Cuba: An American History

by Ada Ferrer

Historically, American statesmen have tended to view US intervention in 1898 as an illustration of American benevolence. The United States had rallied to the cause of a neighbor’s independence and declared war to achieve it. In this version of history, Cuban independence was a gift of the Americans, and for that Cubans owed them a debt of gratitude. In Cuba, however, 1898 represents something entirely different: more theft than gift. There, 1898 was the moment when the United States swept in at the end of a war the Cubans had already almost won, claimed victory, and proceeded to rule over Cuba as a de facto colonial power. Cuba Does Not Owe Its Independence to the United States read the title of an important book published in Havana in 1950.2

Cuba’s most famous patriot and writer, José Martí, spent more of his adult life in the United States than in Cuba, and the largest memorial service for Cuba’s

The Cuban Revolution was not one thing; it changed over time in goals and methods. Before taking power, it was emphatically not communist, nor particularly anti-American. Cubans did not support the movement against strongman Fulgencio Batista because they desired to live under socialism or at near war with the United States. Yet the revolution

The year was 1492. The Spanish monarchs had just waged the final, victorious campaign of the Christian Reconquest, ending seven hundred years of Muslim control on the Iberian Peninsula. The majestic city of Granada, the last Muslim stronghold, fell to the Catholic kings on January 2, 1492. Columbus was there that day.

Columbus was still in the city later that month when Ferdinand and Isabella ordered Jewish residents of their kingdoms to convert to Christianity, leave voluntarily, or face expulsion. Thus did Columbus witness the final victory of a militant and intolerant religiosity. In fact, he was its beneficiary, for it was only with that war over that the Catholic monarchs acceded to Columbus’s unusual venture.

One of the country’s early national anthems was called “Hail, Columbia,” the title referring, of course, to Columbus. Cities and towns across the young country took Columbus’s name. In the nation’s capital, the District of Columbia, a painting called the Landing of Columbus has graced the Rotunda of the Capitol Building since the 1850s.

The hemisphere had a population significantly larger than Europe’s and cities that rivaled Europe’s in size. Its people had political systems, agriculture, science, their own sense of history, their own origin stories set in pasts long before Columbus. This critical and accurate appraisal of the Columbus myth applies not just to the United States, but to Cuba and all the Americas.

It was a simple, indisputable fact received like a revelation: Columbus never came to this America.

Leif Erikson and the Vikings in 1000, for example, or John Cabot in 1497, Jamestown in 1607, or Plymouth Rock in 1620, to name the most obvious. Scholars sometimes maintain that a newly independent United States, searching for an origin story not indebted to Great Britain (its erstwhile mother country), pivoted to embrace Christopher Columbus and 1492. Then the renarration stuck.6

had no way of knowing then that sugar would have a far greater impact in the Caribbean islands than either God or gold.

According to estimates, more than eight of every ten Native persons died by 1500, less than a decade into the conquest. By 1530, the Indigenous population of Hispaniola had declined by about 96 percent.12 With the labor supply dwindling even faster than the gold, colonists embarked on slaving missions to nearby islands, stealing people from the Bahamas, Cuba, and elsewhere to staff the mines

No, Hatuey insisted, “not alone for this [reason], but because they have a God whom they greatly adore and love; and to make us adore Him they strive to subjugate us and take our lives.” Hatuey gestured to a basket of gold and intoned, “Behold here is the God of the Christians.” To get rid of the newcomers they had to get rid of the gold, Hatuey concluded. Then he threw the basket into the river.14

Before the sentence was carried out, a Spanish priest gave Hatuey the opportunity to convert to Christianity and thus save his soul and ascend to heaven. Hatuey asked whether Christians went to heaven. When the friar answered that the good ones did, Hatuey at once answered that he preferred hell, “so as not to be where Spaniards were.”15 That may have been the first political speech recorded on Cuban soil. But it did nothing to avert Hatuey’s fiery death, nor to save Native people from the catastrophe already befalling them.

The conuco system, wrote one scholar, was “an imitation by man of tropical nature, a many-storied cultural vegetation, producing at all levels, from tubers underground through the understory of pigeon peas… a second story of cacao and bananas, to a canopy of fruit trees and palms… an assemblage [that] makes full use of light, moisture, and soil.” Three centuries after the Spanish conquest, a version of the conuco was still in use—not by the Taínos (of whom by then there were relatively few) but by enslaved Africans, who had come to represent a large share of the island’s population and its main generator of wealth.16

another and another, and many more.” Taíno words for things like hurricanes and sharks, unknown in Spain before 1492, are the words still used today across the Spanish-speaking world: huracán, tiburón.17

One Spaniard testified that in some areas more than half the Indigenous population had killed themselves. When the same man found three boys ill from eating dirt—potentially a form of suicide—he “had their penises and testicles cut off… made them eat them soaked in dirt, and afterwards he had [the boys] burned” to death. He never considered, or maybe never cared, that trying to deter suicide through torture might simply result in more suicide. In a few decades, the Indigenous population in Cuba declined by perhaps as much as 95 percent.24

made leaving Cuba punishable by loss of both property and life. But there weren’t enough officials on hand to enforce the order, and the Spaniards continued to leave for Mexico. After the 1530s, they departed for the fabulous Inca empire of South America, or for Florida, “a continent of which nothing was known and everything anticipated.”

In a recent genetic study, 35 percent of the women sampled descended from an Amerindian woman.29 And

Ponce de León found two other things instead. The first was a great peninsula he named Florida.

The Spanish governor who oversaw its construction was a woman. Isabel (or Inés) de Bobadilla arrived in Havana in 1538 with her husband, Hernando de Soto, a conqueror recently returned from Peru having collected part of the gold ransom for the Inca king executed by Francisco Pizarro. The Spanish king appointed de Soto governor of Cuba and charged him with organizing an expedition to conquer Florida, which the Spanish knew about but had not yet begun to colonize. Less than a year after his arrival, he left Cuba with six hundred men, designating his wife as his replacement. Four years later, he died on the western banks of the Mississippi River, never having returned to Cuba or to his wife.

The leader of the attack was the French pirate Jacques de Sores. Nicknamed the Exterminating Angel, he had cut his teeth as captain under the notorious one-legged pirate known as Peg Leg. Like most French pirates, Sores was a Protestant. Perhaps for that reason he enjoyed negotiating Havana’s ransom with a Catholic priest and

Legal avenues to freedom, combined with the opportunities afforded by a vibrant mercantile economy, meant that the population of free people of color increased dramatically. By 1610, about 8 percent of habaneros were free people of color. By 1774, the year of the first census in Cuba, they represented more than 40 percent of the island’s population of color. Throughout this period and beyond, they would play a major role in the course of Cuban history.18

He replied candidly: independence was “by no means an easy enterprise.” The principal obstacle, he said, was white anxiety. “[Among] the whites… some [were] eternally wavering on account of the risks of the enterprise, and others hesitating out of a fear of a servile war with the negroes and mulattoes if Cuba became free.”1 While García’s words were meant to explain the recent defeat of the Cuban cause, they also revealed something about the momentous challenge that lay ahead. To succeed, the independence movement would have to change the way people thought about race.

Yet from the start, the mobilization of Black troops for the war in Cuba highlighted the limits of Black citizenship in turn-of-the-century United States. In 1898, there were four Black units in the regular army, all (despite the grumbling of soldiers) under the command of white officers. Veterans of wars against Native Americans and cattle rustlers, African American troops were popularly known as Buffalo Soldiers. In spring 1898, just as the Rough Riders did, they boarded trains headed for Tampa. As they crossed the Great Plains, people cheered them. Black soldiers pulled off buttons from their uniforms and tossed them to the crowd as souvenirs. But as the trains entered the South, the mood changed, and the stares of the crowd grew hostile.7

Soon after after the Tampa melée, the troops embarked for Cuba. In one way, the outcome of the war was already certain. No one expected Spain to win. But other mysteries loomed large. What would happen when an ever more rigid racial system in the United States encountered in Cuba a popular multiracial mobilization that had consciously challenged racial injustice? And, bluntly, as José Martí had asked a few years earlier, once the Americans arrived, would anyone be able to make them leave?

IN DECEMBER 1898, REPRESENTATIVES OF Spain and the United States met in Paris to sign the treaty that sealed the end of Spanish rule in Cuba. Again, Cubans were denied a seat at the table. The Treaty of Paris granted the United States control of four Spanish territories: Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, and Cuba, none of which were represented at the negotiations. By agreement, Spain’s rule over all of them would lapse at year’s end.20

To Gómez and many others, nothing made sense. The decades-long struggle for Cuban independence had ended in the defeat of Spain. But as if by sleight of hand, someone had shifted the ground from under them, switched the very war in which that defeat had happened. The Cuban War of Independence—the third war in thirty years—seemed suddenly irrelevant, supplanted (like the Black officers suddenly demoted in favor of newcomers) by the Spanish-American War. That was the new name for the war, a name in which Cuba deserved not even a mention. In the struggle between Cuba and Spain, then, it was the United States that emerged victorious.

They established asylums for the reconcentrados, as well as for widows and orphans of the war. To rid the island of yellow fever, Americans worked with Cuban doctor Carlos Finlay, the first person to discover that the disease was transmitted by mosquitos. To feed