Guantánamo Page 18

  The Cubans first received word of the new terms on February 27, the day the Cuban Committee on Relations proclaimed its own desires about U.S.-Cuban relations and before the Platt Amendment had become law. It didn’t take a U.S. Senate vote approving the Platt Amendment on March 1 to plunge Cuba into a political uproar somehow unanticipated in the United States. Predictably, Wood assured Root that both the Cuban Constitutional Assembly and the population at large had no real objections to Platt Amendment demands. “The general feeling in the country is excellent,” Wood wrote Root on March 4, just three days after the Platt Amendment became U.S. law, “and the proposed relations have inspired confidence in the responsible and conservative element of all parties.” At bottom, the Cubans were “willing to do what we want them to do.”61

  When Cubans objected to the proposal, Wood could come up with no more compelling explanation than that their leaders were emotional, cowardly, hysterical, irresponsible, unprincipled, ignorant, ungrateful, and, above all, of modest financial means; the list went on.62 Wood was hardly alone in denigrating Cubans critical of U.S. policy, as if riches were a prerequisite of self-government, submissiveness its cardinal virtue, and dissent unpatriotic. Wood’s and Root’s misreading of Cuban sentiment caught many Americans by surprise. In Congress, not a few of Platt’s initial supporters insisted that they would never have voted for the amendment had they known that the majority of Cubans were opposed to ceding independence to the United States.63

  In Havana, Cubans greeted news that Platt had become U.S. law with protests outside the Martí Theater, home to the Cuban Constitutional Convention. The anti-American protest combined with a strike by stevedores and harbor lighters to lend the capital city a decidedly incendiary air. Inside the Martí Theater, delegates debated how to respond to the latest American aggression. Radicals wanted to throw Platt back in the Americans’ lap and shut down the convention. Moderates proposed suspending the convention for a couple of weeks so delegates could return to their districts to consult the people. In the end, conservatives prevailed on a majority to stay in session, while referring the convention’s response to the Committee on Relations.

  In the time that elapsed between Senate passage of the Platt Amendment on March 1 and the committee’s response, which came out on March 26, U.S. periodicals and audiences weighed in on Platt’s relative merits. Predictably, discussion focused on clauses three and seven, the first of which authorized the United States to intervene at will in Cuban affairs, the second of which provided naval bases, and which together, everybody agreed, restricted Cuba’s sovereignty.

  To critics such as The State, a Democratic newspaper out of Columbia, South Carolina, Platt was a “dastardly act” obviously designed to “coerce the Cubans into relinquishing the essentials of sovereignty and independence which this government solemnly pledged to them three years ago.” As if still smarting from the Union occupation of the South after the American Civil War, the formerly pro-annexationist State castigated the McKinley administration’s deployment of military force to overawe a democratic and constitutional process. The delegates to the Cuban Constitutional Convention, the paper argued, lacked authority to curtail Cuba’s sovereignty or part with any of its land. Precisely for this reason the Committee on Relations had been silent on the subject of naval bases in its original report. Any “intelligent reader” would concede, as the Cubans put it, that U.S. bases in Cuba “militate against the independence which both parties desire to preserve.” Rhetorical skill and logic, never mind right, lay entirely on the side of Cuba.

  Platt’s critics were not altruistic. Indeed, it was America that The State was actually worried about. In breaking its promise to Cuba—“in putting a pistol to the head of its protégé and demanding compensation for a volunteered kindness”—the United States disgraced itself in the eyes of the world “for generations to come.” The paper lamented, “The loss and the humiliation are ours. The penalty will be ours—the penalty of national faithlessness which hereafter may well cause every people in the world to withhold all trust from ‘lying America.’”64

  But many Americans were unwilling to concede logic to the Cubans. Opposition to Platt, The New York Times argued in early February, derived from misunderstanding of the terms sovereignty and independence themselves. Inadequate understanding of the these words “led, on the one hand, to extravagant notions of the future political status of Cuba, and on the other to weak and foolish arguments for a partial or complete repudiation of the pledge of the Teller resolution.” Sovereignty was perfectly compatible with a degree of U.S. control over Cuba. Without question, sovereignty entailed the right of a people to form a government, establish laws, and regulate their country’s internal affairs. But sovereignty did not imply the right of a state to do whatever it so pleased. Just as the liberty of an individual was subject to the liberty of others, so the sovereignty of a state was “subject to the general peace and public order of nations.”65

  But who got to define public? The Times didn’t flinch in assigning that right to the United States. Just as in Europe, for example, the sovereignty of individual states was subject to the “concert of Europe,” so in the Western Hemisphere states were answerable to an analogous system. “The peace of Europe is the law of Europe,” the Times observed. “The law is enforced by the concert—the Great Powers acting together. Any act that endangers peace contravenes the law of the public system and the concert may take jurisdiction.” This hemisphere, too, possessed such a public system; it just so happened that responsibility for that system fell entirely to the United States (on account of its “indisputable primacy”). While not assuming to regulate inter-American relations or determine “territorial arrangements” here, the United States absolutely forbade new European expansion here. In other words, the Monroe Doctrine was the public system of the Western Hemisphere; “the peace of the United States” was its “law.” Cuba would enjoy sovereignty “subject to this law,” though whether Cuba would be expected to make concessions to the United States not conceded to by, say, Chile or Brazil, remained to be worked out.66

  If the Times’s equating of Western Hemispheric law to “the peace of the United States” seems audacious, to put it mildly, the editors were only stating definitively sentiment that American officials had expressed since the founding era. Cuba’s “interests and the interests of the United States are identical,” the Times put it a week or so later; they “will be served and protected by the same measures.”67 The presumption of the claim that U.S. interests were the public law of the hemisphere to which other nations’ sovereignty would be held accountable was matched only by its hubris. Does Cuba wish to erect coast defenses, build ships of war, maintain armies, and maintain a big public debt to pay for these luxuries of greatness? the Times demanded. “Is it her purpose to seek admission into the family of great nations with the full privilege to sue and be sued, to make war and get whipped?” Or would Cuba prove sensible and commit its fate to the “infinitely more effective, the amply sufficient, guarantee” of U.S. national policy? These were rhetorical questions. The choice wasn’t Cuba’s to make. Though Cuba might do as it pleased with its constitution, in its relations with the United States, recognition of U.S. rights and “common interests” must “necessarily find a place.”68

  By the end of March, the Cuban committee assigned to devise a response to the Platt Amendment issued not one but five reports.69 The most detailed and most popular was that of Juan Gualberto Gómez (no relation to Máximo), veteran of all three Cuban wars of independence since 1868, including La Guerra Chiquita, during which he was captured and imprisoned in Spain.70 Having struggled so long for Cuban sovereignty, Gómez was dismayed to see it whittled away at the hands of Platt, which would only make Cubans “a vassal people.” Like many critics, Gomez focused on clauses three, six, and seven, which granted the United States the right to intervene at will in Cuban affairs, separated the Isle of Pines from Cuba, and demanded that Cuba sell or lease land for naval statio
ns.

  In authorizing the United States to intervene in Cuba’s affairs, Gomez observed, Platt bestowed a right that the U.S. Constitution did not grant the federal government vis-à-vis the individual states. To concede that right would be like handing a stranger the keys to your house, allowing him to enter as he pleased, at any hour of day or night, whether for good or ill. A government that conceded such a right wasn’t worthy of the name, and could be nothing more than a docile instrument of a “foreign and irresponsible power.” Moreover, clause three’s expressed aim to ensure in Cuba a government capable of protecting life, liberty, and property was simply redundant. For what was the purpose of government if not exactly that? It didn’t take a treaty between the United States and Spain to justify U.S. intervention in the Cuban War of Independence. To insist that Cuba grant the United States the right to intervene in what amounted to a treaty would “dishonor future Cuban governments before they were born, condemning them to inferiority so humiliating that no Cuban would agree to take part in them.”71

  As for the contention that Platt was consistent with Cuban sovereignty since it was Cuban sovereignty that Platt aimed to protect, Gómez replied simply that no nation could be considered sovereign whose internal affairs were subject to review by another nation. Lest skeptics doubt Gómez’s authority on questions of politics, he cited three world-renowned theorists who defined sovereignty as ultimate, unlimited, and inalienable power. The Platt Amendment, by making “the dictates of the United States the supreme power in the land,” plainly violated the Teller Amendment’s pledge to leave Cuba in the hands of its people. A Cuba under the Platt Amendment “could only inappropriately be called the Republic of Cuba.”72

  Gómez argued that there was no separating clause three from clause seven—on naval stations—“the most vulgar of the provisions,” and “absolutely unacceptable.” In the first place, there were “the moral considerations that prompt us to look with unshakeable repugnance at the idea of foreign strongholds installed on our coasts.” Then came the plain fact that American bases could only bring conflict to Cuba, both between Americans and Cubans themselves and between Americans, Cubans, and any third party that the United States engaged from Cuban shores. As if anticipating the Cuban Missile Crisis, Gómez feared that Cuba would become a site of political hostility originating elsewhere, thereby “inexorably drawing us into conflict not of our own making and in which we have no stake.”73

  In short, American bases in Cuba would increase rather than decrease the likelihood of conflict on the island. It wasn’t Cuba but America that seemed most likely to plunge the nation into international war. Cuba had no international problems (its “great desire is for peace”). Peace is what Cuba had been promised by the congressional resolution of April 1898 and the Teller Amendment. Once promising, the future of Cuba was now uncertain, Gómez lamented, and “one can’t help but see dark horizons and sad prospects for our country.” 74 No wonder, then, that “of all the clauses of the Platt Amendment, none so injures the sentiments of the country, or displeases the people as that which refers to the selling or leasing of land for naval stations. The shout ‘No coaling stations’ is the dominant one in all the popular demonstrations against the Platt Amendment.” Gómez and his colleagues on the Committee of Relations could not “help but take note of this popular sentiment.” As obnoxious as was clause three, clause seven was worse. It “involves not only the mutilation of our home, but a permanent threat to our internal peace.”75

  Gomez’s report on the Platt Amendment won the support of a majority of Cuban delegates and the Cuban public at large, bringing discussion to a standstill. In early April, Wood solicited from Root a statement clarifying the terms of intervention entailed in clause three, which, along with seven, was the biggest stumbling block for Cuban delegates. “You are authorized to state officially that in the view of the President the intervention described in the third clause of the Platt Amendment is not synonymous with intermeddling or interference with the affairs of the Cuban government,” Root wrote back, but rather “the formal action of the government of the United States, based upon just and substantial grounds, for the preservation of Cuban independence,” the protection of life, liberty, and property, and so on.76 Meeting none of Gomez’s objections, Root’s response accomplished nothing so much as convincing the delegates that if they really wanted to be heard they would have to travel to Washington themselves.

  On April 24 a delegation of Cubans arrived in Washington, D.C., to address the question of U.S.-Cuban relations face-to-face with U.S. administration officials. Greeted courteously by President McKinley, the Cuban delegation spent most of its time with Secretary Root. Root repeated what he had written before. Platt was intended to maintain rather than erode Cuban independence. It merely confirmed by law what the Monroe Doctrine had long asserted by proclamation: that the United States would not allow European states to compromise the independence of Cuba. Root never addressed the Cubans’ concern that Platt would make Cuba subservient to the United States, thereby impeding international recognition of Cuban independence.77 For that Root had no acceptable answer.

  Asked if the naval bases were really essential, Root replied that indeed they were, both for the good of Cuba and for the United States. Cuba might have a navy of its own one day, the secretary allowed, but never would that navy be strong enough to defend Cuba against the navies of Europe. Moreover, even a country such as Italy made alliances with stronger powers to safeguard its independence. The United States sought only a few strategic positions from which to defend both parties. The bases would never be adapted to other uses. Suppose another country intended to attack Cuba or the United States, Root argued; they would have to begin by taking Cuba, and Cuba had no means to defend itself. U.S. bases in Cuba conferred no right to the United States to intervene in Cuban affairs, nor to diminish its independence, but exactly the opposite: to ensure Cuba’s independence. The United States had similar treaties with other sovereign nations, Root observed. Never, he promised, would the U.S. sites be a point of departure for U.S. intervention in the interior of Cuba.78

  Impressed by Root’s patience in answering their questions and flattered by a state dinner and elaborate lunches, the Cuban delegates departed Washington feeling “strongly supported” by American officials, though without having moved the McKinley administration a millimeter in their direction.79 The emptiness of Root’s responses would be appreciated only later. He promised, for instance, that the United States would never intervene in Cuba via Guantánamo Bay, something it did repeatedly in the first three decades of the naval base’s existence. Root’s refrain that the purpose of Platt was to promote Cuban independence and his references to other nations having similar treaties only obscured Platt’s coercion. In the end, he fell back on coercion itself: this was simply not an arrangement Cuba was free to reject. Passed by Congress in March 1901, Platt was American law. It must become Cuban law before the United States would end its occupation of Cuba.

  On May 28, a little over three weeks after receiving the report of the delegation to Washington, the Cuban Constitutional Convention voted on the Platt Amendment. In a 15–14 vote, the convention endorsed the majority report of the Cuban Committee on Relations, which accepted the Platt amendment with qualifications based on the delegates’ recent discussions with Root. To Platt’s simple wording in clause seven, that “the government of Cuba will sell or lease to the United States lands necessary for coaling or naval stations at certain specified points to be agreed upon with the President of the United States,” the Cubans added, “for the sole purpose of defending American waters” from foreign aggression. At first, U.S. officials and periodicals greeted the Cuban vote with relief. Upon reading the fine print, however, Wood quickly informed the delegates that their qualifications were unacceptable. The law passed by Congress authorized McKinley to withdraw the military from Cuba after the Cuban Constitutional Convention had adopted the Platt Amendment into the new Cuban constitution, Root re
minded Wood to remind the Cuban delegates. The Cubans themselves had no say in the matter. It was all or nothing for Cuba: Platt as originally worded or continued U.S. military occupation. 80

  On June 12 the Cuban Constitutional Convention adopted the Platt Amendment, unamended, in a 16–11 vote. Compared with the uproar Platt had generated in February and March, its final passage was greeted by an ominous calm. “FREE BY CHRISTMAS,” ran a headline in the Grand Rapids (Michigan) Press. “Cuban Independence Is Now at Hand.” If Cubans did not know otherwise, Leonard Wood certainly did. “There is, of course, little or no real independence left Cuba under the Platt Amendment,” Wood wrote the new American president, Theodore Roosevelt, in October 1901. “The more sensible Cubans realize this and feel that the only consistent thing now is to seek annexation.”81

  5

  GUANTÁNAMO BLUES

  “How many know that the United States has a plant of extraordinary value and efficiency at the Bay of Guantánamo?” Herbert Corey asked readers of National Geographic in June 1921. “Or what it means to the Atlantic fleet each year?” Corey, a veteran travel writer, acknowledged that until recently he certainly had not. Oh, he “had a vague idea that the fleet each winter visited a cactus-bordered beach on which the men walked for health’s sake, and that from time to time it went outside for practice.” And he had heard talk of towns near the naval base where a fellow could enjoy a good drink and then some without having to duck federal agents (1921 was the second year of Prohibition, and Americans were thirsty). But Corey had also heard that a trip to Guantánamo wasn’t worth the trouble. “The background to the picture was always bare white sand and cruelly hard sunlight and scrubby bushes, with a restless surf beating at an inhospitable strand.”1 Such was hardly the case, Corey discovered while accompanying the Atlantic Fleet on its winter cruise. It was as if the navy had been trying to suppress news of a good thing.