The U.S. military occupation of Cuba formally began on January 1, 1899. For the first year and a half, the United States concentrated its efforts on curbing disease, improving sanitation, creating municipal governments, rebuilding infrastructure, building schools, and generally repairing the damage inflicted by a relatively short but brutal three-year war that had torn the country apart. Though no U.S. law restrained the McKinley administration from recognizing the Cuban revolutionary government at the conclusion of the war and transferring authority to it, the United States waited nearly two years before convening a Cuban constitutional convention. Leonard Wood, promoted to military governor of Cuba in 1899, consistently delivered only the rosiest accounts of U.S.-Cuban relations during the military occupation. By contrast, U.S. and Cuban journalists reported mounting Cuban frustration at U.S. policy virtually from the beginning. Looking back on the first two years of the U.S. occupation, journalist Albert G. Robinson acknowledged the efficient work of American officials in addressing sanitation and infrastructure, but noted that these were not problems topmost in Cubans' minds (indeed, “the doing of them was a cause of discontent rather than satisfaction”). If anything, Robinson reported, Wood was less popular among the Cubans than his less competent predecessor, General John Brooke, an observation that deserves attention, given the dissonance between Wood's descriptions of Cuban opinion during the negotiations over the terms of U.S. withdrawal from Cuba and actual Cuban sentiment. It apparently never occurred to Wood that in face-to-face discussions, Cubans might be telling him what they thought he wanted to hear.
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By the summer of 1900, U.S. officials felt confident enough about conditions in Cuba to begin the process of forming a Cuban government. Since the start of the U.S. military occupation, four general elections had been held in Cuba “in an orderly and tranquil manner,” Wood remarked in an annual report. The Cuban population was supporting itself “without any assistance from the State,” leading Wood to conclude that “there must be something in the people themselves to have brought about this result and to have rendered these changes possible.” Having observed Cubans since the start of the U.S. occupation,
Wood could confidently describe them as “orderly and obedient, and in sympathy with law and order.”
45
It was time to begin the process of transferring government to the Cubans themselves. Who could argue with that?
On July 25 Wood issued an order calling for the election of delegates to a convention to be held in the Cuban capital, Havana, on the first Monday of November 1900, “to frame and adopt a constitution for the people of Cuba, and, as a part thereof, to provide for and agree with the Government of the United States upon the relations which ought to exist between that Government and the Government of Cuba, and to provide for the election by the people of officers under such constitution and the transfer of government to the officers so elected.”
46
This prompted an immediate firestorm. As the Cubans recognized, a convention elected to draw up a constitution had no authority to determine questions of political relations. That was rightly the prerogative of a duly elected government. When widespread protest against the wording of the order on the part of individuals and the major political parties threatened to derail the selection of delegates, Wood assured the Cubans that the United States would modify the language, and the election of delegates proceeded.
In November, Wood formally opened the constitutional convention with another order that met part though not all of the delegates' original objections. They would still be expected to treat the subject of U.S.-Cuban relations, but now Wood stipulated that this topic could be taken up
after
the constitution itself was framed and adopted, and then on terms suitable to the Cubans
themselves
. As journalist Robinson later observed, this distinction, though seemingly minor, was the cause of much anti-Cuban sentiment in the United States later that spring, when critics charged the delegates with ignoring U.S.-Cuban relations in the constitution, just as Wood himself had authorized them to do. This proved Cubans' lack of gratitude, many complained, and revealed Cuba as unprepared to be left on its own. As if ignoring the ambiguity, Wood himself lectured the delegates about the fine points of self-government, just as they set to work. In “true representative government,” Wood observed, “every representative of the people, in whatever office, confines himself strictly within the limits of his defined powers.” The delegates to the constitutional convention had
“no duty and no authority to take part in the present government of the island.” And yet, by continuing to insist that the convention take up the matter of U.S.-Cuban relations even after the constitution itself was framed, Wood was asking the Cuban delegates to exceed their mandate.
47
Moreover, the degree of Cuba's liberty to define its relations with the occupying power remained decidedly ambiguous. The U.S. government would, of course, have something to say about these relations, too, Wood cautioned. Still he never doubted the result: “a final and authoritative agreement between the people of the two countries” to promote “their common interests.”
48
Over the course of the next six months, it became clear that Cuba's interest and America's interest were diametrically opposed. The Cubans wanted to realize the dream of Cuba Libre. The Americans wanted to undo the damage of the Teller Amendment, which pledged the United States to “leave the government and control of the Island to its people,” thus apparently repudiating a century and a half of U.S. thinking about Cuba.
49
By the terms of Teller, the United States would withdraw “absolutely” upon the establishment of an independent Cuban government (an interpretation “commonly accepted in both countries”). From Secretary of War Root's perspective, the U.S. Congress had presented President McKinley with an intractable dilemma: he could comply with a literal reading of the Teller Resolution and abandon American interests in Cuba, or alienate the Cubans and divide the American people. Congress had created this mess, Root insisted; Congress should clean it up. If the United States was going to have to force Cuba to recognize America's unique interests there, Root wanted this done “not by a divided government or in the exercise of a doubtful right or as the subject of an internal dispute, but with the whole united power of the nation, in its different branches of government standing behind the demands.”
50
Still, to most observers it wasn't clear exactly what authority Congress exercised on the subject of Cuban independence. As the
Pawtucket
(Rhode Island)
Times
remarked, Cuba was neither a dependency, a protectorate, nor a colony of the United States. “It is to be a free and independent nation, yet its constitution must be submitted to the United States for approval.” Could the United States accept part of the constitution while demanding changes? “Nobody knows what the
rights of Congress are in the matter,” the paper acknowledged, “because never before has Congress been called upon to act in a similar case. There are no precedents. The way has to be pioneered ⦠without chart or compass.”
51
Ordinarily relations between countries are negotiated by treaty. But suppose an “arrogant” Cuba should “decline to enter into treaty relations with the United States and assume to manage its own affairs without regard to the United States”? Then the United States would have to force its will on the new republic; wasn't there something that could be done now to preempt such a regrettable course of action?
52
The
Pawtucket Times
quoted a “prominent Republican senator” (likely Orville H. Platt, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) surmising that the Cuban constitution “might contain an article by which the suzerainty of the United States” over Cuba's relations with “the rest of the world could be acknowledged.” The same could be done for the question of a U.S. naval station, about which, Wood pointed out, the Cubans were “particularly touchy.”
53
The key would be to reassure the Cubans that the point of these measures was not to diminish Cuba's independence in any way, nor to interfere in Cuba's internal affairs, but simply to promote the prosperity of both countries. This was an “extremely complicated” problem that would have to be managed “with great delicacy.”
54
Delicacy was not America's stock-in-trade. On February 11, 1901, delegates to the Cuban Constitutional Convention accepted and signed the new Cuban constitution, thus freeing themselves to take up the question of U.S.-Cuban relations. The previous month, the ever-optimistic Wood had assured Root that casual conversations with many of the delegates suggested that Cubans would define relations between the two countries in terms suitable to the United States. Unwilling to take Wood's word for granted, Root wrote Wood a letter spelling out the administration's position on U.S.-Cuban relations in characteristic detail. Root ordered Wood to remind the convention that the U.S. Congress, not the executive, had ultimate authority on the subject of relations, so that any conversations between Wood and the delegates up to that date were nonbinding. Wood was also to remind the delegates that the United States took seriously its duty under U.S. and international law to secure conditions in Cuba conducive to
individual property rights and the fulfillment of international obligations, and to promote a Cuban government adequate to those ends. Finally, Root reiterated America's commitment, articulated “in varying but always uncompromising and unmistakable terms” since the nation's founding, to ensure that no new foreign power ever laid a hand on Cuba.
Happily, Root observed, America's and Cuba's interests jibed perfectly, for “the condition which we deem essential for our own interests is the condition for which Cuba has been struggling, and which the duty we have assumed towards Cuba on Cuban grounds and for Cuban interests requires.” It was simply unthinkable, Root emphasized, that having expended so much blood and treasure, the United States would emerge “through the constitution of the new government, by inadvertence or otherwise, ⦠in a worse condition in regard to [its] own vital interests” than it was before the war. Hence President McKinley's talk in December 1899 of the United States maintaining ties of “singular intimacy” with Cuba, and the administration's refusal to expose the island “to the vicissitudes” confronting naturally rich but politically weak states. It was, after all, to secure such singular ties that the administration had convened the Cuban Constitutional Convention in the first place.
Lest the Cubans (or the perpetually sunny Wood himself) miss the gist of these remarks, Root provided him with a list of provisions that “the people of Cuba should desire” to incorporate in the Constitution. Cuba was to agree not to enter into treaties or negotiations with foreign powers without U.S. consent. Cuba was not to amass public debt that exceeded the “ordinary revenue” of the nation. Cuba was expected to grant the United States the right to intervene at will in Cuban affairs to maintain life, liberty, and property and Cuban independence. Cuba was to sign off on all the acts of the U.S. military government. Finally, Cuba was to furnish the United States with land for naval stations. This list of demands became the basis of the Platt Amendment, a legislative rider appended to the U.S. Army Appropriation Act of March 1901, which the United States obliged the Cuban Constitutional Convention to incorporate into the new constitution. So much for Wood's assurances of November 1900 that the constitution and the question of relations were separate matters and that the Americans
would leave the defining of U.S.-Cuban relations to the Cubans themselves.
One can fault Wood his optimism and still sympathize with the unpalatable task he faced in informing the delegates that Cuba Libre was essentially dead. No wonder that one of his first acts upon receiving Root's instructions was to flee Havana. On February 15 he set out on a hunting expedition to nearby Batabano, a trip apparently scheduled before the arrival of Root's latest order. Rather than canceling his trip to break the news to the delegates with due solemnity, Wood took its leaders for a proverbial ride, ordering Domingo Méndez Capote and Diego Tamayo, presidents, respectively, of the Constitutional Convention and the newly appointed Committee on Relations, to accompany him. As usual, Wood thought the expedition a smashing success.
55
The Cubans felt otherwise.
56
Only Wood could have been surprised that the delegates greeted these affronts with disappointment and disdain. In the wee hours of February 27 the Cuban Committee on Relations issued its report. It began by recalling the days just before the trip to Batabano, when the delegates expected that their work “would be as easy as it would be brief.” The Cuban nation's gratitude to the United States was indeed palpable, and the delegates were ready to acknowledge eternal “ties of the most intimate and fraternal friendship” between the two nations, “inasmuch as there is not a glimmer of the slightest opposition between their legitimate interests, nor possible the least disparity in their reasonable aspirations.” Then came Root's (and Wood's) interventions. The committee now realized it would have to “proceed with greater care, since the matter had to be considered under a different aspect.” The McKinley administration had introduced “something new.”
57