Everyday I am in danger of giving my life for my country and my duty... to prevent, by the independence of Cuba, the United Slates from spreading over the West Indies and falling, with that added weight, upon our lands of America. All I have done up to now, and shall do hereafter is to that end. Up to now it had to be in silence for there are things which remain hidden in order that they be achieved, and which by their telling would raise difficulties too great to be overcome...! have lived inside the monster?; I have seen its entrails - and my sling is that of David.
What is our flag? It is the flag of Marti ... the flag that so many millions, hundreds of millions admire around the world, everywhere, even by those who are our adversaries, including those who do not share our views, because as they say to us: We do not think the same, but we admire you for what you are doing, because you are the country that stands up to the giant, the atomic giant, the nuclear Coliath... Cuba's struggle is that of David against Goliath. Even the imperialists say so! When they want to explain why Cuba has so much sympathy they refer to the Biblical legend so that people will think it is merely because we are small that we have so much sympathy. But they cannot or will not accept that it is not because we are small but because our ideas are just, the most just ideas that have ever been fought for and which in our present conditions are more just than ever!
[.. ]raising a strength there which on occasion of a future war, might easily be poured down the Mississippi upon the lower country, and into the Bay of Mexico, to be used against Cuba or Mexico herself. (Labaree ed. 1970: 242-243)
Given Franklin's opinions, it is therefore hardly surprising that as soon as the thirteen colonies became independent, Cuba should figure among the candidates for possible inclusion into the new union. In 1805 (thirteen years before the birth of Karl Marx) US president Thomas Jefferson made the first official declaration of an interest in appropriating Cuba when he sent a note to his representative in Great Britain expressing the necessity, in the case of a war between Britain and Spain, for the US to take possession of the island in order to defend Louisiana, which the US had purchased from France two years earlier (Rippy 1929; 72).
Jefferson later sent General James Wilkinson to Spain to find out if the Spanish would consider selling Cuba to the United States. The Spanish replied that they were not interested, but Jefferson certainly remained so. Alter he had vacated the White House, his successor and close friend, James Madison, wrote to him in 1809 for advice on how to deal with Napoleon, who had recently prohibited US trade with Santo Domingo. Jefferson suggested that Madison should threaten Napoleon with US help for the cause of Mexican independence in order that the French emperor might then try to buy' US allegiance through ceding them territory. He said that Florida would not be a very good deal because it was relatively poor and would in time become theirs anyway, but Cuba would be a different matter. 'That would be a price," he wrote;
We should then only have to include the North [i.e. Canada] in our confederacy [...]and we should have such an empire for liberty as she has never surveyed since the creation and I am persuaded no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire... (Martin-Smith ed. 1995:1556)(1)
Jefferson never gave up urging his successors to annex Cuba. In October 1823 he wrote to President James Monroe;
Do we wish to acquire [...] any [...] of the Spanish provinces? I candidly confess that I have ever looked upon Cuba as the most interesting addition that can be made to our system of states. The control which, with Florida point, this island would give us over the Gulf of Mexico, and the countries and isthmus bordering on it, would fill up the measure of our political well-being. (Padover ed. 1943:175)
Franklin's and Jefferson's words are irrefutable proof that the United States' founders were imperialists. It is an undeniable historical fact that long before modern Communism was conceived, even before its founding father was born, US politicians had announced an interest in Cuba which was diametrically opposed to the interests of Cuban national in-dependence.
It is my argument that the US determination to annex Cuba can be identified as a key defining principle upon which US-Cuba relations are based. Cuba, because of its proximity, potential wealth and geographic position has at different times been of such importance to one or other interest group in the US establishment that it has always been the focus of US attempts to either annex or otherwise subjugate it as a matter of strategic, political or economic expediency. When measured against this historical record, the causes of post 1959 US policy towards Cuba, until recently officially explained by the crusade against Communism and latterly by the drive to democratise' the island, are less convincing and can be read more accurately as justifications for a much older ambition by the superpower. Conversely, this history serves to explain the recent durability of the Cuban Revolution in the face of seemingly overwhelming hostility. I argue that US hegemonic ambition has resulted in an equally powerful current within Cuban nationalism that defines itself by a determination not to be dominated by its northern neighbour.
The position of Cuba gives the United States so deep an interest in the destiny even of that island, that although they might be an inactive, they could not be a satisfied spectator at its falling under any European Government, which might make a fulcrum of that position against the commerce and security of the United States (Foner I 962: 127).
In this note, Madison set the tone for US diplomacy towards Cuba throughout the rest of the I ~ century, which was to prevent both an indigenous independence movement from overthrowing the Spanish and to impede other, rival powers from intervening from outside in the belief that once Spanish power in the is-land became too weak, the US would be able to intervene to their advantage. To this end, throughout the early part of the last century a close alliance was forged between the US and a certain strata of the Cuban Creole planter class who saw their best interests also lay in annexation by their northern neighbour.(2)
At the same time, during the first part of the last century, US investment and commercial interest in Cuba grew, especially from the southern planters who were encouraged by a common interest in maintaining slavery. Bowing to US pressure, in 1818 Spain opened the ports of Cuba to international trade, a move which worked directly to the advantage of southern US commercial interests. By 1820 more than half of Cuba's commerce had shifted to the United States.(3) In 1819, as Jefferson had predicted, the US successfully negotiated the purchase of Florida from Spain and therefore extended its territory to within 90 miles of Cuba. Such was the geographical proximity, the economic similarity and the tightening relationship with the Creole leadership in Cuba, that in April 1823, in a letter to Hugh Nelson, the US Minister to Spain, John Quincy Adams, the Secretary of State (and future President) predicted that Cuba would be part of the Union within 50 years:
Cuba... has become an object of transcendent importance to the commercial and political interests of our Union. Its commanding position... its safe and capacious harbour of the Havana... the nature of its productions and of its wants... give it an importance in the sum of national interests with which that of no other territory can be compared and little inferior to that which binds the different members of this Union together... It is scarcely possible to resist the conviction that the annexation of Cuba to our federal republic will be indispensable to the continuance and integrity of the Union itself... There are laws of political as well as of physical gravitation; and if an apple severed by the tempest from its native tree cannot choose but fall to the ground, Cuba, forcibly disjoined from its own unnatural connection with Spain, and incapable of self-support, can gravitate only towards the North American Union, which by the same law of nature cannot cast her off from its bosom... (Thomas 1971: 101)
This was the foundation of what the Cubans refer to as the fruta madura or 'ripe fruit' policy of the US, waiting until Cuba was ripe for picking. Thus it became 'the Empire of Liberty's' policy to work against the Cuban national independence movement. Despite their own anti-colonialist roots, successive US administrations argued that Spain should keep control of its colony Even as Bolivar burned the path of independence throughout the south-em continent, the US worked against any such development in Cuba. Monroe wrote to Bolivar saying that the US would intervene if he sent an army to liberate either Puerto Rico or Cuba and quickly followed this with his famous Monroe Doctrine which told the European powers to keep out of the western hemisphere.
In December 1824, Bolivar defeated the last of the Spanish forces on the mainland and, fearful that the same might happen in Cuba, more Cuban landowners became annexationists themselves. Bolivar was liberating slaves and Cuban landlords increasingly began to see their interests closely allied to the slave-holding South of the US. The Southerners for their part saw the addition of Cuba as advantageous in that it would mean the incorporation of another slave-holding state to the Union. As a result, throughout the 1840s and 50s there were frequent pirate-style expeditions or 'filibusters' as they were called, from the South aimed at trying to seize the island from Spain.
It is not certain how the phrase 'manifest destiny' came into being but it is generally attributed to John L O'Sullivan, the editor of the Democratic Review, who used the term first in 1845 to describe the expectation that the United States, thanks to the 'superior qualities' of Anglo-Saxons (and presumably in his case, the Irish too), would inevitably absorb their neighbours.(4) At any rate, the phrase quickly be-came associated with a widespread movement articulated by the popular press, most particularly in the South of the US, to annex Cuba and other Spanish colonies in the Caribbean. For example, the New Orleans Creole Courier is quoted by Thomas as saying: 'This full blooded Anglo-Saxon race is destined to sweep over the world with the might of a tornado. The Hispano-Morescan (sic) race will quail' (1971: 210). Foner quotes the New Orleans Delta of January 3 1853 as going much further, even so far as to predict the extinction of the Spanish language in tones which betray the racist nature of the US expansionist ideology:
For the bastard Latin of their nation cannot stand for any time against the conquering power of the robust and hardy English... Their political sentimentalism and anarchical tendencies follow rapidly after the language and by degrees the absorption of the people becomes complete all due to the inevitable dominance of the American mind over an inferior race. (Foner 1962: 147)
O'Sullivan was instrumental in 1848 in bringing Southern planters into a secret association with annexionist Cubans in what was known as the Club de Ia Habana, founded some years earlier. In 1849, he acted as an intermediary for President James Polk in another secret yet unsuccessful attempt to buy the island. In 1854, the pro-slavery President Pierce drew up what became known as the Ostend Manifesto by which the US would have invaded Cuba if Spain continued to refuse to sell it. The Manifesto was defeated in Congress, but one of its authors, James Buchanan, was elected President in 1856. Buchanan waged his electoral campaign with the annexation of Cuba as a major plank in his platform. Unfortunately for him, Congress was by that time too bitterly divided over slavery to agree to his wish. When finally the Civil War ended US slavery, so too did plans to purchase Cuba, which still had slavery and would keep it until 1886.
This factor is significant, because from the end of the US Civil War, tile Cuban independence movement began to incorporate the freedom of slaves into its demands. The first War of Independence started in 868 with the landowner, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes freeing his slaves so that they would fight on the side of independence from Spain. De Céspedes expected that the United States, by nature of what he called its 'political principles', would help in his war to wrest Cuba from the colonial power, but the US, under Ulysses Grant and Secretary of State, Hamilton Fish, refused. On April 6 1869 Fish told the US cabinet that its best policy would be to allow the ‘madness and fatuity of the Spanish dominion in Cuba' to continue until a time when all nations, would be glad that we should impose and regulate the control of tile island' (Thomas 1971: 250).
At this time, the US was fighting the native resistance to its expansion into the far North West. Thus it carefully avoided embroiling itself in another war by diplomatically supporting Spain and using its influence with the ailing monarchy to keep the door open in Cuba for US investments. By the late I 880s, when the last of the Sioux were defeated, 83 percent of Cuba's trade was with the USA and only 6 per cent with Spain. In all but name, Cuba had been integrated into the US economy. It therefore seemed that it would only be a matter of time before the fruit would fall.
[...]ya estoy todos los dias en peligro de dar mi vida por mi pais y por mi deber... de impedir a tiempo con la independencia de Cuba que se extiendan por las Antillas los Estados Unidos y caigan, con esa fuerza más, sobre nuestras tierras de America. Cuanto hice hasta hoy, y haré, es para eso. En silencio ha tenido que ser y como indrictamente, porque hay cosas que para lograrles han de andar ocultas, y de proclamarse en lo que son, levantarian dificultades demasiado recias para alcanzar sobre ellas el fin... Vivi en el monstruo, y le conozco las entranas:- y mi honda es la de David. (Marti: Letter to Manuel Mercado, 1981: 576).
Every day I am in danger of giving my life for my country and my duty... to prevent, by the independence of Cuba, the United States from spreading over the West Indies and falling, with that added weight, upon our lands of America. All I have done up to now, and shall do hereafter, is to that end. Up to now it had to be in silence for there are things which remain hidden in order that they be achieved, and which by their telling would raise difficulties too great to be overcome... I have lived inside the monster, I have seen its entrails:- and my sling is that of David. (6)
Subsequent history confirms Marti's fears. In 1898, under the pretext of a mysterious explosion which sank the USS Maine in Havana harbour, the US intervened in the War and imposed a peace on the new Cuban Republic. Al-though 90 per cent of the land had been liberated by the Cubans themselves they were excluded from the peace talks with Spain. From those talks, the US emerged with the Philippines, Cuba and Puerto Rico under its control. Cuba escaped becoming a colony partly because the demand for independence in Cuba was so strong, and partly because the US found itself immediately engulfed in a war to put down an indigenous rebellion in the Philippines. Thus the US was obliged to grant Cuba its independence, though it did so entirely on its own terms by giving the new republic a constitution written in Washington that granted the US the right to intervene in the island whenever it saw its interests threatened. The Philippines and Puerto Rico remained colonies, which Puerto Rico still is today. The constitution which the US imposed on Cuba included the Platt Amendment giving the US the right to a military base at Guantanamo Bay and authorised the US to intervene in the island whenever it felt its interests threatened. The constitution therefore guaranteed that nothing happened in Cuba without the say so of the US Governor General.
Cuba, according to present day Cuban historians, became the world's first 'neo-colony': a land which is politically independent but economically dependent. While the US did not have direct and visible control of Cuban political life, it did have direct control over the economy. In line with the adage: 'he who pays the piper picks the tune', the US was able to make sure that the only tunes played were ones they liked to hear. If a Government came along which they didn't like, it would be changed for one they did, even if they had to send in the marines. By 1912 the US had sent in the ma-tines three times to Cuba to put down rebellions and on one occasion, in 1906, even installed one of its own citizens, Charles Magoon, as President. (It is worth remembering here that Lenin didn't publish Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism until 1917.)
The history of Cuba until 1959 has been one of repeated rebellions and repeated disappointments, of corrupt elections and brutal dictatorships. A wave of strikes in the sugar mills prompted another military occupation by the US between 1916 and 1921. By 1925, the US controlled all Cuban banks, trains, sugar, services, communications and tobacco. In that year, the manager of the US owned American Foreign Power and Light Company, Gerardo Machado, became president. His rule quickly turned into dictatorship characterised by assassinations of political opponents and labour leaders. Among those murdered by Machado's police was the student leader and founder of the Cuban Communist Party, Julio Antonio Mella. Eventually the repression became so severe that the middle classes began to join in the agitation for his removal. In 1933 a general strike made Machado’s position untenable and he fled the island. This produced a revolutionary change of government in which a young radical, Antonio Guiteras became Secretary of State and a hitherto obscure army sergeant, Fulgencio Batista took control of the army. Guiteras forced the United States to accept the removal of the Platt Amendment from the Cuban Constitution and renegotiation of the terms of its lease on Guantanamo Bay. Guiteras paid the price for such effrontery when the US urged Batista to assassinate him. Batista, through graft and assassination maintained a grip on die island's politics which served only US interests for the next 25 years. He successfully rigged the electoral system to ensure that only his favoured candidates won. However, in 1952, the Orthodox Party (to which Fidel Castro belonged) posed a real threat to this arrangement and looked set to win the elections scheduled for that year. Before that could happen Batista took control of the government in a coup d'etat.
The corruption, violence and obvious sycophancy to the whims of the US government that characterised Batista's reign fuelled a popular yearning which clung to the frustrated dream of the 19th century independence fighters. It was the dream of a land which Marti envisaged would be 'con todos cubanos y para el bien de todos.'(With all Cubans and for the good of all Cubans)(7) Marti's last letter, quoted above, was internalised by generations of patriotic Cubans until a generation came along who called itself la generación del centenano (The Centenary Generation) because they were around in 1953, exactly 100 years after Marti's birth. Its members were the ones who grouped around Fidel Castro that year and tried to storm the Moncada barracks in the eastern city of Santiago in an attempt to start a new rebellion aimed at removing Batista from office.
It was a foolhardy thing to do, but miraculously Castro and enough of his followers survived. The attack was a military failure but turned into a political masterstroke that arguably provided the spark which lit the flames of revolutionary fervour and finally brought the end, not only of Batista, but also of US domination of Cuba's political and economic life.
Indeed, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba has been cast literally in the role of David against Goliath. Since the collapse in 1991, which resulted in Cuba losing 85 per cent of its foreign trade, right-wing members of the US Congress have moved to strengthen the US trade and economic embargo. In 1992, the act promoted by Robert Torricelli, a New Jersey Democrat extended the embargo to subsidiaries of US companies in other countries, while in 1996 the Helms-Burton Act, the work of Senator Jesse Helms and Representative Dan Burton, introduced complex new restrictions aimed at Cuba's relations with other countries. These include allowing for legal action by US citizens against foreign companies which invest in properties that were nationalised by the Cuban Government after 1959. The Act also bans executives of such companies from entailing the US. Other measures in the Act call for the removal of Fidel and Raúl Castro from office, the disbandment of the Cuban Communist Party and the installation of a Cuban Government 'acceptable' to the United States. The Act states that the US embargo measures will not be lifted until such a government is in place in Havana.
Such details are not lost on the revolutionary leadership which points out that the Helms Burton Law, because it prescribes the kind of government that Cuba can have, bears a striking resemblance to the Platt Amendment and to the Act as a manifestation of what it calls Un nuevo Plattismo' (A new Plattism).(8)
By invoking such an historical referent, the leadership has a powerful ideological tool at its command and the message is clearly understood by the Cuban people, who, after two centuries of struggle for their national independence do not wish to have it removed again. If Cuba's revolution is still intact, it has therefore less to do with Communism, whether seen as a form of 'totalitarian tyranny' or as a mobilising ideology, than it has to do with this perception of what it is to be Cuban as defined by opposition to the US 'other'. As the Miami based Cuban historian, Louis A. Perez Jr. has theorised, if the US felt it was their 'manifest destiny' to one day have Cuba, it became the Cubans' destiny to resist it and Fidel sees him-self as the latest manifestation of that identity.(9)
Castro foretold the subsequent 40 years of his leadership from the Sierra Maestra in June 1958 in a letter to his confidant and secretary, Celia Sanchez, in a manner which closely resembled his I ~ century predecessor, Marti:
Al ver los cohetes que tiraron en casa de Mario, me he jurado que los americaros van a pagar bien caro lo que estan haciendo. Cuando esta guerra se acabe, empezara para mi una guerra mucho más larda y grande: Ia guerra que voy a echar contra ellos. Me doy cuenta que va a ser mi destino verdadero. (Castro, 1958 quoted in Las reglas del juego, Dirección Politica del ministerio del interior, 1992)
On seeing the rockets they fired at Mario's house, I have made up my mind that the Americans are going to pay heavily for what they are doing. When this war is over I am going to launch another much longer and bigger war against them. I realise now that this is going to be my true destiny. (10)
In 1991, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was widely predicted that the Cuban Revolution could not survive without its generous Soviet ally. Broad parallels were drawn with the former socialist countries of eastern Europe which saw 'Castro's dictatorship' falling like Hoenecker's in East Germany or Ceaucescu's in Rumania. Subsequent events have proved such predictions wrong and now, as the centenary of 1898 rolls by, the chief reason for this is becoming evident.
Cuba has not joyously celebrated the centenary of its independence in 1998 but rather commemorated it as the centenary of the US intervention in the Cuban War of Independence and its imposition of an unwanted peace settlement. The real celebrations of true independence occur annually on January 1st - the day the Revolutionaries took power in 1959.
To be a Cuban patriot is still defined by the willingness to struggle against the 'Goliath' of the North. This logic helps to explain the durability and the adaptability of the Cuban Revolution. The recent crisis may have resulted in the Revolution altering its economic policy, even adapting its political system to the extent of toning down the Marxist rhetoric and seeking accommodations with formerly unwelcome institutions like the Catholic Church, but the economic reforms and the problems that these phenomena have brought with them, have not altered the historically defined role of the Revolution which was essentially a revolt against political and economic domination by the North. That is why the Cubans have stuck with Castro and it ultimately explains why the US stubbornly refuses to desist in trying to remove him. It is because Castro resists and with him, the Cuban people, that they are vilified by Washington. It is not because they are Communist or 'undemocratic,' but because they resist.
Stephen Wilkinson, London, October 1998
© Stephen Wilkinson 1998
This article is reproduced by kind permission of the author.
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Last Revision: November 14th. 1998