“So far from God, so close to the United States,” one Cuban historian despaired. Proximity alone, however, did not determine the varied nature of U.S. military deployments to Cuba, and the Cubans themselves bear part of the responsibility for yanqui military appearance. Fighting the Spaniards or themselves, they often asked for U.S. troops, then complained when they arrived.
Reflecting upon their defeat in the Ten Year War (1868–78), the Cuban political elite swore that the next rebellion against Spain would draw the United States into the war. Their failure to incite American military intervention had doomed their struggle for independence. Through media manipulation and careful political cultivation, Cuban rebels created popular support in the United States when they again “took to the field” in 1895. In the presidential campaign of 1896, all three major parties (Republican, Democratic, and Populist) called for Cuban independence, by force of arms if necessary. Stung by Spanish intransigence, atrocities, and the sinking of the USS Maine by an unexplained explosion in Havana Harbor, the Congress pressured President McKinley to lead the nation into the Spanish–American War in April 1898. The goal was to free Cuba from Spain.
Rejecting one scheme to invest Havana, the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy agreed to blockade Cuba to turn back reinforcements, defeat any Spanish naval forces in the Caribbean, and join the Cuban rebel army in eastern Cuba and defeat the Spanish garrisons in detail. Two American expeditionary forces went to Oriente Province. A Marine battalion of 650 seized a fleet operating base at Guantanamo Bay. The army's Fifth Corps then landed to the west at Daiquiri and, 17,000 strong in regulars of the U.S. Army and wartime volunteers, marched toward Santiago to besiege the city and capture the Spanish naval squadron in refuge there. The advance guard fought Spanish outposts at Las Guasimas, and the whole force made a spirited if awkward twin assault on the Spanish fortifications at Kettle and San Juan Hills and El Caney. Despite 1,400 casualties, the Americans in the Battle of Santiago forced the Spanish to surrender on 17 July, two weeks after an American squadron destroyed the Spanish squadron in its desperate flight. A general capitulation and peace negotiations soon followed.
Although the United States rejected annexation and agreed to limit its own economic penetration, it occupied Cuba until May 1902, and the ultimate agreement to withdraw contained a provision (the Platt Amendment) that the United States reserved the right of future intervention in order to preserve republican government in Cuba and prevent European interference. Cuba also agreed to continue the social, economic, and educational reforms begun by the American military.
To keep internal peace, the United States formed the Guardia Rural (a national police), but no army. The first Cuban president, Tomás Estrada Palma, tried to rig his own reelection in 1906, and his opponents started a mild guerrilla war. President Theodore Roosevelt refused to send troops to reinforce the ineffective Cuban constabulary, but agreed to assume temporary control of the government until a second election produced a new government. An expeditionary force of 5,000 soldiers and 1,000 Marines occupied Cuba without incident, remaining until 1909.
The Second Intervention of 1906–09, however, produced enough frustration for the United States that subsequent administrations chose to back the incumbent Cuban regime rather than adjudicate revolts. U.S. troops generally replaced Cubans around economic targets, not just to protect foreign property but to prevent the rebels from using destruction to spark wider war and deeper intervention. A Marine brigade of 800 helped the Cuban Army suppress electoral revolts in 1912 and 1917. Marine detachments aboard navy warships provided small landing parties for short‐term security duties. In most instances, the rebels avoided Marine outposts while the Marine companies did not seek out the enemy. The last security force departed in 1922.
The next threatened use of U.S. military occupation in 1933–34 had a major influence on Cuban politics, for President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted the oppressive regime of Gerardo Machado overthrown (which happened) and a legitimate, moderate, democratic regime to replace him (which it did not). Dismayed by the radical reformism of President Ramón Grau San Martín, the State Department negotiated an end to the Platt Amendment and signaled its willingness to accept a substitute regime. The result was a wave of military coups that produced a military‐dominated authoritarian government headed by a former sergeant, Fulgencio Batista. Fearing Axis and Communist influence in the Caribbean and Mexico, the United States did not challenge either Batista's indirect rule (1934–59) or actual term as president (1940–44), nor his coup of 1952.
The Communist‐led revolution of 1957–59 made Cuba a serious political and strategic problem for the United States for the first time in history. Alarmed by a U.S.‐sponsored invasion by 1,300 Cuban exiles on 17–19 April 1961, President Fidel Castro turned to the Soviet Union for massive military assistance. Even though he overwhelmed Brigade 2506 at the Bahia de los Cochinos (Bay of Pigs) with 20,000 militiamen in one day's battle, Castro saw the continuing danger of invasion and insurrection. He allowed the Russians to use Cuba as a naval base, intelligence platform, and nuclear missile base. Castro welcomed a Russian Army combined arms task force of 40,000 to Cuba in 1962. Acutely aware that a navy‐Marine task force had been minutes away from supporting the Cuban exile brigade, Castro even allowed the Russians to build launch sites for eighty‐some offensive nuclear missiles, surrounded by antiaircraft missiles. In the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev both retreated, but not before the Navy blockaded the island and 400,000 American servicemen deployed for an invasion of Cuba. This expeditionary force would have faced a Cuban army of over 100,000 and the 40,000 Russians armed with tactical nuclear weapons.
Since 1962, the United States has not put significant military pressure on Cuba, even after the collapse of Russian support after 1989; but it deployed special operations forces and paramilitary covert action teams to counter Cuban revolutionary campaigns in Angola, Haiti, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. Paramilitary Cuban exile groups still conduct occasional raids and sabotage against the island itself. No Cuba‐watcher would predict that U.S. military intervention has become only a historical phenomenon.
[See also Caribbean and Latin America, U.S. Military Involvement in the.]
Bibliography
- Lester Langley, The Cuban Policy of the United States, 1968.
- Hugh Thomas, Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom, 1971.
- Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Army Politics in Cuba, 1898–1958, 1976.
- Lester Langley, The Banana Wars: An Inner History of American Empire, 1900–1934, 1983.
- Allan R. Millett and Peter Maslowski, For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States of America, rev. ed. 1994
