From Confrontation to Negotiation

U.S. Relations with Cuba

Philip Brenner

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429722004
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Nearly thirty years have passed since the United States first attempted to overthrow the fledgling Castro government. Despite enormous changes in the hemisphere, significant developments in the nature of Cuba's international relations, and an end to the cold war consensus in the United States that quietly sanctioned interference in and obstruction of Third World politics, U.S. policy toward Cuba has changed very little: It still embodies the failed dream of isolating Cuba and destroying the Cuban revolution. In From Confrontation to Negotiation: U.S. Relations with Cuba, Philip Brenner provides a thoughtful overview of U.S.-Cuban relations since 1898, with an emphasis on the past ten years. Assumptions, goals, and continuities in U.S. policy are highlighted. He then offers a clear picture of the issues that divide the two countries and around which any discussions for a normalization of relations would likely turn. Could discussions occur? Is a call for a less hostile relationship between the United States and Cuba politically feasible? What are the chances that Cuba and the United States can actually work out an accommodation? Dr. Brenner analyzes the domestic political factors in each country that shape policy and that might present possibilities for serious discussion. He then proposes a workable alternative Cuban policy for the United States that takes into account the fundamental concerns of both countries. The policy proposal is related to the framework adopted by Policy Alternatives for the Caribbean and Central America (PACCA).

CHAPTER 1
U.S. Policy Toward Cuba, 1898-1980

"THE UNITED STATES NEVER REMEMBERS and Latin America never forgets" is a well-known Latin American aphorism that succinctly explains the depth of Cuban distrust of the United States and the continuing surprise North Americans manifest about Cuban behavior. Cuban national pride is fierce, and for the better part of a hundred years the United States undermined, disparaged, and ignored Cuban sovereignty. To be sure, the United States acted toward much of Latin America with an arrogance that Abraham Lowenthal has characterized aptly as a "hegemonic presumption."¹ Cuba experienced the full brunt of the treatment because in many ways it was the jewel in the U.S. imperial crown (the "pearl of the Antilles") for the first half of the twentieth century.

Between 1898 and 1934, the United States robbed Cuba of the sovereignty it had fought hard to win from Spain. The United States controlled Cuba's politics and dominated its economy. Then from 1934 to 1958 Cuba was a favored locale for U.S. investors and tourists, and the two countries maintained a special relationship that worked largely to the benefit of the United States. This relationship was destroyed by the 1959 revolution.

The greater part of this chapter will focus on the period after 1959. The sweep of events before 1959 will be subsumed in the first section, and the period between the revolution and the Ronald Reagan administration will be divided into two segments, 1959-1970 and 1971-1980. Current U.S. policy will be examined in Chapter 2.

From Independence War to Revolution

What North Americans commonly refer to as the 1898 Spanish-American War—when the United States fought against Spain for three months in Cuba and in the Philippines—is to the Cubans and Filipinos an episode in their respective wars of independence against Spain. The seemingly insignificant difference in name reflects a deeper tendency in the United States over the last century to see Cuba and Cuban events as an extension of the United States and U.S. interests. Cuba was a colony of Spain until 1898. But even before independence, the United States had begun to replace Spain as the dominant force in Cuban economic affairs.

By the time Cubans began a concerted struggle for independence from Spain in 1868, Spanish dominance over Cuban trade already had declined. In 1860, Cuba sent 62 percent of its exports to the United States and only 3 percent to Spain. Then, between 1868 and 1878, the war for independence wreaked havoc on the midsized sugar farms predominant in Cuban agriculture until then. With the surviving smaller farms becoming easy prey for investors, most were combined into large units linked to a central mill. One U.S. company, Havemeyer's American Sugar Refining Company, owned nineteen of these centrales (mills) and supplied more than 70 percent of the sugar consumed in the United States. Increasingly, American Sugar came to rely on Cuba as its source for cane.²

Beginning with the sugar connection, Cuban dependence on its wealthy neighbor grew rapidly by the turn of the century. Though U.S. investment in Cuba had reached no more than an estimated $50 million in 1896, much of it was in key sectors. By 1902, U.S. corporations had invested $100 million, and U.S. banks had begun to influence Cuba's finances by way of loans.³

At various times in the nineteenth century, the idea of annexing Cuba was raised in the United States. But this idea was dashed before the Civil War by opposition from northern states, which feared the admission of another slave state to the union, and after 1865 by those who objected to the preponderance of nonwhites on the island. In 1898, when the United States intervened in the independence war, economic interests were an important motivating force for the action.

The Cubans had nearly won the war by February, when the U.S. battleship Maine—in Havana harbor to protect U.S. property and to signal to the Cuban rebels that the United States was worried about the course the revolution would take—exploded. Fueled by sensational articles in Hearst's New York Journal, a war frenzy developed in the United States. In April, the United States declared war against Spain, and in June, 17,000 U.S. troops joined in the Cuban struggle for independence. They fought against a weary and weakened Spanish force, which surrendered quickly at the end of July.⁴ The United States claimed credit for the victory over Spain and promptly installed a military government to oversee affairs. Historian Jules Benjamin has explained that U.S. military occupation contributed to the transformation of Cuba from the status of Spanish colony to that of a U.S. quasi-colony: "The Military Government under General Leonard Wood fostered the development of the island by U.S. capital. . . . General Wood, like most U.S. policymakers after him, saw stability in Cuba arising from her ability and willingness to obtain U.S. capital."⁵

Wood was a strong advocate of tariff reciprocity, which "he saw as a step toward the annexation" of Cuba.⁶ Tariff reciprocity, ultimately approved by the U.S. Congress in 1903, tied Cuba to U.S. corporations and undermined indigenous Cuban enterprises. Under the 1903 agreement, U.S. goods became less expensive in Cuba than those from any other country—cheaper even than those produced in Cuba. In addition, as economist Louis Perez explained: "Preferential access to U.S. markets for Cuban agricultural products at once encouraged Cuban dependency on sugar and tobacco and increased foreign control over these vital sectors of the economy. Reciprocity also discouraged economic diversification by promoting the consolidation of land from small units into the latifundia [large plantations] and concentration of ownership from local family to foreign corporation."⁷

If economic dependence on the United States firmly closed the lid over the coffin of Cuban independence, the lid's hinges were attached in 1901. That year, the United States forced Cuba to include the Platt Amendment in its new constitution, as a condition for the removal of the occupying U.S. force. Introduced by Senator Orville Platt and approved by the U.S. Congress as part of an army appropriations bill, the amendment limited Cuban sovereignty by stipulating that the United States could intervene in all Cuban affairs, domestic or foreign, solely at U.S. discretion. This meant that the United States was free to send in troops as if Cuba were a colony and in effect, to dictate to Cubans how they could organize their government and society.⁸ The Platt Amendment also required Cuba to sell or lease to the United States land for a naval base, which still exists today as Guantanamo Naval Base.

Under these broad terms, the United States did send troops to Cuba three times in the next thirty-two years to stabilize situations that threatened U.S. property. One of these interventions lasted for a period of three years (1906-1909), during which time U.S. troops served again as an occupation force with a military governor. More importantly, the threat of intervention gave the United States de facto control over the internal affairs of the country. Cuban politicians understood that they had to seek U.S. approval to select a president. The State Department made clear that the Cuban government had to facilitate the penetration of the Cuban economy by U.S. corporations and had to avoid placing undue restrictions (such as taxes) on these enterprises.⁹ U.S. officials stated publicly that they sought to bring democracy and morality to Cuban affairs, and some of them may have been imbued with a Wilsonian idealism that sought to make the world safe for democracy. But under U.S. auspices, Cuban governments were corrupt and elections were generally rigged.

Circumstances also contributed to the loss of Cuba's sovereignty to the United States. As a result of the 1920-1921 depression in the sugar industry, U.S. banks and sugar companies gained an ever greater foothold on the economy through consolidation. Their investment in Cuba totaled over $600 million—1,100 percent greater than it had been in 1898. U.S.-owned mills produced 60 percent of Cuba's sugar, and U.S. companies controlled 90 percent of Cuba's electrical generating capacity.¹⁰ Direct private U.S. investment in Cuba totaled $1 billion in 1927.¹¹

Dependency meant that Cuba could not invest in potential farm land for food production. The result was that nearly one-third of Cuba's food had to be imported, including items such as vegetables that could have been grown domestically. Dependency also meant that Cuba could not provide for basic needs that were unrelated to the productive capacity for sugar and could not sustain independent development. Its needs were serviced by imports. This deepened its dependence on the United States, from which it purchased 80 percent of these foreign goods and services.¹² Louis Perez described how dependency robbed Cuba of nationhood and made it into a quasi-colony of the United States: Once U.S. corporations began to invest heavily in Cuba in the late 1800s, Cuban planters functioned "as agents of North American capital, instruments of U.S. economic penetration of Cuba, and advocates of U.S. intervention. ... A new habit developed in Cuba, a practice to endure into the twentieth century, in which the local bourgeoisie [capitalists], able to petition the United States in its behalf in its disputes with local authority, looked to Washington for the defense of privilege and property."¹³

The Cuban government itself was tied closely to U.S. banks because the banks lent it large sums for public works projects. As the 1929 depression hit Cuba especially hard, there were few resources with which to repay the loans. By 1932 the government was bankrupt, and the foreign debt was over $100 million. Concern over the banks' solvency gave the United States added impetus to intervene in Cuban affairs.¹⁴

One of President Franklin Roosevelt's important foreign policy initiatives in 1933 was the Good Neighbor Policy. The newly elected Democratic president offered it as a contrast to the "gunboat diplomacy" that the Republicans had practiced in Latin America. Under the Good Neighbor Policy, the United States would supposedly eschew military intervention and attempt to relate to countries in the hemisphere by appeals to common interests as "neighbors." Still, the Roosevelt administration had no compunction about trying to control Cuban affairs. In the summer of 1933, Assistant Secretary of State Sumner Welles assumed the mantle ambassador plenipotentiary to Cuba and in the next year orchestrated key events to serve the U.S. business interests.¹⁵

At the time, Cuba was ruled by the dictatorial government of Gerardo Machado, By the early 1930s, his brutality had led to such instability that the United States began to distance itself from the dictator and then encouraged him to step down.¹⁶ Ambassador Welles supported the rising tide of anti-Machado opponents and helped to select and organize the government that emerged out of the successful August 1933 coup. When a September revolt ousted the Welles-backed officials, the ambassador immediately applied pressure. He advocated armed intervention, encouraged nonrecognition of the new government, and began to work with the army to plan the overthrow of the new government. By January 1934 his plans had worked to wreck the September revolution, and a government friendly to U.S. economic interests was installed. Welles then helped to fashion plans for the Cuban economy.¹⁷

While the Roosevelt administration was restructuring the Cuban debt, it facilitated the further penetration of U.S. capital and tied Cuba even more closely to the United States through a series of trade agreements. Even though in the next twenty-five years U.S. businesses lost some ground to other foreign investors and some Cuban nationals gained a small foothold, by 1958 U.S. companies had made Cuba their second largest investment location in Latin America. Cuba sent 71 percent of its exports to the United States in 1958, and 64 percent of Cuba's imports came from there.¹⁸ Treaties of 1934 formally negated the right of the United States to intervene under the Platt Amendment, but economic power enabled the United States to continue its major role in Cuban affairs.¹⁹

From 1934 to 1958, Cuban leaders regularly consulted with U.S. officials and staunchly followed U.S. foreign policy directions.²⁰ In this period the United States was less inclined than it had been in the first third of the century to specify the particular Cuban politicians it wanted to govern Cuba. But it did make clear the contours of acceptable behavior within which Cuba had to conduct itself. Of greatest importance, Cuba had to maintain economic and political stability, which meant that the state had to respect and protect property relations, suppress labor struggles, and keep Cuba open to foreign capital.²¹

Toward this end, the Cuban military played a si...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• INTRODUCTION: REALISM ABOUT CUBA
• 1 U.S. POLICY TOWARD CUBA, 1898-1980
• 2 U.S. POLICY IN THE 1980s
• 3 ISSUES IN CONTENTION
• 4 FACTORS SHAPING CUBA'S POLICY
• 5 DOMESTIC FACTORS SHAPING U.S. POLICY
• 6 A SENSIBLE POLICY
• Chronology
• Suggested Readings
• Index