Cubans, Filipinos, and (to a much lesser degree) Puerto Ricans had fought Spain for decades, draining its resources and exhausting its morale. Yet little of this registered in the United States. Right after landing in Cuba—the landing enabled by the Cuban defeat of Spanish troops at Daiquirí—Roosevelt eyed his Cuban allies and judged them to be “utter tatterdemalions” of “no use in serious fighting.” “We should have been better off if there had not been a single Cuban with the army,” he wrote. “They accomplished literally nothing.” That judgment, which was shared widely, mattered. Feeling that
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