Guantánamo Read online

  García had fully expected the Americans to have “taken possession of the city, the garrison and forts”; he expected to cooperate with Shafter to preserve order until the time came for the United States to fulfill its pledge to “establish in Cuba a free and independent government.” What could explain this turn of events? “A rumor too absurd to be believed,” García wrote, “describes the reason of your measures and of the orders forbidding my army to enter Santiago for fear of massacres and revenge against the Spanish. Allow me, sir, to protest against even the shadow of such an idea. We are not savages ignoring the rules of civilized warfare. We are a poor, ragged army, as ragged and poor as was the army of your forefathers in their noble war of independence, but like the heroes of Saratoga and Yorktown, we respect our cause too deeply to disgrace it with barbarism and cowardice.”

  Referring to Saratoga and Yorktown, García challenged Shafter to imagine how American patriots would have felt had the French, having intervened in the American Revolution, refused to allow the Americans to attend the British surrender. Rather than submit to the indignity, García resigned his commission as commander of Cuban forces at Santiago and rode off over the mountains to continue the fight at Jiguaní.3

  Shafter’s treatment of García was only the first in a long series of humiliations that the United States visited on Cuba in the aftermath of the Cuban War of Independence as it tried to reconcile its pledge, as stated in the Teller Amendment, “to leave the government and control of the island to its people” with the centuries-old conviction that Cuba was essential to the security and prosperity of the United States. More than the fate of Cuba was at stake here. The defeat of Spain compelled the United States to confront the tension between its liberal, universal principles and its self-interest. Whether and how it resolved this dilemma would determine not only U.S.-Cuban relations but also U.S. relations with independent (often weaker) nation-states throughout the hemisphere and, indeed, the world. Guantánamo Bay figured crucially in these negotiations. Despite the strong objection of Cuba, the Americans retained Guantánamo Bay in the aftermath of the war both as an instrument of control over a nominally independent Cuba and as a base of U.S. influence in Latin America.

  In the autumn of 1898, the United States recapitulated Shafter’s snubbing of García on a grand scale. As American and Spanish officials descended on Paris in early October to work out the details of the transfer of Spanish sovereignty over Cuba and its other colonial possessions to the United States, not a single Cuban representative could be spotted in their midst. Like Shafter before it, the U.S. government simply assumed that Cuba had no role to play in negotiations with Spain. The next year, as if acknowledging the appearance of unfairness, U.S. secretary of war Elihu B. Root justified Cuba’s exclusion from the peace talks by appealing to the conventions of international law. “I assume,” Root wrote in his annual report, “that all acquisition of territory under this treaty was the exercise of a power which belonged to the United States, because it was a nation, and for that reason was endowed with the powers essential to national life.”

  In the face of international law, García’s faith in American support for Cuban independence appears, in retrospect, quaint. Spain’s former colonies were “subject to the complete sovereignty” of the United States, Root continued; the United States was “controlled by no legal limitations except those which may be found in the treaty of cession” between the United States and Spain. America’s new possessions had “no right to [be] treated as states, or to [be] treated as the territories previously held by the United States have been treated.” Cubans possessed certain “moral rights,” Root acknowledged, among them, the right to be treated “in accordance with the underlying principles of justice and freedom which we have declared in our Constitution.” 4

  In justifying the U.S. treatment of Cuba, Root reached back to arguments developed over the course of the preceding century regarding Native Americans. As early as 1834, U.S. Supreme Court chief justice John Marshall referred to American Indians, once considered independent nations with whom the United States negotiated treaties, as “pupils” and “wards” of the state. A succession of Supreme Court cases throughout the second half of the nineteenth century confirmed Indians’ dependent status, ultimately re-creating tribes as colonial subjects beneath the sovereignty of the United States.5

  Like Native American nations before them, Cubans found it difficult to square the U.S. commitment to justice and freedom with the fact of American domination. “There is so much natural anger and grief throughout the island,” Máximo Gómez noted in his diary in January 1899, “that the people haven’t really been able to celebrate the triumph of the end of their former rulers’ power.” Gómez thought the U.S. military occupation “too high a price to pay for [America’s] spontaneous intervention in the war we waged against Spain for freedom and independence.” The occupation was “dangerous for the country, mortifying the public spirit and hindering organization in all the branches that, from the outset, should provide solid foundations of the future republic, when everything was entirely the work of all the inhabitants of the island, without distinction of nationality.”

  American officials dismissed Cuban calls for immediate independence as irrational. Gómez wondered what could be “more rational and fair” than that the owner of a house “be the one to live in it with his family and be the one who furnishes and decorates it as he likes and that he not be forced against his will and inclination to follow the norms and dictates imposed by his neighbor?” Cuba could never have true “moral peace” under a transitional government dominated by the Americans. Imposed by force, such peace was plainly “illegitimate and incompatible with the principles that the entire country has been upholding for so long and in the defense of which half of its sons have given their lives and all of its wealth had been consumed.” U.S. bullying of Cuba was sure to extinguish “the last spark of goodwill” between the two peoples.6

  Cuba’s grief contrasted markedly with the triumphalism suffusing the United States as the war drew to a close. The defeat of Spain, the occupation of Cuba, and the annexation of Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines transformed the United States into a global power seemingly overnight. In the public response to these developments, familiar themes of commercial expansion, Manifest Destiny, and empire for liberty took on global dimensions.

  “We have just emerged from a short, but momentous war,” the educator, editor, and now U.S. postmaster general Charles Emory Smith told an audience at the Chicago Peace Jubilee in October 1898. The war’s “transcendent events have spanned the whole wide horizon of this world, and have unveiled a new destiny for this country.”7 The United States had “taken a new position in the great family of nations,” had “stepped out upon the broad stage of the world’s action,” becoming one of its undeniable powers. Not only had the rest of the world learned something new about the young republic, but Americans were coming to appreciate themselves in a new way. War had united North and South, prairie and brownstone, in common cause to uphold the flag and promote a renewed sense of “our national possibilities and national greatness.”8

  To Walter Hines Page, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, the U.S. victory over Spain promised to transform a century’s talk about liberty and empire into a world historical project. Americans stood “face to face with the sort of problems that have grown up in the management of world-empires,” Page marveled. The only question was how Americans would react. Would they “be content with peaceful industry” and their increasingly “indoor life”? Or did there yet “lurk in us the adventurous spirit of our Anglo-Saxon forefathers?” With “no more great enterprises awaiting us at home,” it was only natural that Americans should “seek them abroad”—not in wars of conquest, Page cautioned, but in redeeming Anglo-American civilization from European decadence. American would open the Orient to Western principles and commerce, thus effecting “one of the greatest changes in human history.”9

  Like Page,
John Henry Barrows, president of Oberlin College, regarded the nation’s new colonies as stepping-stones, which, by transporting American institutions to Asia, would thereby “unitize” the world. To be sure, U.S. interests would be served by the conquest of Asia; but so, too, would Asian and above all human interests. Commerce and liberty were but two sides of a coin whose universal allure would speed the U.S. “penetration” and “control” of West and East Indies alike. The twentieth century would be an American century, Barrows predicted, with U.S. scholars, missionaries, teachers, books, and businesses overrunning the world. But these were but the means to the next millennium and a still greater end: “an empire of peace” with “representatives of brotherly nations” cooperating in “the new parliament of man.”10

  More than merely compatible, civil liberty, commerce, and American empire were ultimately indistinguishable, according to Chicago lawyer and businessman Franklin MacVeagh. In America, MacVeagh insisted, empire found its ideal vehicle: a free and restless workforce combined with unprecedented natural abundance; here, finally, were the sources of “universal relations between our nation and the whole of mankind.” The new century would see “no seas without American ships, and no ports without American goods carried there under our own flag.” Thoughts of America isolating itself had become outdated. The nation would be great, MacVeagh announced, and “greatness is interested in all related great things; greatness has relationships, responsibilities, duties, which are on the scale of its own proportions.” Greatness implied involvement “in the activities of all the world together.” Like Barrows, MacVeagh viewed America’s new empire as the means to a universal end. The choice Americans confronted was not between colonies or no colonies; it was between peace or war, cooperation or conquest, civilization or chaos. The world need not fear. The nation would remain “the exemplar of free government, the hope of social progress, and the powerful friend of the oppressed.”11

  All that was missing was God. John Ireland, archbishop of St. Paul, Minnesota, differed from his compatriots only in emphasis by describing the U.S. victory over Spain as “a momentous dispensation from the Master of Men.” According to Ireland, the war heralded the arrival of the universal nation to which “no world-interest” was “alien.” Our “spirit travels across the seas and mountain ranges to most distant continents and islands.” Territories, shipping, conquest—these were but the instruments of democracy, liberty, and self-government. Where these ideals ruled, there America ruled; where they were “not held supreme, America has not reached.” Ireland confessed awe, even a certain trepidation, in contemplating the nation’s new responsibility “to God and to humanity.” America, he warned, “thou failing, democracy and liberty will fail.”12

  The strains of argument on display here—the sense of a new day dawning, the sense of a need for strenuous projects to replace the vanishing American frontier, the sense of commerce as the agent of global harmony, the sense of expansion as divine duty—achieved apotheosis in the speeches and writing of Indiana senator Albert Beveridge. Even more than Theodore Roosevelt, Beveridge emerged as the nation’s leading imperial propagandist. Just days after the United States declared war on Spain, Beveridge challenged an audience at Boston’s exclusive Middlesex Club to distinguish “events,” “the arguments of God,” from “words,” “the arguments of man.” With their liberal principles and economic institutions, Americans were “the allies of events and the comrades of tendency in the great day of which the dawn is breaking.” Embarked on its new “imperial career,” the United States would harness untapped labor, idle capital, and congealed industry around the world to save civilization and redeem humanity. 13 The nation’s power, principles, and divine sanction authorized the United States to go out into the world, Beveridge told an Indiana audience later the same fall. To be sure, by opening new markets to American farmers and factories, and by securing new resources for American manufactures, the nation was destined to dominate “the imperial trade of the entire world.” But it would do so in a public manner befitting “the sovereign power of the earth.”14

  Not all Americans were as sanguine as Beveridge and the others about the implications of the U.S. victory over Spain. To William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic Party presidential candidate in 1896 and a veteran of the recent war, the prospect of empire represented a radical departure from a century of republican rectitude. U.S. victory over Spain left the nation on the horns of a grave dilemma, Bryan warned an audience convened to commemorate George Washington’s birthday in February 1899. “The ancient doctrine of imperialism, banished from our land more than a century ago, has recrossed the Atlantic and challenged democracy to mortal combat upon American soil.” The founding fathers had aimed to secure liberty for themselves and their posterity despite regional and economic differences; their successors upheld “self-government as the controlling national idea” and avoided “entangling alliances.” Sure in their understanding of their neighbor to the north, Cubans had appealed to the United States to free them from Spanish tyranny, and in the name of liberty and self-government Americans had done so. “Have the people so changed within a few short months,” Bryan wondered, that they would now force on others the “system of government against which the colonists protested with fire and sword?” Surely, this was not what America was about.

  What America was about, Bryan insisted, was the selfless promotion of liberty and prosperity. A product of all the world’s great civilizations combined, the United States had transcended them all—and, indeed, transcended nationhood itself. “During its brief existence it has exerted upon the human race an influence more potent for good than all the other nations of the earth combined, and it has exerted that influence without use of sword or Gatling gun.” Where “Anglo-Saxon civilization has taught the individual to protect his own rights, American civilization will teach him to respect the rights of others.” Where the former taught self-interest, the latter will propagate the commandment “Thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself.”15

  Ostensibly Bryan differed markedly from proponents of American imperialism. But his “love thy neighbor as thyself” bears striking resemblance to the universalism of his imperialist counterparts, whose logic blinded Americans to the prospect that theirs was not the only way to decorate a house, as Gómez put it, that justice, liberty, and self-government could take different forms in different places according to local customs and conditions. Only by learning to love their neighbors on their neighbors’ own terms could Americans promote the ends of true self-determination and self-government that Bryan ostensibly defended.

  It has taken a century or more for the apologists of American empire to begin to come to terms with the alienating effects of U.S. triumphalism on global sentiment. Slower still has been the ability of liberals such as Bryan to acknowledge that the nineteenth-century America they mythologized differed little in its logic from the imperialism they opposed. Only by ignoring the insatiable appetite for land, markets, and resources of a liberal political economy, only by overlooking the conquest of a continent (never mind a century of saber rattling over Cuba), could Bryan make the claim that Americans had intervened in Cuba simply “to aid a neighboring people, struggling to be free.” With friends like Bryan, Cuba needed no enemies. One way or the other, the Americans would come. Cubans had plenty to say about the Americans’ arrival, but their protests went largely unheard in a nation swaying to the two-part harmony of imperialism and anti-imperialism.

  Though few of these men exercised political power, their views were shared by those who directed U.S.-Cuban policy in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War. In the spring of 1907, for example, future president Woodrow Wilson (still celebrated today as a man of peace) observed that “since trade ignored national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the door of the nations which are closed to him must be battered down.” It was the duty of elected officials to ensure that “concessions obtaine
d by financiers … be safeguarded … even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process,” Wilson argued. “Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused.”16

  Against this backdrop, U.S. control over Cuba and the retaining of Guantánamo Bay was inevitable, notwithstanding the Teller Amendment. Cuban independence would be tolerated to the extent that it was consistent with U.S. interests. Only the details remained to be worked out. As Gómez feared and García experienced firsthand, this process of adjusting Cuban expectations to U.S. norms began long before the war was over. After the war, proponents of U.S. control over Cuba made their case in earnest, first insisting that Cubans were unfit for self-government, then arguing that American control over Cuba was fully consistent with the pledge of the Teller Amendment to leave Cuba to its own devices.

  The armistice brought no end to the contest to define the Cuban people in terms suitable to U.S. aims. Unusual only in its detail is the report of Boston Herald journalist Herbert Pelham Williams published by Page’s Atlantic Monthly in June 1899. After the war, Williams walked from Santiago de Cuba to Havana, a distance of some six hundred miles, in order to get a feel for the state of the country. Hence Williams claimed to be something of an authority on Cuban conditions and Cubans’ character.

  Above all, Williams began, Americans must face the fact that Cubans were essentially “‘children.’ The word describes them almost exactly. Ignorance, delight in seeing or owning pretty trifles, curiosity, the tendency to tell an untruth whenever telling the truth may have unpleasant results, cruelty, wanton destruction of inanimate things which have obstacles in their path, fondness for personal adornment, intense desire for praise, and a weakness for showing off,—these are the attributes of children.” As such, Cubans needed nothing so much as a firm hand. Unfortunately, U.S. policy in Cuba had been anything but firm, thanks in part to Teller. As a result, Cubans responded as children would: pursuing their selfish interests without any concern for the greater good.17