The Mopox Commission called for the construction of two cities located near Guantánamo Bay. The first, La Paz, was to be located on the Guantánamo River at or near the spot that had so captivated Admiral Vernon on that afternoon in June 1741. The other city, Alcudia,
would lie slightly north and west. Six miles apart, the cities were to be joined by both road and canal and connected by highway to the regional capital at Santiago. The commission called for La Paz and Alcudia to be populated originally with settlers from the Spanish regions of Catalonia and Galicia, as well as from the Canary Islands; these settlers might be joined at a later date by others from within Cuba itself. The commission explicitly enumerated the incentives to be offered prospective settlers, including land, a pair of mules, an ox, a yoke, farming implements, a slave, birds, a hog, the right to exploit local minerals, and finally, a twenty-year grace period on local fees and taxes. To help the settlers establish themselves, each settler would receive two royals (Crown silver currency) per head, reduced to one in the second year. In return, they would be expected to produce basic staple crops for local consumption and to repay the cost of their establishment in Cuba.
“Negroes” were not the only ones to be excluded from citizenship at La Paz and Alcudia. There would be no room for vagabonds or other individuals unable to maintain their end of the bargain. Meanwhile, prizes awaited citizens who excelled in producing coffee, sugar, indigo, honey, and tobacco. To promote commerce and industry on Guantánamo Bay, boatbuilding would be encouraged and individuals with surplus would be granted access to Spain's markets while reaping the benefit of an open commerce in slaves and other provisions.
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In elaborate technical sketches never to be realized, Mopox's engineers transformed Guantánamo's naturally open and inviting mouth into a deadly trap. The engineers exploited all of Guantánamo's natural endowments. On the outermost terrace of Windward Point a large battery commanded the Cuban coastline, north and south, affording the bay's defenders ample warning of approaching vessels. Along the mile-long ridge overlooking Windward Point ran a wall, several hundred yards long, connecting three batteries, some four hundred feet above the bay. Halfway along the same side of the entrance lay another large battery atop the thirty-foot terrace, capable of treating enemy vessels to withering fire. Finally, at the north end of the Windward Point, the engineers designed a jetty protruding half a mile into the bay at the end of which sat yet another battery. Beyond the jetty, on Fisherman's Point, sat the major fortification of the bay, comprising an
arsenal, storehouses, dikes, troop quarters, and houses for officers' families and servants. Beyond the fort and jutting into the bay was a harbor, protected on four sides and capable of sheltering the largest vessels. Here were the beginnings of a new garrisoned city.
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Meanwhile, on Leeward Point, opposite the battery at the end of the Windward jetty, would sit another rampart, smaller than its counterpart only in degree. Across from these two forts, halfway down Hicacal Beach would be yet a third large fort, the three together forming an equilateral triangle of death and destruction. And that was it. The engineers saw no need for other fortifications farther up the harbor. The bay was now impregnable. An ambitious plan, surely, but no more so than that which had made Havana the securest port in the New World in the aftermath of the British occupation of 1762.
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Had Spain carried out the commission's plans for Guantánamo Bay, the United States would not occupy it today. But like other, far less ambitious plans to develop the bay that preceded it, the Mopox Commission was never put into effect. The reasons are by now familiar: an overextended Crown committed its resources elsewhere; the refugees from Santo Domingo were unenthusiastic about Guantánamo Bay. Mopox himself actually came out against developing Guantánamo Bay, “despite its importance, on account of the costs that it demands.”
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It would take the investment and machinations of an up-and-rising empire to finally give Guantánamo the economic boost it needed.
THE NEW FRONTIER
The view from Thomas Jefferson's hilltop home Monticello lends itself to speculation. “I candidly confess,” Jefferson wrote James Monroe in October 1823, “that I have ever looked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of states. The control which, with Florida point, this island would give us over the Gulf of Mexico, and the countries, and the isthmus, bordering on it, as well as all those whose waters that flow into it, would fill up the measure of our political well-being.”
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Nestled in the Virginia upcountry, its back to the Blue Ridge Mountains, its front gazing down across the piedmont and the valley of the James River, Monticello provided Jefferson a unique perspective from which to appreciate the accomplishments of the young American republic and anticipate its future wants.
Since the ships of the Virginia Company first arrived off the mouth of the James River in 1607, successive waves of colonists had spread out across the coastal plain, pushing their way past the fall line up into the valleys of the James, York, Rappahannock, and Potomac Rivers, before pausing, momentarily, at the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains. Evidence of their labor, and of that of their draft animals and slaves, was plain to see as Jefferson looked off to the east. In two hundred years, they had vanquished the Indians, reclaimed a wilderness, secured independence, and planted the seed of empire. And even
then, Jefferson might have mused as he strode through Monticello from front to back, they were just getting started.
At the foot of Monticello, plainly visible from the west portico, lay the town of Charlottesville, still under construction, signs of a frontier breached. Beyond Charlottesville rose the Alleghenies, local range of the great Appalachian Mountain chain, which stretched from Georgia to Maine and which, up until the time of Jefferson's birth in 1743, defined the western limit of the colonists' world. To the settled eye, the land west of Monticello looked uninviting, if not impassable. But to Jefferson, as to his father, Peter, like George Washington's father, a surveyor, the Allegheny ridge was but a veil concealing a seemingly infinite, largely unexplored watershed whose valleys and plains fairly shimmered with opportunity.
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As a farmer dependent on water to get his produce to market, Jefferson knew rivers. He was born in the shade of the hill that would become Monticello, on the Shadwell estate of his father, one of the first settlers and commissioners of Albemarle County. On its southern edge, Shadwell was bordered by the Rivanna River, along which sat a small mill, built by Peter and later enlarged by Thomas, after Shadwell was incorporated into Monticello in 1794. As the young Thomas watched the milling and floating of his father's crops, one imagines him launching boats of his own design down the Rivanna, destined for the James, the Chesapeake, the Atlantic, andâwho knows?âEurope, Africa, or Asia.
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Roughly half the rainfall that waters the Allegheny drains to the east. Above Monticello, in Jefferson's day, creeks with names such as Lynches, Moores, Prettys, Redbud, Wolftrap, and Ivy fed the north and south forks of the Rivanna, which, uniting just above Charlottesville, shot the gap between Monticello and Wolfpit, Broadhead, and Lonesome Mountains, before cutting through the fields of Shadwell and Monticello and continuing down to Columbia, where it joined the larger James River and, after clearing the falls at Richmond, meandered through the tidewater before emptying into Chesapeake Bay.
The other half of Allegheny rainfall ends up a thousand miles or more to the south. Several valleys and roughly seventy miles west of Monticello rise the tributaries of the New River, rare among the waterways of what is now the northeastern United States in that it runs
due north up the Allegheny Plateau for over a hundred miles before veering west, through the New River Gap (today's Fayetteville, West Virginia), and finally joining the Great Kanawha River on its journey to the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and ultimately the Gulf of Mexico. Having accompanied his father, the surveyor, on trips to the frontier, Jefferson could describe these western rivers in intimate detail.
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He understood their relation to the Mississippi watershed and the Gulf of Mexico. And he recognized the promise that the Mississippi and Gulf of Mexico held for the prosperity of the young republicâso long as it controlled Cuba.
Farmer, son of a surveyor, amateur scientist, Jefferson was a systematic thinker. He saw the world in terms of systems, of networks of harmonious and interdependent parts. Ninety miles of ocean could no more separate Cuba from the United States geographically, economically, or politically, in Jefferson's mind, than an apple could be separated from the tree, as John Quincy Adams once put it.
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Cuba belonged with the United States. Indeed, in a footnote in
Notes on the State of Virginia
, Jefferson surmised that Cuba had once been
part of
the American mainland. “I have often been hurried away by fancy, and led to imagine that what is now the bay of Mexico, was once a champaign country [a plain]; and that from the point or cape of Florida, there was a continued range of mountains through Cuba, Hispaniola, Porto Rico, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Barbados, and Trinidad, till it reached the coast of America, and formed the shores which bounded the ocean, and guarded the country behind.” Rocked by some tremendous force, the mountains broke apart, flooding the plain and creating the Gulf of Mexico.
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Jefferson was not naïve about the reality of political boundaries. As a naturalist, he doubted the durability of man-made boundaries, which, like Spanish Cuba, defied the natural order.
Gazing west from Monticello, then, Jefferson saw an expansive, trans-Appalachian confederation of states shipping its produce down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and out the Gulf of Mexico, with Cuba, guardian of the Gulf and Caribbean trade, firmly in American hands. To this point, Jefferson's vision circa 1820 was not that different from the imperial vision of Lawrence Washington and Edward Vernon seventy or eighty years before. They, too, had seen Cuba as the key to opening Caribbean markets to British goods, relieving population
pressure along the colonial seaboard, and unlocking the potential of the American interior. But commercial prosperity comprised only half of Jefferson's vision of American empire. The other half was liberty. Liberty, Jefferson and James Madison had come to conclude somewhat paradoxically by 1789, depended on empire, which, by mitigating factionalism and providing for healthy population growth, ensured the virtue and independence of the American citizenry. But what was good for Americans, Jefferson insisted, was likewise worthy of the world. The empire Jefferson envisioned encompassed the liberty of fellow American republics and, indeed, all who suffered the yoke of despotism. Of course, to Jefferson, as to so many of his compatriots north and south, the liberty of white Americans and Europeans was compatible with African slavery. Though Jefferson wrestled with the moral contradictions of slavery to the end of his days, he never doubted that the annexation of Cuba was essential to preserving the “peculiar institution” and southern way of life.
There were similarities and differences, too, between Jefferson's vision of American empire and that of the generation of 1898, which propelled the United States into war with Spain and finally landed Cuba and Guantánamo Bay. At the turn of the twentieth century, Cuba was no less an essential strategic element of an unfolding imperial vision than it had been eighty (or twice eighty) years before. But by then Jefferson's rhetoric of liberty had become hollowed out. In part this was the result of maturing southern slave interests forsaking Jefferson's republicanism in their pursuit of Cuba as a slave state. (“Cuba must be ours,” Jefferson Davis announced matter-of-factly in 1848, “to increase the number of slaveholding constituencies.”
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) In part it was a result of apostles of Manifest Destiny inflating Jeffersonian rhetoric to the bursting point. Throw in the blandishments of social Darwinism and the new racial “sciences” and you have a justification for imperial expansion altogether divorced from the reality of colonial relations in the Philippines, say, or Cuba, one that, in comparison to Jefferson's vision of an empire for liberty, seems little more than a case of special pleading.
Which is not to suggest that Jefferson's vision of American empire was devoid of arrogance or presumption, or that it lacked contradictions
of its own. The point is not to defend Jefferson but to illuminate the different ends that Cuba and Guantánamo could serve in an unfolding, expanding U.S. political economy. Over nearly four centuries of development, Cuba remains a constant presence. Readers familiar with Edward Vernon's expedition to Cuba in 1741 will not be surprised to learn that Cuba figured centrally in debates about expansion long before expansion meant expansion overseas. Until late in these debates, Guantánamo Bay drops away. But never entirely. When the United States decided finally to move on Cuba in the spring of 1898, it did so through Guantánamo Bay; when, after the Spanish-American War, the United States decided to stay in Cuba, it chose Guantánamo as its forward operating base.
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The American Revolution was not a war against empire. As Jefferson made plain in the years leading up to the war and in early drafts of the Declaration of Independence, it was not an aversion to empire itself that compelled Americans to declare independence, but rather, dismay over the king's inability to mediate equitably between the various parts of the British Empire. The king had failed as a neutral arbiter between Parliament and the colonial assemblies. Only when it became clear that there could be no equality in empire did the colonies resolve to pursue equality outside it. They would create an empire of their own.
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Creating an empire out of thirteen independent republics, or states (with presumably more to come), was no mean feat. To begin with, empire and republican government were thought to be contradictory. The eighteenth-century French political philosopher Montesquieu was only one in a long line of political thinkers who assumed that republics must be small and independent to be worthy of the name. Empire entailed conquest and the administration of foreign peoples and territories, along with a concentration of power and resources necessary to carry it out. By contrast, self-rule implied not only smallness but also liberty, equality, and living within one's means. The American colonists needed no lesson in the ways that empire eroded liberty and self-government. But what if Britain had misconceived
empire? What if, rather than promoting narrow English interests, the Crown had acted impartially, safeguarding the well-being of separate but equal colonies? What if Montesquieu had been wrong?
Such was the logic of many prominent colonists in the years leading up to independence. It was also the burden of much of the writing of Jefferson and fellow Virginian James Madison throughout the founding era. Jefferson and Madison disagreed about the desirability of commercial markets in the new nation. (Jefferson generally endorsed them; Madison regarded them as a source of inequality, corruption, and foreign influence.) But both agreed that empire, rather than eroding republican institutions, could be republicanism's very salvation. More land meant opportunity and independence for the citizen farmers of their agrarian ideal. Land also offered a way to resolve one of the most vexing problems confronting republican governments, namely, the existence of political and/or economic factions, which supposedly eroded citizens' commitment to the public good. Rather than striving futilely to stamp out factionalism, Jefferson and Madison thought to neutralize it by encouraging the proliferation of factions the better to counterbalance one against othersâat all levels: local, state, and national. The bigger the nation, the better the odds of preventing the centralization and corruption afflicting Britain.
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The American victory in the War of Independence presented Americans with the opportunity to imagine the world anew. No one took to this opportunity more eagerly than Jefferson. The American empire he envisioned would not be the product of conquest carried out by an existing centralized state. Rather, it would be the product of a compact between equal, sovereign, and independent states forged for their mutual benefit. The government of this union would reflect its intended aim, namely, to preserve its members' happiness. Like the individuals who made up these states, the states knew best what was good for them; the more the union promoted states' rights, the stronger, the greater the states' devotion to the union. There was no natural limit to how large this union might grow, but grow it must, as open land was the condition of citizens' virtue and independence.
In 1800, Americans elected Thomas Jefferson president of the United States. Jeffersonian Republicans swept into office, ending the decade-long rule of the Federalist Party and inaugurating what Jefferson
liked to refer to as the second American Revolution. Virginia governor James Monroe caught the note of optimism, writing to an English friend that the nation might become again “the patroness of peace, harmony, and liberty.”
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Elevation to the presidency allowed Jefferson to put his ideas into practice, to begin to construct that “pacific system” of equal and reciprocal federated republics that might one day literally cover the globe.
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Jefferson's own revolution of 1800 coincided with political instability in Spain's New World empire, which would culminate by 1829 in the creation of eight new Central and South American republics. Jefferson included the peoples of these regions in his vision of a great American empire, just as he did the indigenous inhabitants of North America. Join us, he told representatives of the Delaware, Mohican, and Munrie tribes in December 1808; we will teach you how to plow.