Reference
- Spanish-American War-CubaDemands by Cuban patriots for independence from Spanish rule made U.S. intervention in Cuba a paramount issue in the relations between the United States and Spain from the 1870s to 1898. Sympathy for the Cuban insurgents ran high in America, especially after the savage Ten Years War (1868–78) and the unsuccessful revolt of 1895. After efforts to quell guerrilla activity had failed, the Spanish military commander, Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau, instituted the reconcentrado, or concentration camp, system in 1896; Cuba's rural population was forcibly confined to centrally located garrison towns, where thousands died from disease, starvation, and exposure.
Although the majority of Americans, including President McKinley, wished to avert war and hoped to settle the Cuban question by peaceful means, a series of incidents early in 1898 intensified U.S. feelings against Spain. The first of these was the publication by Hearst of a stolen letter (the de Lôme letter) that had been written by the Spanish minister at Washington, in which that incautious diplomat expressed contempt for McKinley. This was followed by the sinking of the U.S. battleship Maine in Havana harbor on Feb. 15, 1898, with a loss of 260 men. Although Spanish complicity was not proved, U.S. public opinion was aroused and war sentiment rose. The cause of the advocates of war was given further impetus as a result of eyewitness reports by members of the U.S. Congress on the effect of the reconcentrado policy in Cuba.
A Short and One-sided War
In late March, McKinley proposed to Spain an armistice in Cuba, but under pressure from expansionists both in and out of Congress, he was won to the war cause. Although on Apr. 10, 1898, McKinley was informed that the queen of Spain had ordered hostilities suspended, he barely referred to that fact when he addressed Congress on Apr. 11. He asked for authority to intervene in Cuba. Congress responded by passing resolutions to demand Spanish withdrawal from Cuba and set terms for U.S. intervention; these included the Teller Amendment, which pledged that the United States would withdraw from the island when independence was assured. On Apr. 22, Congress authorized the enlistment of volunteer troops, and a U.S. blockade of Spanish ports was instituted. On Apr. 24, Spain declared war on the United States. The next day Congress retorted by declaring war on Spain, retroactive to Apr. 21.
The warfare that commenced was short and very one-sided. The first dramatic incident occurred on the other side of the world from Cuba. On May 1 a U.S. squadron under George Dewey sailed into the harbor of Manila, Philippine Islands, and in a few hours thoroughly defeated the Spanish fleet there. Dewey's name was greeted across the United States with almost hysterical praise. On May 19, Admiral Pascual Cervera y Topete took the Spanish fleet into the harbor of Santiago de Cuba. Commodore W. S. Schley established (May 28) a blockade of the harbor, in which Rear Admiral W. I. Sampson joined, taking command of the blockading fleet on June 1. When the Spanish fleet attempted to escape on July 3, it was destroyed.
Meanwhile 17,000 more or less trained, poorly equipped but enthusiastic U.S. troops under W. R. Shafter landed and undertook a campaign to capture Santiago. The Spanish forces were weak, but there was some heavy fighting (July 1) at El Caney and San Juan Hill, where the Rough Riders, under Leonard Wood and Theodore Roosevelt, won their popular reputation. On July 17, Santiago surrendered. The war was, in effect, over.
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Perspectives
War and Genocide in Cuba, 1895-1898
From 1895 to 1898, Cuban insurgents fought to free their homeland from Spanish rule. Though often overshadowed by the "Splendid Little War" of the Americans in 1898, according to John Tone, the longer Spanish-Cuban conflict was in fact more remarkable, foreshadowing the wars of decolonization in the twentieth century. Employing newly released evidence--including hospital records, intercepted Cuban letters, battle diaries from both sides, and Spanish administrative records--Tone offers new answers to old questions concerning the war. He examines the origin of Spain's genocidal policy of "reconcentration"; the causes of Spain's military difficulties; the condition, effectiveness, and popularity of the Cuban insurgency; the necessity of American intervention; and Spain's supposed foreknowledge of defeat. The Spanish-Cuban-American war proved pivotal in the histories of all three countries involved. Tone's fresh analysis will provoke new discussions and debates among historians and human rights scholars as they reexamine the war in which the concentration camp was invented, Cuba was born, Spain lost its empire, and America gained an overseas empire.
The sinking of the "Merrimac"
A personal narrative of the adventure in the harbor of Santiago de Cuba, June 3, 1898, and of the subsequent imprisonment of the survivors
Cuba's fight for freedom, and the War with Spain
a history of the Spanish kingdom and its latest and fairest colony; the long struggle of Cuba for freedom and independence; the intervention of the United States and the fierce war with Spain that followed.
Websites
- Chronology of U.S.-Cuba Relations-Cuban Research Institute1775–83: The thirteen North American colonies rebel against Great Britain and establish the United States, thereby encouraging increased commerce between the newly independent nation and Cuba.
1818: Spain opens Cuban ports for international trade, especially with the United States. - A Guide to the United States’ History of Recognition, Diplomatic, and Consular Relations, by Country, since 1776: CubaAfter Spain’s defeat by U.S. and Cuban forces during the War of 1898, Spain relinquished sovereignty over Cuba. Following the war, U.S. forces occupied Cuba until 1902, when the United States allowed a new Cuban government to take full control of the state’s affairs. As a condition of independence, the United States forced Cuba to grant a continuing U.S. right to intervene on the island in accordance with the Platt Amendment. The amendment was repealed in 1934 when the United States and Cuba signed a Treaty of Relations.
- Spanish-American War for Cuba's Independence-University of South FloridaBy the end of the 1800s, Spain had lost all of its New World colonies except Cuba and Puerto Rico. Many Cubans did not wish to be under Spanish rule, so they fled to Florida and other parts of the United States. At the same time, however, they still remained loyal to Cuba. Jose Marti, a Cuban writer living in New York, came to Tampa to gain supporters to help Cuba fight for its independence from Spain. Jose Marti was the leader of the revolution, but he was killed when he went back to Cuba to fight in it. Tomas Estrada Palma became the new leader and later the President of Cuba.
Articles
- Clashing over Cuba: The United States, Spain and Britain, 1853–55Before 1898, the most sustained attempt by the United States to acquire Cuba occurred during the presidency of Franklin Pierce when the debate about slavery was roiling US domestic politics. Spain responded to the threat with a dramatic change of policy: in order to gain the favour and protection of Britain, it ordered that the slave trade to Cuba be ended. This article analyses Pierce's strategy and examines the complex jockeying it precipitated among Washington, London and Madrid. Mining US, British and Spanish archives, it is the first international history of the crisis that Washington's avarice provoked.
- Spain, Cuba and the United States : recognition and the Monroe doctrineDiscusses Spain's history of slaveholding and the role of other nations to end slavery in Cuba.
- The Threat from Havana: Southern Public Health, Yellow Fever, and the U.S. Intervention in the Cuban Struggle for Independence, 1878-1898Espinosa traces the ongoing concerns in the US in the 1890s with yellow fever in Cuba. She documents how these concerns led to calls for the US annexation of Cuba, calls that grew more insistent as the risk to the South increased due to the rapid spread of the disease on the island during the Cuban War of Independence. She describes how, when the deteriorating conditions in Havana produced the 1897 epidemic that again paralyzed the southern economy, yellow fever became an important motivation for the US declaration of war against Spain in 1898.
- ‘Pure Feelings, Noble Aspirations and Generous Ideas’: The Martí–Dana Friendship and the Cuban War of IndependenceThis article considers the friendship between the Cuban leader José Martí and the US journalist Charles Anderson Dana in relation to questions of transnationalism, print culture, modernist aesthetics, and the politics of dissent during the era of the Cuban War of Independence (1895–8). It investigates the radical potential and aesthetic difficulties of rendering genuine affection in print at a time in which American friendliness towards Cuba often served to mask imperialist intentions. I offer a reading of Charles Dana’s obituary for José Martí as a text that destabilizes assumptions about Cuban–American relations in the late nineteenth century by presenting an alternative political vision that incorporated the possibility of an autonomous Cuban subjectivity.
The Spanish-American War
- The Spanish-American WarThe American public has great interest in tabloid accounts of Cuba's fight for independence from Spain.