Cuba

Article Outline

Introduction; Land and Resources; People; Culture; Economy; Government; History

The Inter-War Period

With the war over, the Spanish brought Cuba in line with slave emancipation throughout the rest of the Americas. They enacted the patronato, a law that required slave owners to prepare their slaves for freedom. When slavery did end in 1886, only 30,000 slaves remained, down substantially from the estimated 500,000 at the onset of the Ten Years’ War.

Between 1878 and 1895, Cuba faced a period of financial and social disintegration. The Spanish levied punishing taxes and tariffs to pay for war damages and costs. A radical change in the sugar market compounded this financial burden. Increased cultivation of sugar beets in the United States drove the price of sugar down from 11 to 8 cents a pound. Meanwhile, the shift from unpaid slaves to paid laborers increased the cost of sugar production. By the mid-1880s Cuba was in a deep economic depression. Massive unemployment resulted, and workers migrated in large numbers from the countryside to urban centers where a new underclass of beggars and prostitutes developed. Tens of thousands of professionals left the country to find employment. Many of them vowed to return to free Cuba and provide it with a vital economy and just government.

During these years, pro-Spanish forces began to organize to protect their interests. Conservative Creole planters founded the Liberal Party (Autonomists). The Spanish elite formed the Constitutional Union Party. Both parties worked to maintain Cuba’s ties to Spain and rejected armed revolution as a means of changing government.

The independence forces in exile continued to organize as well. Cuban writer José Martí soon emerged as the leader of the renewed independence movement. Martí had traveled throughout the Americas before settling in New York City in 1881. From New York he wrote numerous influential newspaper articles on Latin American culture and became a leading advocate of Cuba’s independence. Martí formed the Cuban Revolutionary Party (Spanish acronym PRC) in an attempt to unite the various revolutionary factions and to fuse white and black Cubans into a single army of citizens. By April 1892, all the revolutionary clubs had joined the PRC. Between 1892 and 1895, the PRC solicited funds, purchased weapons, and trained troops in Cuba and in the United States. Officially, the United States remained neutral, but sympathy grew for the independence cause.

The War of 1895 and the Spanish-American War

The PRC set February 24, 1895, as the date to begin the final war of independence. PRC leaders arrived in Cuba, and small rebellions broke out in the east and moved into central Cuba. At first it seemed the PRC would lose, especially when on May 19, 1895, José Martí was killed in the battle of Dos Ríos in Cuba’s southeastern mountains. Moreover, the United States honored a previous commitment to Spain and intercepted rebel arms shipments.

Spain sent a massive army of 200,000 troops, the largest ever sent to the Americas, under the command of General Valeriano Weyler, a veteran of the Ten Years’ War. To eliminate potential support for the rebels, Weyler removed tens of thousands of Cubans to concentration camps. In the camps, thousands of people died of starvation, disease, and exposure.

The American popular press devoted a great deal of space to covering Spain’s alleged atrocities. By 1896 U.S. popular opinion clamored for intervention, and American investors were increasingly worried about their property. In 1896 U.S. president William McKinley told the Spanish government to win the war, issue reforms, or expect U.S. involvement. In the fall of 1897, Madrid agreed to reforms, withdrew General Weyler from Cuba, and appointed a Cuban assembly to govern the island’s internal affairs. The insurgents, however, refused to recognize the assembly members, who were Autonomists, and the war continued.

The McKinley administration prepared for intervention in the name of peace and uninterrupted trade. In the United States the public demand for intervention increased following an explosion that sank the U.S. battleship Maine in Havana harbor on February 15, 1898. Most Americans blamed Spanish sabotage for the explosion. (A U.S. Navy study published in 1976 suggested that spontaneous combustion in the ship’s coal bunker caused the explosion.) In April 1898, Congress declared war on Spain, but a congressional resolution limited U.S. action in Cuba to liberating the island and granting sovereignty to the new nation of Cuba.

The Spanish-American War itself lasted only fourteen weeks. The real battle was in Spain’s Asian colony of the Philippines, where the U.S. Navy defeated the Spanish navy at Manila Bay. In Cuba, the war consisted of a naval blockade of Havana’s harbor and an attack and siege of Santiago de Cuba in the east. The U.S. naval blockade cut off Spain’s supply lines and broke Spanish control of Cuba.

United States intervention altered the Cuban war of independence from a popular insurrection by Cubans to a victory by the United States. Prior to the U.S. intervention, Cuban revolutionaries controlled all Cuban territory except the major ports; by the end of 1898 the U.S. Army controlled the entire country.

United States control denied some of the social changes that the revolutionaries had hoped to put into effect, including efforts to establish racial and social equality. Many American political leaders opposed an independent Cuba with a racially diverse government. This prejudice was reinforced when the U.S. and Cuban armies met in Santiago de Cuba. The U.S. soldiers were appalled by the ragged and impoverished condition of their allies, many of whom were poor blacks. After the war, the United States occupied Cuba, and the U.S. Army disbanded the patriot army and excluded from power many of the Cuban patriots who had fought 30 years for liberation.

United States Occupation

In 1898 the Treaty of Paris formally ended the Spanish-American War. The United States and Spain negotiated the treaty with no Cuban representative present. The treaty left the United States firmly in control of newly independent Cuba. The United States assumed formal military possession of Cuba on January 1, 1899, and maintained a military occupation until May 20, 1902. Under U.S. tutelage, public schools were built and staffed throughout the island. Cuban teachers took educational courses at Harvard University and taught in their nation’s public elementary and secondary schools. Protestant missionaries flooded the country. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built bridges, roads, and sanitation systems. American army surgeon Walter Reed and Cuban doctor Carlos Finlay discovered the mosquito that carried yellow fever, and the army corps helped control the pest.

Although the United States kept its commitment to give Cuba self-rule, the U.S. government required an “Americanization” of Cuba’s leaders before ending the occupation. The U.S. government insisted that Cubans learn democratic principals before they were allowed to rule themselves. United States officials’ sense of democracy meant that only Spanish and Cuban elites should form the constitutional assembly that would write Cuba’s new constitution, since these elites were more inclined to favor U.S. influence in Cuba.

Despite U.S. attempts to control the direction of Cuba’s new government, in 1900 Cuban separatists won a majority of seats in the constitutional assembly. To ensure that the assembly did not reject U.S. influence, the U.S. government insisted that the new constitution include a number of conditions defining the relationship between the two nations.

These conditions—known as the Platt Amendment after its author, U.S. senator Orville Platt—prohibited Cuba from making treaties and alliances with other foreign countries, granted military bases on the island to the United States, and allowed U.S. intervention on the island whenever instability threatened. It also limited Cuba’s ability to accept foreign loans and mandated public health measures to suppress disease and malnutrition. The United States insisted that the military occupation would not end until Cubans accepted the Platt Amendment as part of their new constitution.

Most Cubans were strongly opposed to the Platt Amendment. Assembly members spoke out against it and citizens protested. At first the assembly voted down the amendment. However, when a number of nationalist members left the Assembly in protest, the remaining members passed the amendment by a one-vote margin. Most Cubans viewed the Platt Amendment as an intrusion on Cuban sovereignty and as an attempt by the United States to maintain control. Consequently, Cuban national identity developed a strong anti-American feeling.

The Search for Stability

Early Independence

The constitution adopted in 1901 provided for democratic selection of local, provincial, and national leaders. A president could succeed himself for a second term. A congress with two houses, modeled after the Congress of the United States, approved laws. The judicial system was separate from the executive and legislative branches. Tomás Estrada Palma, who had assumed the leadership of the Cuban Revolutionary Party following the death of José Martí, won election in 1901 as Cuba’s first president. He and his supporters had the task of repairing the damage of war and binding the wounds of disagreement between factions within Cuba.

Following the war, foreigners—largely Americans and Spaniards—bought land cheaply, and economic and political power began to concentrate in their hands. This created economic hardships for most Cubans. Cuban elites lost their lands and the poor lost their jobs as foreign laborers from Haiti and Jamaica, who worked for low wages, took the place of Cuban workers. Estrada Palma sought measures to stimulate the Cuban economy. The most lucrative opportunities lay with guaranteed purchases of Cuban sugar. In 1903 Cuba and the United States signed the Treaty of Reciprocity, which promised Cuban sugar growers 20 percent of the U.S. market without paying U.S. import taxes. In exchange, Cuba dropped taxes designed to protect its industries from U.S. imports. The Cuban market was opened to well over 400 American products that had previously been so heavily taxed that they were not affordable for most Cubans. As a result, the Cuban economy became dependent on the United States.

To counter growing opposition to his commitment to the United States, Estrada Palma organized the Moderate Party, which used local political organizations to control blocs of voters during the 1905 election. Although Estrada Palma won the election, opposition parties interpreted the use of these political organizations as election fraud and an abuse of presidential power. Rebellions broke out against his administration.

Estrada Palma and his cabinet resigned in 1906 and asked the United States to intervene to protect the Cuban treasury. A small corps of U.S. Marines landed in 1906. A provisional governor, U.S. bureaucrat Charles E. Magoon, assumed the task of restoring order and safeguarding American financial interests. Governor Magoon insisted that opposing parties disarm and agree to an election. He assured each side that the election would be fair. Magoon returned political control to a Cuban administration in 1908.

However, national trust in Cuban politicians had eroded as a result of the failure of Cuba’s first attempt at self-rule. Between 1909 and 1925, political parties became little more than a staging ground for gaining power and money. Opportunistic presidents curried favor in Washington and did little to build Cuba for Cubans. Holding political office often required payoffs to friends and foes alike, and the national treasury was at the disposal of dishonest officials.

Amidst political plunder and electoral opportunism, voices for social justice clamored to be heard. Between 1908 and 1912 a number of black political groups, such as the Independent Colored Association and the Independent Colored Party, organized to fight against racial discrimination in Cuban politics. Fearful that race would become a national issue, the Cuban Congress passed the Morúa law, which prohibited political organization along racial lines. The Independent Colored Party responded with an armed revolt in 1912, and the U.S. government landed Marines at Guantánamo, Havana, and Manzanillo. Cuban president José Miguel Gómez repressed the rebels ruthlessly to demonstrate that his administration could avert civil unrest. The government executed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of black activists and sympathizers, putting an end to political organizations based on race.

Over the next decade, the United States continued to intervene directly in Cuba’s internal affairs. In 1917 the Liberal Party revolted after the Conservative Party candidate, Mario C. Menocal, assumed the presidency through electoral fraud. The United States sent Marines to Cuba’s largest ports, and the U.S. ambassador notified the rebels that the United States would not recognize leadership that came to power through unconstitutional means. With that, the rebellion subsided, and it became clear to all that Cubans did not control their political destiny.

The Liberal and Conservative parties agreed to revise the electoral code in order to deter voting fraud. They invited U.S. supervision of the 1920 elections, and U.S. general Enoch H. Crowder came to Havana. He oversaw the election of Conservative Party candidate Alfredo Zayas, which was relatively free of fraud. But after the Zayas administration took office, graft and corruption reached new heights. Crowder, who remained in Cuba as a special representative of the United States, tried to pressure Zayas into ending government corruption. Crowder succeeded in forcing budgetary, commercial, municipal, and electoral reforms on the Cuban government. He persuaded the government to pass laws eliminating fraudulent election practices and convinced Zayas to appoint an “honest cabinet,” which included a number of highly respected Cubans. This cabinet cut government spending, reduced the bureaucracy, and revoked several public works contracts that would have enriched government employees. At first Zayas cooperated with Crowder, but later he played to Cuban sympathy for sovereignty and won wide support among Cubans. He eventually succeeded in rolling back the reforms that Crowder had put in place.

Zayas presided over a period of economic boom and bust. Sugar had always been Cuba’s major export, but the years between 1909 and 1920 were ones of exaggerated growth. The price of a pound of sugar was 1.93 cents per pound in 1914, just before the outbreak of World War I. By 1920 it was worth 22.5 cents per pound. The rapid rise of sugar prices led Cubans to invest in land and equipment to produce more sugar, mortgaging all they had for future profits. This vigorous investment came to a sudden halt in December 1920 when the sugar market collapsed. Prices plummeted to 3.58 cents per pound.

The sugar bust devastated Cubans of all classes. United States banks and individuals bought sugar estates for a fraction of their original purchase price when their Cuban owners could not keep up mortgage payments. By 1925, U.S. citizens owned half of all Cuban sugar lands and refineries, many of which were consolidated into even larger estates. The colonos (smaller sugar growers) could not compete with these large holdings. Most colonos were forced to sell their land. Some became tenant farmers on property they had once owned. Others moved into cities to seek work there or became day laborers working in the sugar fields. Formerly, peasants had owned or inhabited small parcels of land and sustained themselves with subsistence farming. As the sugar plantations expanded, many peasants lost their land and took jobs working for the sugar companies. Salaries for peasants were minimal and likely to remain that way because Cubans and laborers from other Caribbean islands vied for work in the sugar mills.

The Machado Years

By 1920 political corruption, economic collapse, and financial desperation caused many groups to form new political organizations. Agricultural and industrial workers formed trade unions, which organized as the National Workers’ Federation of Cuba. Other workers formed the Radical Socialist Party. Women, determined to win legal and social rights, formed women’s rights organizations. In 1925 Communist associations united to form the Cuban Communist Party. Intellectuals who opposed the government formed the Grupo Minorista, which argued for cultural renewal and political reform. A new generation of Cubans proclaimed an idealistic nationalism aimed at social justice in Cuba. Suddenly the hopelessness of the previous 14 years changed to indignation, and citizens made clear that they expected more from their government than corruption and compliance with foreign economic interests.

As the 1924 elections approached, Zayas’ Conservative Party, too long associated with corruption and cooperation with the United States, had little chance of victory. The opposition parties, however, agreed on only one thing: the Platt Amendment had to go. Beyond that, political positions were deeply divided. Moderate nationalists sought compromise with the United States and modest reforms that would benefit the laboring classes. Radical activists demanded a reduction in U.S. economic holdings and socialist solutions to relieve economic hardship and promote economic equality.

The Liberal Party nominated Gerardo Machado, a former general, as their presidential candidate. Machado promised to cut back on government bureaucracy, limit the presidency to one term, revise the Platt Amendment, provide more public services, and pay public debts. Machado won by a landslide. For the first three years of his presidency, Machado was extremely popular. He put laborers to work on major construction projects, controlled sugar production to keep prices high, taxed imported products to protect Cuban industries from foreign competition, and invested in agricultural diversification to reduce Cuba’s reliance on sugar. The Liberal, Conservative, and newly formed Popular parties pledged their support to the president and his policies.

World economics, not domestic disagreement, first shook Machado’s hold on power. Beginning in 1926, sugar prices fell. The government held down sugar production by 10 percent to support sagging prices. Thousands of laborers were out of work and tens of thousands faced chronic underemployment. Disgruntled laborers began work stoppages and slowdowns, and Machado met their actions with police repression. Still, the majority of Cubans continued to support Machado. In 1927 the Liberal, Conservative, and Popular parties suggested that Machado seek another term of office. With Machado’s approval, a Constituent Assembly amended the constitution to create a six-year presidential term. This would allow Machado to hold office until 1935.

With this act, Machado alienated many moderate nationalists who had supported him. Rumblings of protests began in 1928 when Machado ran unopposed for a six-year presidential term. A leftist group, the University Student Federation, staged violent protests in the streets of Havana. The government responded by closing the university indefinitely. The members of the Federation then dissolved the group and formed the more radical Student Directorate. They fanned out over the island, organizing workers, intellectuals, and women to seek a return of democracy and social justice.

The Great Depression of 1929, not dissent from the Left, finally destabilized the Machado regime. Cuba was hit especially hard. Sugar prices, already low in 1928 at $2.18 per pound, dropped to $1.72 per pound in 1929. By 1933 a pound of sugar sold for $0.57 per pound. The government and businesses laid off employees and reduced pay for the remaining workers. Poor peasants migrated to cities and slept in parks, on streets, or in flophouses, and people starved to death throughout the country.

Demonstrations demanding jobs, decent wages, and the right of workers to unionize and strike increased in frequency. In 1930 Machado decreed spontaneous demonstrations illegal and authorized police to break up political meetings. Moderate and radical groups unified in opposition to Machado. Feminists, students, workers, teachers, agricultural workers, and small farmers took to the streets and sabotaged government installations. In response Machado became even more brutal. He established the Porra, a special police force trained to arrest, imprison, torture, and execute dissidents. As moderates watched the repression, discontent grew against Machado’s government, even in aristocratic circles. In 1932, as civil order deteriorated, Machado suspended the constitution.

In April 1933, Sumner Welles, the U.S. assistant secretary of state, arrived with instructions to mediate talks between Machado and his opposition. Machado refused to make any concessions to the opposition, which was divided. The moderates favored a return to the 1901 constitution and Machado’s resignation, while the radicals demanded deep social, economic, and political reforms.