History
6393
Review
Six
March
29, 2000
Perez,
Louis A., Jr. Cuba Under the Platt Amendment, 1902-1934. Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press,
1986.
In Cuba Under the Platt Amendment, 1902-1934,
Louis Perez examined the involvement of the United States in Cuban affairs,
beginning with the American entry in 1898 into (what should properly be called)
the Spanish-Cuban-American War, and ending with the onset of the Batista regime
in 1934. Central to the relationship
between the United States and Cuba for three decades was the Platt Amendment,
an appendix added at the insistence of the United States to the 1901 Cuban
Constitution. Written by Americans for
the benefit of American capital, the terms of the Platt Amendment made the Cuban
nation little more than “an extension of the U. S. national system,” and served
to subordinate Cuban sovereignty to American needs.
The
United States cast covetous eyes toward Cuba for years, and always assumed that
an accommodation with Spain for control of the island was inevitable. Cuban success against Spanish troops seemed
to portend Cuban victory. That Cubans
might win their independence was an unacceptable option to American policy
makers who still maintained designs against Cuba. The swallowing of a sovereign nation played against all of
America’s self-imposed rules against territorial acquisition (if the Hawaiians
are left out of the history), so another way to obtain the island became
necessary.
That opportunity presented
itself when Cuban planters invited the United States (according to Perez) to
enter the war. The planters considered
themselves in a no-win situation no matter which side ultimately won. The United States took credit for the
victory and determined the rules of the peace.
The Cuban revolutionaries, who were near victory over the Spanish at the
moment of United States intervention, found themselves relegated to the
sidelines with a pat on the behind from their American “saviors.” The independistas
never forgot the victory stolen from them by the United States.
The occupation of Cuba by
United States troops lasted until 1902.
As the time for departure approached, American leaders considered how to
establish hegemony on the island. The
protection of American capital investments in Cuba was too great to leave to
chance, as was the value of Cuba to the United States as a trading
partner. It became evident that an
absolutely sovereign Cuba would never agree to put American interests first. The United States determined to use a type
of outside dominance to accomplish its goals.
That dominance took the form of the Platt Amendment to the Cuban
Constitution. The United States made it
plain to Cuba that acceptance of the Platt Amendment, which granted only
limited sovereignty, was preferable to the alternative, which was a continuing
American presence and no Cuban sovereignty.
The unhappy Cubans cut the best deal they could, and accepted the terms
of the Amendment.
The Platt Amendment
demonstrated far more than a concern by the United States for the protection of
its capital. It illustrated the deep
disrespect held by American policy makers towards the Cubans by assuming that
Cubans would govern Cubans poorly. It
also showed the change in direction of nineteenth-century American missionary
zeal. It was now not enough for the
United States to extend its economic empire to the lesser developed
nations. It became imperative that
those nations be reborn in the American image.
Hesitance to do so was a sign of a backwardness that offered the United
States, sans guilt, the right to step
in and force such change. Even worse
than hesitancy to adopt the American paradigm was the substitution of a
nationalist model for development. Walter
LaFeber, in Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America,
said that after the American Revolution, the United States became adamantly
anti-revolutionist, and that American policy and presence became the dominant
force against which revolutionaries revolted.
So, Cuba offered laboratory conditions to conduct social experiments on
the people of Cuba previously only dreamed about with regard to other areas of
Latin America and the Caribbean.
Additionally, the United
States understood that the Cuban underclass represented change (anathema to
American interests) rather than continuity (the American preference). The best chance for the establishment of
American hegemony within the guidelines of the Platt Amendment lay with the
middle or upper classes. Those chosen
to lead Cuba under the Amendment quickly discovered that all decisions related
to American capital, whether in the form of loans to Cuba or capital
expenditures in Cuba required American approval. Perez said, “The dominant class in Cuba …did not exercise
hegemony directly from within…the Cuban state…but indirectly through the
political structure of the United States.”
As long as capital was protected, the United States was happy. Of course, the protection of capital
involved almost every facet of Cuban life, so the American influence was
omnipresent. One of the few areas left
to Cuban control was the political infrastructure, where graft, corruption,
self-enrichment and pork-barrel legislation made even Louisiana politicians
appear to be novices in comparison.
Due to Cuban resistance in
the face of the Platt Amendment, the United States intervened militarily in
Cuba in 1906. The Cubans, always quick
learners, never again forced military action on the part of the United States. For its part, the 1906 intervention established
the willingness of the United States to act.
Therefore, the mere hint of American unhappiness at any proposed Cuban
challenge to the Amendment was normally enough to whip the Cubans back into
line. It became a matter of American
pride that military intervention became unnecessary. The Cubans learned to use American silence or pronouncements as a
sounding board as to the appropriateness of change.
Protection of capital and
intervention by threat rather than by deed gave the American stamp of approval
to the increasingly oppressive presidency of Gerardo Machado. Machado very carefully protected the
financial concerns of the United States while simultaneously putting a
proto-dictatorship into place. After
his illegal re-election in 1928, and after the Great Depression destroyed the
world market for Cuban sugar, many of his wealthy supporters turned on
him. By 1931, labor unions, university
students, and peasants joined the opposition.
The situation continued to worsen and although in 1933 Franklin Roosevelt
refused to consider military intervention (Perez said, “Roosevelt and Hull were
loath to inaugurate the ‘Good Neighbor’ policy on the debacle of an armed
intervention in Cuba.”), non-intervention was still a powerful option. Meetings between Sumner Welles and Machado
failed, and the United States resorted to the construction of a military coup,
led by Fulgencia Batista, that finally brought down the Machado
government. Following the short terms
of Ramon Grau San Martin and Carlos Mendieta, the Batista regime remained in
power until the twentieth century Cuban Revolution completed the nineteenth
century Cuban Revolution pre-empted by the United States.
United States policy in Cuba
for the first three decades of the twentieth century provided a textbook
example of all that was wrong with American foreign policy in Latin
America. The Platt Amendment offered
the chance to engineer a society that incorporated all the aspirations held by
Americans for a Latin American nation.
After the addition of the Amendment to the Cuban Constitution, the plan
began to unravel immediately. Rather
than concede defeat, the United States continued to tinker with Cuban society
through new and creative interpretations (often at odds with the previous
interpretations) of the Amendment for another thirty years, to the long-term
detriment of the Cuban people.
The experience of the United
States in Cuba under the Platt Amendment brings to my mind the value of
historical understanding in formulating American policy. I wonder at times if history does really
teach any lessons (apart from the obvious…Don’t attack Russia in the winter,
and …Don’t put American troops on the Asian mainland), but if the possibility exists that it does, then who is in charge of
giving the lessons to policy makers? It
seems that John Kennedy and his advisors looked no farther with regard to Cuba
than it was friendly to the Soviets. I
see in Chapter 10 no mention on the part of Americans to the role played by the
United States in support of the Batista regime, and definitely no mention of the Platt Amendment years. Kennedy insinuated that Castro’s
Soviet-friendly policy was treacherous, given the “special and historical
relationship to the United States and the nations of the Western Hemisphere.” He went on, almost hypocritically, to refer
to “your deep aspirations for liberty and justice for all.” And finally, he accused the Soviets of the
very things of which the United States had been guilty sixty years before. Kennedy said, “…the American people have
watched with deep sorrow how your nationalist revolution was betrayed and how
your fatherland fell under foreign domination.
Now your leaders are no longer Cuban leaders inspired by Cuban ideals. They are puppets….” Castro, however, had paid attention in
class, for in 1962 he said, “After the War of Independence, the Americans
imposed the so-called Platt Amendment limiting the validity of the Cuban
Constitution. That ‘amendment’ denied
our country the right to make its territory available for foreign military
bases without the consent of the U. S. government. The Americans took advantage of it to grossly interfere in Cuban
affairs….”
I have a confession that I
will share if you promise not to tell Dr. O’Brien. In his Latin America-U.S. class last semester, we were to read
Perez for a common reading. I was out
of town and excused from class that week so took advantage of the situation by
not reading the book. This term and
this class offered a way to make up for my laziness, and I am glad I took advantage
of the opportunity. I really need to
know more about Castro’s revolution, but reading this book did a great job of
filling in the blanks about conditions in Cuba during the years leading up to
the overthrow of Batista.