Cuba suggested the enunciation of the Monroe Doctrine. It is true that in relation first to Louisiana and then to Florida there had previously been preliminary hints at and approximations to that Doctrine. But those were territories contiguous with our own and already marked by the United States for eventual annexation and incorporation. Cuba, on the contrary, was entirely detached from our domain, and while there were then those who anticipated and desired her ultimate annexation, there was no such confident and determined resolution to that effect that there was in the case of the other regions named. Cuba was therefore the first detached country, not destined for annexation, to which the United States extended and applied the fundamental principle which was later developed into the Monroe Doctrine. We may not doubt that the Monroe Doctrine would have been put forward, even had it not been for Cuba. We may not deny nor dispute that it was because of Cuba and concerning Cuba that the first specific and indubitable intimation of that doctrine was given.

The development of American policy toward Cuba is an important and interesting part of the history of the United States as well as of Cuba. The progressively significant utterances of the younger Adams, of Clay and of Forsythe, culminating years afterward in those of Cleveland and McKinley, form one of the most consistent, logical and convincing chapters in American diplomatic history. It is marred, we must confess, by some adventitious excrescences, chiefly contributed by Calhoun and Pierre Soule. Yet even these, deplorable as they ever must be regarded, fail to destroy the symmetry of the whole. It is a chapter, indeed, which more than any other is comprehensive and expository of the whole spirit and trend of American international transactions.

Cuba has also been intimately connected with three great issues of American domestic politics, as well as with that supreme principle of her foreign policy. The first of these was that of human slavery. From the end of the second war with Great Britain to the beginning of the Civil War that issue dominated American politics and therefore determined largely the American attitude toward Cuba. The pro-slavery influences, which were generally paramount at Washington, resisted all efforts, which otherwise might have been successful, to draw Cuba into the community of republics freed from Spanish rule in Central and South America, because of unwillingness to have her become, like them, free soil; and subsequently the same influences planned and plotted and fought for Cuban annexation to the United States, either by conquest or by purchase, in order that she might thus be added to the slave-holding domain. On the other hand, the anti-slavery party, because of its abhorrence of these schemes, opposed the manifestation of what would have been a quite legitimate and benevolent interest in Cuban affairs. For forty years Cuba was a pawn in the game between these contending factions. Of course this issue was disposed of by the Civil War and the consequent abolition of slavery in the United States.

Another issue was that of expansion. There was from the first a considerable party in the United States that favored the widest possible acquisition of territory, sometimes quite regardless of the means, and it early fixed upon Cuba as what Jefferson and the younger Adams had declared it to be, the most interesting and most natural addition that could be made to the federal system. There was also a party that was resolutely opposed to any further extension of American territorial sovereignty, whether by conquest or purchase. Sometimes the one and sometimes the other of these prevailed in American politics, and not infrequently Cuba was the chief issue between them. Ultimately it was over Cuba that their greatest conflict was waged; resulting in a compromise, under which the United States on the one hand renounced all designs of annexing Cuba, and on the other hand did annex other still more extensive territories.

The third of these issues was that of the tariff. Commercial relations between Cuba and the United States were naturally intimate and important to both countries, and afforded scope for almost endless discussions concerning and manipulations of tariff duties. It was in the power of the United States to enhance or to depress the prosperity of Cuba, by the adjustment of tariff rates. To admit Cuban sugar, not to mention tobacco, freely or at a low duty, into the American market meant prosperity for the island. To place a high tariff rate upon it meant hard times if not disaster in Cuba. During the period between the Ten Years' War and the War of Independence in Cuba, such tariff changes very seriously affected the economic and also the political condition of Cuba; and the final withdrawal of the reciprocity arrangement which had opened American markets to Cuba was one of the chief provoking causes of the final revolution in the island. That revolution would doubtless have come, in any case, but it was measurably hastened and exacerbated by the economic distress which was thus precipitated upon the island, and against which it was realized there could be no assurance until Cuba was an independent nation with full power to regulate and control her own commerce and her own economic system. Even then, as we shall see, for a time the island was involved in economic distress because of the unwillingness of certain sordid interests in the United States to perform the most obvious and indisputable moral duty of that country toward its neighbor. There are few passages which the friendly historian must more regret to record in the story of Cuban-American relations than that of the delay of the American Congress to enter into proper commercial reciprocity with Cuba as soon as the independence of that island was established.

We shall see in these pages why it was necessary, from the very beginning, for Cuba to be entirely freed and divorced from all political connection with Spain, and why all the various proposals of autonomy were essentially and inevitably unacceptable. Such proposals were repeatedly made, by the Spanish government, but they were invariably either consciously or unconsciously delusive. The story of Spain's promises to Cuba is a story of broken promises, and of disappointed hopes. Nor is that to be wondered at by those who take into consideration the circumstances in which the promises were made. When the impossible is promised, the promise is doomed to non-fulfilment. Spain was in an impossible position. In order to pacify Cuba she had to promise her reforms, autonomy, liberty. But in order to maintain herself at home she had to repudiate those promises. Their fulfilment in the West Indies would have been disastrous in the Iberian Peninsula. While Spain was a reactionary monarchy at home, she could not practice liberal and progressive democracy in her colonies. Even when her monarchy became constitutional, and even during the brief periods of her republican government, the full concession of Cuba's demands would have been incompatible with her domestic status. There was an irreconcilable conflict between the European system—even European republicanism—and the American system. Spain was compelled for the sake of her Peninsular integrity and tranquillity to adhere to the former, while Cuba would be and could be contented with nothing short of the latter. Such were the terms of the problem which arose in the early part of the Nineteenth Century. Its only possible solution was in the complete separation of the two countries, and the complete independence of Cuba.

We must not wonder, however, at the circumstance that this was not universally recognized at first, but that year after year some of the wisest and best of Cuban patriots strove merely for reforms in government under continued and perpetual union with the Spanish crown, and that they even deprecated and opposed all efforts at independence. We must not wonder, even, that so late as the War of Independence some of the foremost Cuban statesmen, who yielded precedence to none in purity of purpose and in sincere devotion to what they regarded as the best interests of the island, were willing and even proud to be known as Autonomists and to essay the impossible task of trying to make an Autonomist government successful. The Cubans of to-day, with vision cleared of the red glare of war and of the mists of misapprehension, doubtless understand what the conditions were at that time and appreciate the motives, however mistaken they proved to me, of the Autonomists. American readers, with less vision and comprehension of Cuban affairs, should equally understand the matter when they are reminded that the Cuban Autonomists were merely following the example of some of the men whom Americans most delight to honor.

For precisely the same conditions prevailed, only to a much wider extent, in the Thirteen Colonies at the beginning of the American Revolution, when Washington and Franklin and Jefferson and Jay were American Autonomists, inexorably opposed to independence. Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill were fought not for independence but for autonomy under the British Crown and in perpetual union with the British Empire. When the First Continental Congress met in the spring of 1774 there was no word, at least, of independence. On the contrary, according to some of the very foremost members of that historic body, the idea of independence, at least in the Middle and Southern colonies, was "as unpopular as the Stamp Act itself." Not only did that Congress complete its course without saying a word for independence, but it adopted an address to the people of Great Britain declaring that the reports which had got abroad that the Colonies wanted independence were "mere calumnies," and that nothing was desired but equality of rights with their fellow subjects in the British Isles. The Second Colonial Congress met after Lexington and Concord and just before Bunker Hill. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were members of it. But they spoke no word for independence. Instead, Jefferson drafted a declaration, which Congress adopted, to the effect that the Colonies had "not raised armies with designs of separating from Great Britain and establishing independent states"; and in other addresses which the same Congress adopted after the battle of Bunker Hill it was explicitly stated that the Colonists were loyal to the British Crown, that they wished for lasting union with Great Britain, and that they had taken up arms not to find liberty outside of the British Empire but to vindicate and defend liberty within that Empire. After the adjournment of that Congress in August, 1775, less than a year before the Declaration of Independence, so representative a man and so ardent a patriot as John Jay publicly denounced the imputation that the Congress had "aimed at independence" as "ungenerous and groundless," and as marked with "malice and falsity." Not until the spring of 1776 was there any significant turning toward independence as the inevitable resort.

If I have thus dwelt at length upon well-known facts which pertain to the history of the United States rather than to that of Cuba, it is in order to remind American readers, on the strength of a precedent which they, at any rate, must regard with the highest respect, how reasonable it was for Cubans even as late as in 1897 and 1898 to cling to a policy and a hope substantially identical with those which were cherished by the foremost representative American patriots in 1774 and 1775. We can see now, they themselves can see now, that they were in error and that their hopes were vain. But they were no more in error than were the immortal American Autonomists of the beginning of the American Revolution.

Similarly it was necessary that Cuba should not only be entirely separated from Spain but also should be made independent, and not be annexed to the United States. On that point, too, many good men were in error. As we shall see, the first important Cuban revolutionist—although not himself a native Cuban—had in view not independence but annexation to the United States, and so did many another sterling patriot after him. Probably the general feeling was that the one thing supremely essential was to be sundered from Spain, and since annexation to the United States seemed to promise the effecting of that most promptly, most easily and most surely, it was to be accepted as the best solution of the problem. Of course, too, the annexation sentiment in Cuba was greatly encouraged and promoted by the advocates of annexation in the United States, who were numerous, and aggressive, and actuated by a variety of motives.