Stuart King reviews Cuba: A New History by Richard Gott, Yale Note Bene 2005, £9.99. Part I – From Spanish Colony to US semi-colony
Richard Gott’s new history of Cuba has now appeared in paperback. In less than four hundred pages, he takes us from the first Spanish attempts to conquer the island in 1511 up to Castro’s Cuba in the early years of this decade. Gott’s book is an accessible starting point for anyone wanting to understand the Caribbean island’s turbulent history.
Cuba: a new history emphasises the role of black people and their struggles in Cuban history, an important corrective to those who viewed revolutionary developments in the country as a largely Spanish or Latin American affair. As Gott points out, for much of Cuban history blacks made up the majority of the population (up to 60 per cent) and the great majority were slaves. This only began to change in the latter half of the 19th century when the Spanish colonial masters deliberately set out to “whiten” the population through mass Spanish immigration.
BEGINNINGS OF REBELLION
The slave revolt on nearby Saint-Domingue in 1791 (which ultimately created the black republic of Haiti) cast a long shadow over the anti-colonial struggle in Cuba. The fear of a similar slave revolt in Cuba often divided the struggle against the Spanish along racial lines. When Bolivar defeated Spain’s continental armies in Peru in 1824, so liberating Latin America from their yoke, some expected him to liberate Cuba too. But he thought this was “too much work” for a small island, fearing “another Republic of Haiti”.
However much the Cuban landowners and small merchants, who were overwhelmingly white and of Spanish and European descent, chaffed under Spanish rule, they feared the largely enslaved blacks more. As a Spanish minister put it in 1830, surveying the prospects of another revolt on the island: “The fear of negroes is worth an army of 100,000 men,” (Gott, page 52).
Even so, revolts recurred throughout the 19th century. Ironically, it was a century of prosperity for Cuba with cattle ranching and tobacco being supplemented by the sugar and coffee industries – sugar would, of course, later dominate the island’s export trade. The population grew, especially that of the black slaves, but also “free people of colour”. The 1841 census listed 436,000 slaves and 153,000 free blacks out of a population of one million.
All the black revolts that swept the island sought to abolish slavery. Aponte’s rising in 1812 was betrayed and he was hanged with many others. A large-scale rebellion, La Escalera in 1843-44, spread to the sugar plantations and caused panic among the white elite. It was crushed with the utmost brutality with thousands of blacks being slaughtered.
THE 10 YEAR WAR
In 1868 an even more serious revolt swept the country, which would last for a decade. Carlos Manuel de Cespedes, a lawyer and landowner, raised the independence standard. He drew behind him not only other landowners and merchants, fed up with the heavy taxes extracted by Spain, but much of the black population as well – Antonio Maceo, for example, would become an outstanding black guerrilla general. In Gott’s words: “The 10 Year War was both a civil war and a race war. On the one side were a handful of determined white settlers, joined by their black slaves and by free blacks. On the other were the Spanish armies joined by groups of racist white settlers, many recent immigrants from Spain” (page 72).
By 1878 both sides had fought to a standstill but with no sign of Spanish capitulation, the rebels laid down their arms. All slaves who had fought with the army were freed; concessions were made on discrimination against blacks in public places, schools and public employment. But slavery was only finally abolished in 1886.
Jose Marti took up the struggle for independence once again in the 1880s and even though he died at the very start of the Cuban campaign in 1895, the new revolt gained strength under the leadership of Maceo and other generals. Of the 30,000-strong rebel army mobilised by the end of the first year, 80 per cent were black. The old racist Winston Churchill, writing for a US magazine at the time, declared them an “undisciplined rabble” whose triumph, would make Cuba “a black republic”.
By 1896 the country had been split in half by the rebels and the Spanish faced defeat. Only a new Spanish captain-general with an army of 200,000 and a scorched earth policy in the countryside, including “concentration camps” and the development of “strategic hamlets” for confining poor peasants, saved the regime.
It was a new military method of combating popular guerrilla wars soon imitated by imperialist armies all over the world – from the British in the Boer War to the USA in the Philippines, and decades later in Vietnam.
US INTERVENTION
Spain’s brutal repression led to an outcry in the United States by the popular press owned by William Randolph Hearst. But the outrage and the calls for intervention in support of Cuban independence were a smokescreen for a much larger plan.
US imperialism was flexing its muscles, its eyes fixed on the possessions of a weakened Spanish empire. If seized, these would allow the US control not only of the Caribbean sea routes, and therefore trade, but also those of the Pacific. Cuba was the stepping-stone, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines the prizes.
An explosion on board the battleship Maine and its sinking in Havana harbour was the signal for war under the battle cry “Remember the Maine”. Never mind that it later turned out that an accidental fire had set off the ship’s magazine; like the mythical weapons of mass destruction, it was sufficient pretext.
An American fleet defeated the Spanish off the Philippines in May 1898. In June another fleet landed an American force on Cuba. After initial resistance, Spain capitulated and sailed away from Cuba and its other colonies leaving them to the USA.
The Cubans, who had been fighting the independence war for three years, now found themselves pushed aside by what was effectively a military dictatorship. The Spanish captain-general was replaced by a US general who governed the island from 1898 to1902.
This section of the book is worth reading if only for highlighting the striking and repeated similarities with today’s occupation of Iraq. The rebel army of 33,000 was disbanded and paid $75 if they handed in their weapons. The US set up a more reliable “Rural Guard”, a relatively weak force because the US intended to retain military control.
To the dismay of the former black fighters, racial segregation was introduced along the lines then existing in the US army. The new officer corps was completely white. The US hardly altered the old Spanish administration or purged its officials. Rather it used them to run the administration under its direction.
President McKinley told the US Congress at the end of 1898 that the military would stay in Cuba “until there is complete tranquillity in the island and a stable government is inaugurated”. Many thought this meant decades of US rule, others envisaged annexation, as happened with Puerto Rico.
A SEMI-COLONIAL SOLUTION
But the costs of direct imperial rule proved too much – a rebellion in the Philippines was under way and took tens of thousands of troops to crush it. Cuba was costing half a million dollars a month. It was time to put in a trusted semi-colonial government through which the US could govern at arms length.
Elections were planned for December 1900 but on a very restricted franchise. Only males over the age of 20, who were literate and owners of property worth $250 or more, received the vote (as a concession all who served in the rebel army were allowed to vote even if they did not fulfil these conditions). The poor and most blacks were thus excluded, with a mere 5 per cent of the population enfranchised.
The man put in charge of Cuba, Secretary for War Elihu Root, thought this would pave the way to power for the most conservative and pro-annexationist wing of the Cuban landowners and businessmen – men with whom Uncle Sam could do business.
In his own words, if the “mass of ignorant and incompetent” people could be kept out, it would be possible to “avoid the kind of control that leads to perpetual revolutions in Central America and other West Indian islands”
(page 108).
The election results were not, however, to Uncle Sam’s liking – pro-independence parties swept to power. Root now had to plan for a transfer of power and a military withdrawal that left the USA with as much economic control as they could get over a newly independent Cuba. The means was the infamous “Platt Amendment”.
Platt Amendment
Passed by the US Congress in 1902, Platt’s goal was to define relations between the USA and Cuba. The Cuban Constituent Assembly, elected to draft the country’s new constitution, was obliged to incorporate the agreement into the constitution as a price for the US handing over control. Gott handily provides the text in an appendix. It is a worked example of how an imperialist power sets up a semi-colonial state and enshrines it in law, anticipating the basic approach used in the Balkans, East Timor and now Iraq.
The first paragraph barred Cuba from making any treaties with foreign powers, or allow any foreign military bases on its soil, without US approval. The second ceded the US ultimate control over Cuba’s public finances. The third gave the US the right to intervene militarily in Cuba whenever it felt it necessary. And the seventh paragraph gave the US the right to establish permanent military bases on the island.
This last point, of course, led to the establishment of the massive military base at Guantanamo Bay used today by the US government to illegally hold, interrogate and torture people kidnapped as part of its “war on terror”.
The Platt Amendment was incorporated into the Cuban Constitution by 15 votes to 14. General Gomez, once one of Marti’s disciples and one of the black independence leaders, was among the opponents. The amendment he said “reduced the independence and sovereignty of the Cuban Republic to a myth,” (page 111).
Indeed, in the first three decades of the 20th century the US did not hesitate to intervene when it thought its interests or the stability of a virtual puppet government was under threat. US marines intervened in Cuba in 1906-1909, again in 1912 and between 1917-23. A radical government in 1933 eventually repealed the Platt Amendment.
But the US never relinquished its permanent base at Guantanamo, even when Fidel Castro swept out the US‘ closest ally – the dictator Batista in 1959.
The second part of this review will look at Gott’s treatment of those revolutionary years.