In the Caribbean, nothing was more important than controlling the Windward Passage. “No solution to the problem of coaling and naval stations can be considered satisfactory which does not provide for military safety upon that route,” the board observed. As potential sites of U.S. stations along the Windward Passage, both Santiago and Guantánamo had their advantages. Santiago, with its narrow channel, was easily defensible. Guantánamo, with its generous entrance, would be easy to escape in the event of enemy attack. Santiago was well sheltered. Guantánamo could accommodate a whole fleet of ships.
14
So began a long debate about the virtues of Guantánamo Bay, not only compared with Santiago de Cuba and other Cuban harbors, but among Guantánamo and other locations throughout the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico and along the eastern seaboard of the United States. Had the debate remained within the limits of the naval community, it would quickly have resolved in Guantánamo's favor. Along with New York and Norfolk harbors, Guantánamo was generally acknowledged to be an invaluable strategic asset among experienced naval personnel. But the debate didn't remain intramural. Politicians,
too, would have their say. U.S. bases provided jobs and income to host communities whose representatives in Washington did not want naval funding moved offshore. In negotiations about naval appropriations in the first decade and a half of the twentieth century, U.S. politicians seized on the slightest pretext to deny Guantánamo the funding required to make it a fully functioning naval base, with a fuel depot, dry docks, machine shops, ample living quarters, and appropriate defenses. Instead, sustained by discretionary funding channeled to the station by the secretary of the navy, Guantánamo became a limited coaling and emergency repair facilityâuseful to the navy as a rendezvous site for the fleet and as a jumping-off point in Cuba, but hardly the springboard of the forceful new naval strategy envisioned by Mahan, Roosevelt, and Henry Cabot Lodge.
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The U.S. Navy never really abandoned Guantánamo Bay in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War. But the U.S. occupation of Guantánamo became official in October 1903, when the Cuban Senate ratified a treaty leasing forty-five square miles of territory at the outer harbor to the United States, as stipulated in the Platt Amendment. The treaty included the leasing of Bahia Honda in northwest Cuba, a site the navy never developed.
15
From the first, navy officials and President Roosevelt himself were dissatisfied with the amount of land conceded by Cuba. Even an unseasoned observer could see that it was surrounded by higher land. As early as December 1900, naval officials had requested that Cuba concede a ten-mile radius focused on the old Spanish battery at the top (or north) of the outer harbor on South Toro Cay, which the navy expected to become the heart of the U.S. station. The three-hundred-odd square miles of territory within that radius included the local foothills of the Sierra Maestra and Nipe-Sagua-Baracoa mountains, and would allow the navy to command the high ground surrounding Toro Cay. It also encompassed access to the freshwater of the Guantánamo, Guaso, and Yateras rivers, the absence of which in the land allotted to the navy proved nettlesome for years to come.
If three hundred square miles seems an unreasonable request on the part of navy officials, their concern about the defensibility of the
base was vindicated in February 1904, when the Japanese successfully captured the Russian naval bastion at Port Arthur, Manchuria. It wasn't so much that Port Arthur and Guantánamo were analogous in their degree of vulnerability to potential enemies; Port Arthur was infinitely more exposed. Rather, the apparent susceptibility of Guantánamo to a land-based attack was all the fodder that jealous congressmen needed to withhold support for Guantánamo over the course of the next ten years. Meanwhile, naval officials did everything they could both to quell fears about Guantánamo's vulnerability and expand the territory of the base. When political instability in Cuba in 1905â1906 provoked a second U.S. military occupation lasting three years, naval officers thought the time might be ripe for simply seizing more land. President Roosevelt and Elihu Root, now secretary of state, refused to endorse the suggestion, sensitive to America's deteriorating reputation throughout the region.
16
Talk of expanding the base continued through January 1914, when mounting hostilities in Europe deflected attention away from Cuba. In the waning days of the Taft administration, U.S. and Cuban officials signed a treaty, never ratified or implemented, that would have afforded the base the much-coveted high ground surrounding Toro Cay as well as a freshwater source at the Yateras River. Meanwhile, naval and congressional officials continued to debate the merits of Guantánamo versus existing naval installations along the eastern seaboard and throughout the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico.
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Congress's reluctance to fund a full-fledged naval base in the first decade of the U.S. occupation did not detract from the base's usefulness. On May 21, 1912,
The New York Times
reported that a “Negro” insurrection on the island of Cuba threatened American lives and property.
17
The revolt seems to have had its origin in disgruntlement among Afro-Cubans who had seen their position in Cuba decline in the aftermath of independence. Prominent in the revolutionary movements of the nineteenth century, Cuban blacks were denied full participation in Cuban society during and after the U.S. military occupation. In 1902, for instance, the United States banned black Cubans from a new Artillery Corps; when convening the Cuban Constitutional Convention
in autumn 1900, Leonard Wood tried to exclude black Cubans from participating in the electoral process. The “illiterate mass of people” had no business participating in the democratic process, Wood declared, equating illiteracy with “the sons and daughters of Africans imported into the island as slaves.”
18
Discrimination persisted into the Cuban republic and through the second U.S. military occupation of 1906â1909, when U.S. troops returned to Cuba to quash an uprising ignited by the corruption and incompetence of the so-called Moderate Party of President Estrada y Palma. In response to the discrimination, a group of Cuban blacks left the Liberal Party to form the Partido Independiente de Color (PIC), whose exclusive-sounding name belied its ambition for broad social, especially working-class, reform. In the 1908 national election, the PIC fared miserably, proving itself unable to compete with the patronage of the mainstream political parties. When, by 1910, the PIC appeared likely to erode black support among the mainstream Liberal and Conservative constituencies, the parties passed a law outlawing single-race political institutions. PIC's members were harassed and arrested, its political organs banned. The PIC members preferred “to be blacks rather than Cubans,” one editorial writer warned. The new nation had no place for such “racists.” The PIC, meanwhile, appealed to the United States to intervene under the Platt Amendment, something the new Taft administration was not ready to do.
19
Excluded from political participation and unable to air its grievances, the PIC took matters into its own hands in May 1912. The way to get the United States' attention, Cubans had learned back in 1906, was to create social upheaval threatening to U.S. property. And so the PIC began to destroy U.S. and foreign property throughout Cuba, but especially in Oriente province, in the vicinity of Guantánamo Bay.
As early as February 1912, U.S. representatives in Cuba had begun closely following the behavior of PIC leader Evaristo Estenoz, a “troublesome negro.”
20
On May 23, U.S. secretary of state Philander Knox ordered his ambassador to Cuba to warn the Cuban government that the U.S. Marines were on the way to Guantánamo, in response to U.S. property being seized and employees of U.S. plantations threatened. The U.S. government took these steps not to intervene in Cuban affairs, Knox insisted, but simply to protect American lives and
property.
21
And to goad Cuban officials to action. The next day, U.S. ambassador A. M. Beaupré informed his boss that three battleships with 250 marines each had arrived at Guantánamo, making “a very good impression” on Cuban officials, if not on the rebels themselves. Cuban officials had finally assigned guards to the vulnerable American businesses, calming American fears considerably. Tellingly, a day later, Beaupré confessed ignorance about the rebels' motivation. “It is difficult to say,” he remarked, “what the moral effect the presence of [the American] ships will have upon the irresponsible negroes.” Sizing up the insurrection, Beaupré could say only that it seemed “to be organized and directed by some unknown interest, it being highly probable that the negroes at the head of the Independent Party would be capable of engineering a movement on this scale. The negroes now in revolt are of a very ignorant class.”
22
Beaupré claimed that Cuban officials welcomed the arrival of the U.S. fleet, fully recognizing the distinction between U.S. intervention in Cuba and the protection of U.S. property. A letter from Cuban president José Miguel Gómez to U.S. president William Howard Taft suggests otherwise. That was a distinction without a difference, Gómez wrote Taft. To Cuba, the arrival of the U.S. forces smacked of intervention,
and the natural development of events, once these foreign troops landed, would accentuate that character, it is my duty to inform you that a determination of this serious character alarms and injures the feelings of a people loving and jealous of their independence, above all when such measures were not even decided upon by previous agreement between both Governments, which places the Government of Cuba in a humiliating inferiority through a neglect of its national rights, causing it discredit within and without the country.
23
The Cuban military itself was quite prepared to “annihilate” the “negroes” itself.
In reply, Taft told Gómez that the United States appreciated Cuba's resolve, and that the ships had sailed to Cuba merely in case of necessity. Gómez responded in turn that the United States was most welcome to observe events in Cuba. Any deployment of U.S. forces should
only follow an agreement of both parties.
24
In a note to Beaupré, Secretary of State Knox distinguished American intervention in Cuba from police action to protect U.S. property; the government would never consult Cuba on that.
25
As they had during the so-called negotiations over the Platt Amendment, U.S. officials continued to talk past their Cuban counterparts. Meanwhile, with marines itching for action aboard battleships anchored at Guantánamo Bay, Secretary Knox became increasingly forthright in dictating the number and location of
Cuban
troops to be dispersed around the Cuban countryside to protect U.S. and foreign planters.
26
On June 6, 1912,
The New York Times
announced that American marines had come ashore at the Cuban port of Caimanera, just outside the boundary of the U.S. base. From there they fanned out up the Guantánamo Basin, taking positions around the U.S. estates. Meanwhile, more marines were headed to Cuba from Key West. The larger strategy, according to the
Times
, was to station an American battleship in each of the major towns along Cuba's southern coastline, “with the idea that the crew of a thousand bluejackets [sailors] will impress the negroes with the fact that the power of the United States is nearby, and that further acts of lawlessness on their part will lead to their ultimate punishment.” The sailors were to be granted “liberal shore leave, so that the negroes as they come into the towns to get supplies may see them and carry back word to their associates that the forces of the âNorth Americans' have arrived and are on the alert.”
27
With the U.S. Marines guarding American property, Cuban forces were now free to take the battle to the “troublesome negroes,” which they did with ruthless efficiency. It was bad enough that Afro-Cubans threatened foreign property; their “diabolical assaults upon the honor of white women” were beyond the pale. With marines providing cover, the Cuban military, joined by white vigilantes, massacred black Cubans, ultimately claiming between three and six thousand lives. The vengeance loosed upon the rebels seems out of proportion to their crimes, and calls to mind the violence against African Americans during Reconstruction, when the sanctity of white womanhood was reported to have been similarly imperiled.
28
Ultimately, the United States was satisfied with the way things turned out. “I beg to express my thorough conviction,” Beaupré wrote
his boss, “that the sending of troops was fully warranted by the situation, that the effect of their visit was salutary, and their withdrawal at this time would be a serious mistake.” There was mopping up to do. And then there was the instability in states within sailing distance from Guantánamo, such as black Haiti and the nearby Dominican Republic.
29
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In May 1916, in the face of political and social instability in the Dominican Republic, seven hundred marines deployed to the capital, Santo Domingo, to begin an eight-year occupation. Like earlier interventions in Cuba, this occupation handsomely benefited U.S. commercial interests on the island. U.S. sugar producers, for example, increased their holdings nearly twofold, elevating their share of Dominican sugar production to 80 percent by the time U.S. forces pulled out. The occupations of the Dominican Republic and Cuba would become a model for future U.S. policy in Haiti and throughout Latin America for decades to come.
30