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Cuba Was Not a Spanish Wasteland, Nor Was It a USA Miracle

The United States modernized an island devastated by war, but it also constrained its sovereignty. Interpreting present-day Cuba through the lens of 1899 requires more history and less rescue mythology.

By Jose A. Adrian Torres (14ymedio)

HAVANA TIMES – On May 30, Rolando Gallardo published an intriguing article in this newspaper about the US intervention in Cuba and the possibility that history might repeat itself. His argument contains a valid point: the US American occupation of 1899–1902 effectively addressed sanitary, administrative, educational, and logistical problems that the Island was suffering in dramatic fashion after the war. To deny that would be absurd.

The Cuba the United States encountered was wounded, impoverished, exhausted, and disorganized. The War of Independence, the reconcentration policy, the destruction of farmland, roads, and sugar mills, and the final collapse of Spanish authority had left the country in a critical condition.

But it is one thing to acknowledge that reality and quite another to portray Cuba in 1899 as a barren wasteland of poverty, ignorance, and neglect upon which Washington had to build everything from scratch. At that point, the comparison becomes too convenient. And convenient comparisons usually have a problem: they explain a great deal in one stroke but understand very little. Complex matters are not explained by simple reasons; simple explanations merely make them easier for the public or the voter to digest. Turning 1899 into a template for the present blurs history and oversimplifies the future.

Cuba at the end of the nineteenth century was not a blank slate. It was a society devastated by war, yes, but also one that was urban, port-oriented, sugar-producing, commercial, and culturally dense. Havana, Matanzas, Santiago, Cienfuegos, Trinidad, Camagüey, and Holguín were not villages lost among palm trees, mosquitoes, and tropical resignation. They were centers with history, architecture, printing presses, theaters, cultural societies, international trade, ports, economic activity, and a complex social life. One should not confuse an island ravaged by war with an island that did not exist before the arrival of the USA administrator with his notebook, his sanitation brigade, and his healthy faith in efficiency.

It is worth stating this clearly, because otherwise we fall into a new version of the old Black Legend, now repurposed in service of a USA White Legend. By 1898 Spain was exhausted, politically defeated, and clearly incapable of offering Cuba an acceptable way forward.

The Spanish administration had been slow, uneven, rigid, and often unable to grasp the depth of Cuban demands. It was also trapped in the tensions of Spain’s own political system and in the alternating rule of conservatives and liberals, who failed to provide a timely and genuine solution to the Cuban question. Slavery was abolished late. Autonomy came late. Reforms came late. And war ultimately blew everything apart. But from there to suggesting that under Spanish sovereignty Cuba—and especially its major........

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