British Diplomacy and US Hegemony in Cuba, 1898-1964

Christopher Hull

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349333523, 9780230295445
• eBook ISBN: 9781137301765
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

An analysis of Cuba's history from a British diplomatic perspective during the period of US political and economic domination, from 1898 to 1964. It investigates how Britain attempted to protect its trade and other interests in the island, whilst always sensitive to the reactions of its most important ally, the United States.

1

Perfidious Albion?
Britain and Cuba before 1898

English involvement in the Caribbean was longstanding. As long ago as 1586, for example, pirate Francis Drake headed a large fleet that threatened Cuba’s long coastline, but he neglected the island for more easily attainable mainland treasures. Following this scare the Spanish strengthened their colony’s defences.¹ At great expense they erected impressive fortifications to guard the entrance to Havana’s natural harbour, an essential port of rendezvous for galleons returning from Central and South America laden with gold and silver treasure, and continuing in convoy to Spain. The Spanish considered Havana impregnable to foreign invasion, but from 1748 to 1815 the British prioritized the Caribbean – strategically and economically – as never before.²

Spain’s entry into the Seven Years War between Britain and a Frenchled coalition of countries turned the Caribbean into a theatre of conflict. Havana, a vital military outpost and conduit of the Spanish Empire’s riches, was a key strategic target. A hastily assembled British fleet departed from Spithead near Portsmouth on 5 March 1762. After joining up with other forces off French-controlled St Domingue in the Caribbean, the British took Havana by surprise. With amphibious landings of 16,000 men, they undertook a diversionary attack west of the city and covert main assaults east of Havana. Columns attacked Spanish rearguard defences and laid siege for two months. Reinforced by a contingent from its New England colony in North America, sappers finally breached the seaward wall of the Morro Castle and stormed inside.³

But a lengthy mid-summer siege, amidst the ravages of mosquitoes and tropical diseases, decimated the British. As was the case with Cuba’s nineteenth-century independence wars, far more foreigner combatants died from sickness than in battle. Between 7 June and 9 October nearly 800 seamen and 500 marines of the Royal Navy perished, only 86 from enemy action. Of the 2673 seamen and 601 marines sick in October, only a few were expected to recover. Meanwhile, the army’s losses were even greater: 5366 dead between 7 June and 18 October, 4708 of them through disease.⁴

The British had seized the Spanish power base in the West Indies in a single action. Spain’s most important link between the Old and New Worlds was in foreign hands, a shattering blow to Spanish prestige. There were celebrations with bonfires and gun firing at the Tower of London. The Duke of Cumberland wrote to campaign Commander Lord Albermarle:

Upon the whole no joy can equal mine, and I strut and plume myself as if it was I that had taken the Havanah. In short you have done your King and Country the most material service that any military man has ever done since we were a nation.

With this trump card now in British hands, prominent personages implored their government to drive a hard bargain with the Spanish.⁵

British Occupation and the Slave Trade

Cuba was an excellent bargaining counter, and not for the last time, foreign powers negotiated possession or control of this strategic entrepôt. Planters in the neighbouring British colony of Jamaica worried about a lengthy occupation of Havana, fearful for their wealth should Britain become responsible for other Caribbean islands. In London, parliamentary members with West Indian interests lobbied on their behalf against such action.⁶ In Paris peace negotiations, the Spanish gave up East Florida and recovered Havana from the British, returning it to Bourbon rule. But in less than a year, British merchants and commercial practices had given the island’s producers a taste of Cuba’s economic potential when opened to free trade with Britain, the British West Indies and North America. Spain’s trade monopoly ended at a stroke and more than 1000 vessels called at Havana’s port during the occupation, compared to a previous annual average of around 15.⁷ The short occupation also left a linguistic legacy. Havana’s inhabitants likened the British Redcoats to a local tropical fruit, the black-seeded and red-fleshed mamey. For the occupying soldiery they invented the expression a la hora de los mameyes, a pertinent equivalent in Spanish to ‘when push comes to shove’.⁸

Cuba’s increased trade included the importation of slaves, during and following occupation. British merchants such as Cornelius Coppinger delivered increased numbers of African slaves to Cuba from Jamaica and Barbados. But the American Revolution and subsequent war (1776–83) interrupted British trade. The loss of its 13 North American colonies obviously lessened Britain’s power in the continent, but commerce was not slow to recover, including trade in slaves.⁹

Britain, for so long heavily involved in the slave trade, was paradoxically instrumental in the long campaign to abolish this practice in its colonies and throughout the Atlantic. A reform movement finally achieved its aim of outlawing the slave trade in 1807. By 1833 the practice of slavery had ceased to exist in British colonial possessions, and the vociferous campaigners targeted instead the suppression of flourishing slave traffic in other parts of the Atlantic; for example, from Africa to Brazil and Cuba. Much of the stimulus for British abolitionists came from religious conviction and newfound humanitarianism, but there was also an economic imperative. By the 1820s it was difficult to justify British taxpayers’ subsidies to West Indian planters, which supported the importation of slaves. Or, as one strong Latin American critic of foreign exploitation in the continent asserts, ‘The English were the champions in buying and selling human flesh until it ceased to be convenient for them.’¹⁰

With the abolition of the slave trade in British island possessions, Cuba became its principal centre in the Caribbean. Britain’s determination to suppress the trade attracted the corresponding odium of those in the island who depended on slave labour for their lucrative agricultural production. Through the course of the nineteenth century this principally and increasingly involved sugar cultivation. British government pressure on Spain’s government impelled it to sign two treaties in 1817 and 1835, prohibiting the slave trade in the Spanish Empire, but neither agreement achieved its objective. Creole planters and merchants feared economic ruin if the Spanish authorities implemented such a policy. Meanwhile, British West Indian planters pointed to their competitive disadvantage, having to pay workers on their estates while rival producers exploited slave labour.¹¹

Spanish officials themselves were up in arms when the British government appointed to Havana a declared and assertive abolitionist, David Turnbull, to replace Consul David Tolmé – a merchant accused of involvement with slave-trading interests. Tolmé’s case highlighted a very real conflict between British commercial and humanitarian interests. Criticism by abolitionists contributed to his recall and replacement by Turnbull, a former Times correspondent in Europe, who had travelled in and written about the West Indies (including Cuba).¹²

Turnbull’s abolitionist activities on the island soon led to vociferous demands from the Spanish authorities for his recall. Even those few Creoles that supported his efforts suspected sinister motives.¹³ Britain had the power to enforce the treaties made with Spain, so why did it allow the trade to flourish? Did it have annexationist designs on the island?¹⁴ Cuban historians have concluded that Britain was playing a double game in the island; Rodolfo Sarracino, for example, argues that behind the facade of an abolition campaign the inconsistent British were actually contributing to the strengthening of slavery as an institution in Cuba.¹⁵

Even British interests in Cuba reacted negatively to the campaign, but support at home from the abolition movement was decisive, at least initially. Turnbull’s critics included Tolmé. David Murray, author of Odious Commerce, writes, ‘The rivalry between commerce and humanitarianism in British foreign policy which had, in part, been responsible for Turnbull’s appointment surfaced again to bring him down.’ With a commonality of interests, British merchants on the island along with London merchants and shipowners lobbied the Foreign Office to remove the root of their discontent. In fear for his life, Turnbull sought refuge on a British vessel at anchor in Havana, and his wife eventually persuaded him their future lay elsewhere.¹⁶ In this way ended the representation of one of Britain’s first men in Havana, who had stridently defended Britain’s controversial position on abolition. Owing partly to the slowness in communications in a period before the telegraph, he had enjoyed considerable autonomy during his posting. His activities, however, left many Cubans with the impression that Britain’s policy in the island could be duplicitous and certainly not altruistic, as sponsors of the abolition movement claimed.

Cuba’s classic nineteenth-century novel Cecilia Valdés voiced such sentiments. Its author Cirilo Villaverde had escaped from a Cuban prison in 1849 a year after participating in an anti-colonial conspiracy. He settled in the United States and continued his political activism against the colonial regime, first publishing his lengthy novel in 1882. Set in 1830s Havana, its main character is a beautiful fair-skinned mulatta who is pursued by the son of a slave owner, but both are unaware they share the same father. Reflecting contemporary society and the Spanish colony’s troubled political and economic affairs, the novel is replete with references to the treacherous English. Citing the 1817 treaty between Britain and Spain that stipulated the complete cessation of the slave trade within three years, Cecilia’s male suitor asserts,

That’s where the evil lies. For £500,000 sterling the unwise counsellors of the best of monarchs granted perfidious Albion the right to inspect our merchant ships on the high seas and to insult, as it still insults with impunity day after day, the sacred flag of the nation that not long ago was mistress of the seas and owner of two worlds.¹⁷

Britain’s projection of power in the Caribbean was keenly felt at this point in the colony’s development, while Spain’s star appeared to be waning.

British and US Interest in Cuba

British commercial interests in Cuba fluctuated during the course of the nineteenth century. From 1829, the Anglo-Cuban company La Consolidada started to extract newly discovered copper in Cuba, soon becoming Britain’s chief source of the commodity with annual exports of 10,000 tons. But from the outbreak of the ten-year independence war in 1868, Chilean and South African mines began to out-compete their rivals and the Cuban copper industry collapsed.¹⁸ British capital was heavily involved in the financing of a private railway system. Preceding its mother country by 11 years, the island’s first line from Havana to Bejucal opened in 1837, only 12 years after the inauguration of the first public railway in North-East England.¹⁹ British Minister in Madrid George Villiers had put the proposers of Spanish America’s first railway in contact with London bankers, and Alexander Robertson provided a loan.²⁰

One of London’s oldest merchant banks, J. Henry Schroder & Company (with origins in Hamburg, Germany), was the principal source of British capital for railway construction in the island. In the mid-nineteenth century, Cuba held the largest concentration of Schroder’s clients outside Hamburg, owing to their longstanding interest in sugar and its export to Europe and the United States. Starting with the company’s first ever bond issue for the Matanzas & Sabanilla Railroad Company in 1853, Schroder & Company continued to invest in railway infrastructure that considerably reduced the freight costs for transporting sugar and its derivatives from the island’s interior to its coastal ports.²¹

Indeed, Britain’s chief interest in Cuba, as with the rest of Latin America, lay in the economic field. For most of the nineteenth century, Britain was pre-eminent in international trade, manufacturing and finance.²² Due in great part to technological advances in communications that linked the world by railway, steamship and telegraph, world trade grew tenfold between 1850 and 1914, after doubling between 1800 and 1850.²³ The security offered by the solid and conservative institutions of British commercial banking and insurance gave Britain an advantage in Latin America, where easy access to cheap capital was in much demand.²⁴ For decades, the stability of new import–export elite regimes in Latin America depended to a significant degree on their financial connections with capital-rich London, in mutually profitable economic dependence.²⁵

For Latin America, Britain was the most important trading partner, as well as being its pre-eminent foreign investor from the 1820s until the start of the First World War. From the mid-nineteenth century until the war, British holdings in railways and government loans constituted the largest areas of investment in private industry.²⁶ In pursuance of new commerce or simply to maintain that existing, Britain rarely asserted itself politically, instead allowing its supremacy in these fields to function mostly unaided, carried out by merchants in the field.

Foreign trade brought Britain huge econom...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Illustration
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Perfidious Albion? Britain and Cuba before 1898
• 2. Uncle Sam versus the British Lion
• 3. The First World War to Boom and Bust
• 4. Beyond Recognition: Grau’s 100-Day Government
• 5. Sugar and the Anglo–Cuban Commercial Treaty
• 6. The Second World War: Sugar without Cigars
• 7. Cold War: Democracy to Dictatorship
• 8. Revolution: Anglo–American Cooperation
• 9. Shipping, the Missile Crisis and Buses
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index