Two of the most intriguing filibustering plans for Cuba never advanced beyond the planning stage. The first was the work of William Walker, an ambitious, if not megalomaniacal, native of Tennessee who wanted to extend the American republic southward into Central America. In 1853, Walker tried and failed to establish an independent state in Baja California. In May 1855 he led a band of U.S. and Latin American mercenaries to Nicaragua, then in the midst of civil war. In September of that year he defeated the Nicaraguan army in a pitched battle; in October he captured the city of Grenada. By May 1855 he had set himself up as the puppet of a new political regime that won recognition of the outgoing Pierce administration. The next year, Walker was “elected” president of Nicaragua, at which point he re-legalized slavery (abolished there in 1824) and undertook an Americanization campaign.
Walker's ambition did not stop there. From Nicaragua he hoped to establish a federation of five Central American republics that would include Cuba. But by this point, Spain and Costa Rica had had enough. Despite the new Buchanan administration's recognition of Walker's regime, Spain and Costa Rica moved on the man from Tennessee, who ended up fleeing into the arms of the U.S. Navy, who spirited him home to the United States.
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Walker's ambitious plans for Central America and Cuba received close scrutiny from what appears at first glance to have been an unlikely source: the African American black nationalist philosopher Martin
Delany. Unlikely, that is, because Delany scrutinized Walker and the other filibusterers not simply to oppose their effort to infinitely extend the scope (and life) of slavery, but also to emulate them, in black form: to liberate Cuba from Spain and complete its “Africanization.” But for Delany, too, Cuba was just the beginning. Just as Nicaragua in Walker's mind was to serve as the focus of a new southern slaveholding republic, so Cuba would occupy the heart of a prospective confederation of AfricanâLatin American states. Long ambivalent about projects to recolonize free African Americans to Africa, Delany saw black Cuba and a black confederation in Latin America as an ideal solution to the problem of U.S. racism. He rejected the notion that blacks and whites could coexist in the United States, but he did not want blacks to “return” to Africa. In the end, Delany was no less blind to the imperialism of his projectâno more sensitive to the individuality of the actual Cuban or Latin American peoplesâthan the others who went before him.
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After 1854 and the uproar over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the new Republican Party wasn't alone in believing that the containment of slavery would put it on the road to ultimate extinction.
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Southern proponents of slavery agreed with them. Southerners saw their political influence in Washington diminish as slavery was excluded from part of the territory taken from Mexico. As beleaguered defenders of slavery came to see Cuba as the salvation of slavery and the southern way of life, the debate over Cuban annexation betrayed signs of the sectional polarization of the national political parties that was finally breaking the nation apart. Democrats generally advocated the annexation of Cuba as a slave state; Whigs (-cum-Republicans) generally opposed it.
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In November 1857 a correspondent for the New York
Weekly Herald
witnessed “over three hundred young negroes in excellent health” being off-loaded at Guantánamo. One day, the correspondent speculated, this “beautiful” and “capacious” harbor was likely to become “the center of a large and active [and presumably legal] commerce”; for now, it remained a “favorite harbor for the off landing of cargoes of negroes from Africa, as [its] numerous bays and inlets surrounded and separated from each other by high hills enable the slavers to discharge their cargoes in perfect security.” In this case, the writer suggested,
the traffic transpired with full knowledgeâindeed, collusionâof the district governor and local commander, whose forces corralled the slaves, exacted a fee, then sent them on their way. Within days, the slaves were said to be at work building a new railway for an English merchant named Thomas Brook.
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On the eve of the American Civil War, U.S. traders seemed to be ramping up their traffic in slaves, as if anticipating an interruption in the trade. In July 1860
The Chicago Tribune
reported that its sources in “Guantánamo, Cuba, assert that ten or twelve American vessels have landed over 5,000 negroes on the island within the last six weeks.”
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A few years later, Abraham Lincoln's naval secretary, Gideon Welles, contemplated occupying Guantánamo Bay as a coaling base to help enforce the Union blockade of the South. Whether the Union navy could have succeeded in curbing the
American
traffic in slaves at Guantánamo Bay is impossible to say, but the thought of such a showdown
there
is intriguing.
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In fact, the outbreak of the Civil War deflected pro-annexation sentiment in the United States, when formerly pro-annexationist enthusiasts in the Confederacy found themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to throw themselves at the mercy of Spain for recognition of the Confederacy and access to Spanish ports. After the Civil War, many former southern planters moved to Cuba (and to Brazil), seeking to revive their fortunes there.
It was not the U.S. Civil War but the Ten Years' War in Cuba (1868â1878) that effectively ended the slave trade and precipitated the formal abolition of Cuban slavery in 1886. The Ten Years' War was Cuba's first war of independence, and like so many Cuban revolts and insurrections, it arose in the east, more precisely in the western region of Oriente province, to the west of Santiago and Guantánamo Bay, where Creole planters had grown old waiting for Spain's promises of liberal reform to improve their lives. From the very beginning of the war, the revolutionaries faced an intractable dilemma of needing both to marshal into its army Cuba's restive slave population and to retain the sympathy of the majority of Creole planters without whose support the revolution was sure to fail. In the end, military necessity overwhelmed political strategy. Marshaling the slaves of eastern Cuba into their ranks, the revolutionaries alienated planters across the island, so that the spirit of independence never caught on.
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In the region around Santiago and Guantánamo, planters who did not ally themselves with the rebels had their fields destroyed, their crops burned, their slaves freed. The coffee and sugar economies of the region, just hitting their stride, would take years to recover, and even then in unrecognizable form. Many of the war's original leaders were ambivalent about the destruction. But as the revolution ran on and became a war of attrition, older, white Creole leaders were pushed aside, to be replaced by younger men of mixed blood, less ambivalent about the economic and political system they laid to waste. The French planters of the Guantánamo Basin had seen this before. Eastern Cuba had become Haiti. Their world crumbled around them as Cuba descended into racial conflagration.
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Meanwhile, many U.S. planters who had abandoned the American South for Cuba after the Union victory returned to the United States in 1868. But those who endured in Cuba triumphed at the war's end as the devastation wrought by the conflict created new opportunities for planters with the capital to invest in Cuba's rapidly consolidating sugar industry. Meanwhile, the Grant administration, in office for eight out of the ten years of the war in Cuba, muddled through, alternately threatening Spain and resisting the calls of Cuban partisans in the United States for recognition first of belligerent rights, then of Cuban independence. To Grant, Cuba remained “a friendly nation,” one “whose sympathy and friendship in the struggling infancy of [America's] own existence must ever be remembered with gratitude.” Intervention would wait a quarter century.
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The Ten Years' War in Cuba, though confined largely to the east, crippled Cuban industry and commerce. As in the aftermath of most wars, the first to recover were individuals and businesses with surplus capital to invest, and in 1880s Cuba this meant above all American businessmen, who took advantage of the depressed Cuban economy to consolidate and recapitalize once-small sugar, coffee, tobacco, cocoa, and indigo plantations. Big was in. “The tendency of modern times is toward consolidation,” remarked Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge in March 1895. Lodge spoke to justify U.S. imperialism and
America's absorption of smaller states such as Cuba, which were a thing of “the past and have no future.”
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But he might just as well have been referring to the smaller farms of Cuba (and the United States) at the time when Cubans needed them most. If bad for Cubans, postâTen Years' War Cuba was good for U.S. investors, tamping down annexationist sentiment in the United States. By 1896, American investment in Cuban sugar and mining exceeded $50 million. Ripe for American investment, Cuba was also a good market for the United States, whose exports to Cuba exceeded $105 million by 1894.
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The consolidation and recapitalization of the Cuban economy mimicked developments in the United States in the aftermath of the American Civil War. Industrialization proceeded apace, spurred by improvements in communications and infrastructure and the arrival of millions of immigrants desperate for work. These were simultaneously exhilarating and anxious times, full of opportunity but also uncertainty, as the nation became further and further enmeshed in a global economy whose subtleties were not always easy to discern. Like other ambitious countries at this time, the United States thought to stabilize its economy and quell anxiety by venturing out into the world. Truly, the would-be world empire had come of age at an opportune time. Its warehouses were full of goods, its factories hungry for resources. Its writers and statesmen were poised for adventure and imbued with a sense of mission. Its rivals were curious, expectant, not precisely sure what to make of the ambitious young republic. When the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner announced the “closing” of the American frontier in 1894, Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, Albert Beveridge, Elihu Root, and John Hay, among others, heeded Turner's essay like a starting gun, charging onto the public stage and laying the ideological groundwork for new imperial adventures.
When so-called anti-imperialists protested that republics do not lend themselves to empire, Roosevelt and company replied with a resounding
Hogwash!
What, after all, had the United States been doing to the Indians on this very continent lo these many years? On the frontier, American settlers confronted an indigenous population that had not owned that land and thus had no claims worthy of respect, Roosevelt argued. The U.S. government could hardly have treated the Indians
as individuals with attendant civil rights. Indians were “warlike and bloodthirsty,” living lives “but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid, and ferocious than that of the wild beasts with whom they held joint ownership.” In the face of such savagery, neither “the rules of international morality” nor the nation's founding principles applied. Like the defenders of the Indians before them, anti-imperialists were not only sentimental but dangerously naïve. “To withdraw from the contest of civilization because of the fact that there are attendant cruelties,” Roosevelt observed, “is, in my opinion, utterly unworthy of a great people.” All Americans benefited from Western conquest, all were implicated in the violence. “The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all of civilized mankind under debt to him.” American was to Indian as Boer to Zulu, Cossack to Tartar, New Zealander to Maori: in “each case the victor, horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foundation for the future greatness of a mighty people.”
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In Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, a naval officer who hated nothing so much as to go to sea, the propagandists of empire found a bard.
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Twice president of the U.S. Naval War College at Newport, Rhode Island, Mahan was one of the world's foremost authorities on naval power at a time when the term
naval power
could be said to be redundant. Mahan shared many of the assumptions about American nationhood just described: a century of isolation had come to an end, liberty and empire were compatible, the United States had a right to appropriate distant territory for strategic interests, U.S. commercial expansion would benefit the entire world.
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But where many nineteenth-century Americans underemphasized the conflict entailed in American global expansion, Mahan took conflict for granted, insisting that the nation be prepared for it. When, around 1890, he began to write his influential essays on the history of naval warfare, he became convinced that the nation was decidedly
un
prepared. The nation needed not just ships, coastal defenses, and overseas basesâthough it needed those in spadesâbut also an education in the role of sea power in promoting and maintaining national prosperity in an industrial age.
Two premises, closely related, undergirded Mahan's writing on naval policy: first, that “control of the seas, and especially ⦠the great
lines drawn by national interest or national commerce, is the chief among the merely material elements in the power and prosperity of nations”; second, that “communications are ⦠the most vital and determining element in strategy, military or naval.” Though blessed internally by two coasts and a river system with few rivals on earth, the United States was woefully underrepresented in the region that mattered most: the Caribbean Basin, which Mahan described as “one of the greatest nerve centers of the whole body of European civilization.”
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