The so-called Platt Amendment, signed by President William McKinley on March 29, 1903, was the legislative expression of the perennial interventionist aims of the United States with regards to Cuba. Tomás Estrada Palma, the first president of the Republic of Cuba, signed the Cuban–American Treaty of Relations which, as the U.S. demanded, enforced the law on May 22, 1903.
Estrada Palma, delegate of the Cuban Revolutionary Party, founded by José Martí, in the U.S., had already requested intervention at the beginning of our first War of Independence in 1869, and again in 1878. By 1884 the annexationist conviction of Estrada Palma became manifest when the Gómez-Maceo Plan of San Pedro de Sula was being plotted, which entailed launching a new independence war.
Essentially, the Cuban government had consented to the U.S. intervening in Cuba whenever it believed necessary, while territory was ceded to the United States to establish naval bases.
Senator Morgan had opposed the proposal of Senator Orville H. Platt in Congress sessions on February 25 and 26, 1901, along with ten other legislators. He described the Platt Amendment as an aggressive “ultimatum” to men convinced of their right to rule the country for which they had fought. But the amendment was approved by 43 votes in favor and 20 against.
In Havana, the obligation to accept the amendment was argued sine qua non. As such “the Constitutional Convention of Cuba, convinced of the futility of resistance” (1) was forced to approve, by the narrow majority of one vote, the imposition of the U.S.
In 1896, General Antonio Maceo completed the invasion of the island, from the east to Pinar del Río, and headed for Havana. He was already in Santiago de las Vegas, at the gates of Punta Brava and the capital, studying the plan of attack on Marianao planned for that very night of December 7, when a Spanish assault surrounded his camp and, as usual, he set out to lead the fighting. Colonialist bullets hit him in the face and chest during the skirmish and ended his precious life.
The “Bronze Titan”, as Maceo was known, had stressed his position to Estrada Palma on April 14, 1896: “The only thing required from that country (the U.S.) was help to obtain weapons...the secret of our final victory, which will only bring with it the happiness of the country, if reached without that intervention... “(2).
The position was related to the letter from Maceo to Máximo Gómez sent soon after, in mid-1896, when the invasion had already occurred, and just a few months before his death which, following that of Martí, was the second great tragedy of the Revolution. The letter read “So far I have not received any resources, absolutely none; I'm undertaking the invasion with what I've taken from the enemy. Those led by Zayas, he tells me have retreated. Those brought by Collazo, I arranged to be distributed between Havana and Matanzas.” (3)
The picture is completed when linked to a further letter from General Mayía Rodríguez informing him that he was not close to Havana with the second invading contingent as thought, but remained in Camagüey. According to Jose Luciano Franco in the third volume of his biography of Maceo, he had been halted in his advance by a message from the Cuban government in arms in which he was ordered to “retreat for reasons of high policy.”
In 1959, Camilo Cienfuegos and Ernesto Che Guevara relived that invasion, this time guided by Fidel with strategic intent, and they took up that same military route to Santa Clara. They did not need to get to Pinar del Río, from there they received the bold order to continue on to Havana to complete the great feat that Maceo had attempted.
The U.S. press, and particularly the new daily, the New York Journal, of William Randolph Hearst and the already established New York World of Joseph Pulitzer, led a campaign with a million copies each, serving as a sort of baptism of fire, inciting war against Spain. They took advantage of the brutality of colonial repression on the island to serve their cause. “You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war!” Hearst provocatively responded to a telegram he received from his special correspondent in Havana, who complained that there was quiet in Cuba and requested permission to return.
The struggle of the Cuban people to achieve independence actually lasted more than two centuries. First against Spain, incapable of listening to Pi y Margal when he said that the only way to end the war was to accept the independence of Cuba - and later against the U.S.
In 1805, the third U.S. president, Thomas Jefferson, had warned the British Minister to Washington that in the case of a war against Spain, the United States would seize Cuba due to strategic necessity, “Probably Cuba would add itself to our confederation.”
In 1823, John Quincy Adams, Secretary of State under President Monroe, wrote: “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.” (3)
Thus the “ripe fruit” strategy of biding their time ensued. President McKinley considered the time had come in 1898, and he took measures to prevent the imminent triumph of the Cubans against the exhausted Spanish army. This was already so imminent following the war in two stages, lasting thirty years, that the McKinley administration sent an ultimatum to Spain demanding that they grant autonomy to Cuba; the idea was to buy the island, as Monroe had expressed.
AUTONOMY: SPAIN’S DESPERATE SOLUTION
The Spanish crown decided to appoint General Blanco to replace Weyler as governor of the island and the United States was informed of the decision to grant Cuba autonomy under its protectorate, as requested. The queen signed the decree on November 24, 1897, hoping to avoid the greater evil of the Cubans achieving their independence from Spain. This decision would take effect from January 1, 1898. But both knew that neither would actually grant autonomy, and much less independence, as demanded by the Cubans.
The successors of the founding fathers of the Union were consistent with annexationist ideas, but they did not fully impose them. The annexationism defended by McKinley and his Republican party was curbed by opposition Democrats and independents, who upheld the spirit of the valuable joint resolution of Congress which expressed that “the people of Cuba are, and of right ought to be, free and independent.” However, this was not the case with the so-called Platt Amendment, which was not the work of Platt but actually of McKinley and his Secretary of Defense, and responded to his interventionist resolve, justifying the war against Spain referred to by Jefferson.
The blowing up of the U.S. battleship Maine and the scandalous interpretation of the event in the U.S. press, facilitated U.S. intervention. The Spanish government of liberal Sagasta, just as the conservative Cánovas, refused to acknowledge that Spain had really lost the thirty years of almost uninterrupted war against the mambises.
The Spanish government believed that appeasing the powerful U.S. enemy was in their best interests. Instead of listening to the voices from within Spain itself, that urged the government to admit that the war was lost and to recognize the independence for which the Cubans had fought, it facilitated the plans of the U.S. government by scornfully surrendering Cuba. With the Treaty of Paris, the United States not only swallowed up the islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico, but as an extra, they increased their spoils in the Pacific with the Philippines, Guam and several small islands. A byproduct of the intervention was the annexation of Hawaii, where five years before U.S. marines had overthrown Queen Liliuokalani, to begin the “transition.”
In reality, Cuba did not achieve the independence for which some 300,000 Cubans had died, of them 10,635 soldiers and mambí officers. More than a century later, the island continues to feel the effects of the attempts at domination that led to this unhappy outcome. •
(1) Ramiro Guerra. La expansión Territorial de los Estados Unidos. Editorial Ciencias Sociales 2008, p.313
(2) Herminio Portell Vilá. Historia de Cuba. Tomo I Jesús Montero La Habana, p. 226.
(3) Cuba: las Máscaras y las Sombras, p. 21
