Even before American independence, the Caribbean region was an important source of slaves and a major market for the farm surpluses of the thirteen colonies, accounting for about a third of U.S. exports before 1815. From then on the trade level steadily dropped, undermined by the decline of West Indian sugar production. The United States always had other concerns about the region, however. The bloody slave revolt in Haiti that preceded its independence in 1804 made U.S. leaders fearful of black rebellion in their own country, and they refused diplomatic ties with Haiti until 1862. The Monroe Doctrine (1823) announced American opposition to further European colonization in the New World, reflecting concern that the breakup of Spain's American empire would tempt stronger powers to scavenge in the wreckage. Fears lingered that Puerto Rico and Cuba, still in Spanish hands, might fall to great-power ambitions. Almost all the earlier presidents hoped to acquire Cuba, but Spain rebuffed purchase offers in 1848 and 1853 by southern expansionists who wanted to make Cuba a slave state.
Transit routes across the Central American isthmus also interested Americans, especially after the 1848 acquisition of California and the discovery of gold there. The 1850 Clayton-Bulwer Treaty with Britain stated that any future isthmian canal should be jointly controlled. But interest in the isthmian routes faded after completion of a transcontinental railroad system.
The American Civil War diverted attention from Caribbean initiatives, but in 1869-1870 President Ulysses S. Grant vainly sought Senate approval for the request of the president of Santo Domingo (later the Dominican Republic) for annexation. A private French project to build a Panama canal aroused a sharper reaction: President Rutherford B. Hayes insisted that any such canal must be under American control (even a British partnership was now unpopular in the United States). Washington's alarm lessened when the French company went bankrupt in 1888.
Beginning in 1895 a Cuban revolt against Spain brought guerrilla warfare and widespread suffering to that island. A skillful Cuban propaganda campaign caused the American public and Congress to favor Cuban independence, the one concession Spain rejected. The mysterious 1898 explosion of the battleship Maine in Havana mobilized sentiment for war with Spain, which broke out that year.
During the four months' war, U.S. forces occupied Puerto Rico and fought a short campaign in eastern Cuba. The peace treaty gave Puerto Rico to the United States and left Cuba free of Spanish control, but under American military occupation. Congress's war resolutions had included a promise not to annex Cuba. Ultimately the Platt Amendment of 1901 established a protectorate--the United States retained extensive controls over Cuba's government and had the right to intervene if order broke down--and U.S. occupation ended the next year.
Having acquired bases in Cuba and Puerto Rico, U.S. policy now focused on an isthmian canal. Under pressure from Washington, Great Britain gave up its right to share in a canal project. Panama, a province of Colombia, became the preferred site, and Panamanians were dismayed by Colombia's rejection of a canal treaty with the United States. In 1903 Panama declared its independence, and U.S. naval forces promptly appeared to overawe the Colombians. President Theodore Roosevelt began government construction of the canal in 1904, and it was completed in 1914.
The Panama Canal was soon defined as a place of unique strategic importance, and Washington henceforth viewed the entire Caribbean as a security zone. But local tendencies toward revolution and defaulted government debts often invited European interventions of which Germany's were most suspected of sinister designs. Between 1898 and 1917 the United States built a system of regional control. Troops returned to Cuba (1906-1909) under the Platt Amendment's right of intervention; revolts in Nicaragua drew in U.S. forces in 1910 and 1912; and a cycle of revolutions in Haiti resulted in American military occupation from 1915 to 1934. Protests of European creditor states at the threatened bankruptcy of the government of Santo Domingo brought a U.S. takeover of the Dominican customs service in 1905; political violence there led to another full-scale occupation (1916-1924). American marines became a routine factor in Caribbean politics, as did general U.S. oversight of the region's affairs.
Fears of European threats dimmed after World War I, and a period of U.S. retrenchment in the Caribbean followed, though marines were embroiled in the Sandino War (1927-1932) in Nicaragua. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policy marked a pause in the use of force in the Caribbean. Even so, America imposed a settlement after a Cuban revolution in 1933. The abrogation of the Platt Amendment in 1934 ended formal U.S. controls over Cuba, but left the United States still dominant in that country's affairs. In general, Washington favored Caribbean governments that maintained stability, even harsh dictatorships like those of Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua and Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. World War II brought closer U.S.-Caribbean cooperation, as every Caribbean state joined the wartime alliance.
Early cold war perceptions that the Caribbean was safe from the "red threat" soon changed, and long-standing alliances with right-wing dictators were supplemented by active anti-Marxist measures. The rise of a leftist government in Guatemala prompted fears of Soviet influence, which ended with the regime's overthrow in 1954 by a Guatemalan exile force organized by the Central Intelligence Agency (cia). Similarly, after 1959 Fidel Castro's leftist government in Cuba faced a hostile United States. By 1961 Castro was allied with the Soviet Union, and the cia had prepared a Cuban exile force, hoping to duplicate its Guatemalan success. The Bay of Pigs invasion was a fiasco, however, embarrassing President John F. Kennedy while convincing Castro that a U.S. invasion was imminent. In October 1962 a U.S. spy plane discovered Soviet missile bases under construction in Cuba. The ensuing superpower crisis seemed to threaten nuclear war, but ended with Soviet withdrawal of the missiles and a U.S. pledge not to invade Cuba. Since then U.S.-Cuban diplomatic communication has resumed but relations are chilly.
A revolt in the Dominican Republic in 1965 raised new though unproven charges of a Marxist takeover and this time U.S. troops, not locals raised by the cia, invaded to seize control. After this, however, the familiar pattern of using local proxies for armed incursions returned. In 1979, revolutions in Nicaragua and El Salvador released new leftist forces in Central America, while U.S. authorities still struggled to block Caribbean Marxist movements. President Ronald Reagan moved in 1981 to assist right-wing rebels or regimes in Central America, and in 1983 U.S. forces invaded Grenada to oust a Marxist government. A new cia--created army began a civil war in Nicaragua that failed to dislodge the Marxist Sandinista government. By 1990 the Contra revolt seemed to have collapsed, but an election in that year saw the Sandinistas peacefully ousted by a non-Marxist coalition.
American interests in the Caribbean included commercial, ideological, and strategic elements. At times of international tension, as during the two world wars or the cold war, strategic factors predominated, though ideological elements were also important at such times and during the opening years of this century. In more relaxed eras economic interests, first in a Caribbean export market, later in U.S.-owned enterprises in the region, gained in relative weight. Prominent among the latter were the United Fruit Company and large American sugar concerns in Cuba and the Dominican Republic. The use of military intervention declined between the two world wars, reflecting reduced security fears and a conscious effort to work through other means. The cold war years again saw direct U.S. intervention and added the use of local cia--raised proxy forces.
By the 1980s, U.S. domination had been challenged in Cuba and Central America. In Puerto Rico, whose status changed from colony to self-governing commonwealth in 1952, a vigorous independence party labored to improve its minority position. Panama moved toward full control of its canal under a 1977 treaty providing for final turnover by the year 2000. But a U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989 ousted the regime of Manuel Noriega, who was accused of complicity in the region's booming drug trade. All the while unrest, discontent, and poverty brought Cuban, Haitian, Dominican, and Central American immigrants to the United States in unprecedented numbers, almost a million Cubans alone arriving in the three decades after 1959. Much had changed, but the unstable Caribbean was still an area of special concern to the United States.
Bibliography:
Lester D. Langley, Struggle for the American Mediterranean (1976); Lester D. Langley, The United States and the Caribbean, 1900-1970 (1980).
Author:
David Healy
See also Bay of Pigs Invasion; Good Neighbor Policy; Iran-Contra Affair; Monroe Doctrine; Ostend Manifesto; Panama Canal; Platt Amendment; Puerto Rico; Spanish-American War; Triangular Trade.
