In Cuba a second war of independence erupted in 1895 after it had failed to gain freedom from Spain in the Ten Years’ War (1868–1878). In a brutal war of attrition, Cuban nationalists attacked the economic base of Spanish colonialism by ordering all farmers to cease growing sugarcane and all mills to stop refining it. The nationalists burned the fields and destroyed the mills of all who defied them. In response, Spanish forces branded those farmers who ceased production as disloyal and punished them by destroying their farms and mills as well. Of 1,100 sugar mills operating in 1894, only 207 remained in 1899. The consequences were devastating. By 1898 the countryside had been destroyed and Spanish colonial control was restricted to a handful of cities. Cuban nationalists were on the verge of defeating the Spanish forces and gaining independence. But before they could realize this goal, the United States intervened.

The U.S. intervention began with a provocative act: sailing the battleship Maine into Havana harbor. This was an aggressive act because the battleship was capable of bombarding the entire city. But soon after it laid anchor, the Maine exploded and sank, killing hundreds of sailors. The U.S. government accused Spain of sinking the warship and demanded that the Spanish government provide restitution. Spanish authorities accused the United States of sinking its own ship to provoke war (later investigations determined that a kitchen fire spread to the main munitions storage and blew up the ship). Regardless of the cause, the sinking of the Maine led to war between Spain and the United States over control of Cuba and the Philippines. From April to August 1898 the U.S. Navy and Marines fought and defeated Spanish forces in the Pacific and the Caribbean. With its victory, the United States acquired Guam and Puerto Rico and launched a military occupation of Cuba and the Philippines.

Puerto Rico and Guam became colonies directly ruled by U.S. administrators, and residents of both island territories did not gain the right to elect their own leaders until after the Second World War. They remained commonwealths (territories that are not states) of the United States. The U.S. government also established direct rule in the Philippines, brushing aside the government established by Filipino nationalists who had fought for freedom from Spain. Nationalists then fought against the United States in an unsuccessful effort to establish an independent government in the Philippine-American War (1899–1902). Cuba alone gained independence. Cuban nationalist forces already controlled the majority of the island’s territory and were seasoned combatants, placing aspirations for the annexation of Cuba by the United States out of reach.

Cuba gained formal independence in 1902, but U.S. pressure limited that independence. The Platt Amendment, which the United States imposed as a condition of Cuban independence, gave the United States the power to cancel laws passed by the Cuban congress, withheld the Cuban government’s right to establish foreign treaties, and granted the United States control over Guantanamo Bay, where it established a permanent naval base. In addition to imposing legal limits on Cuban independence, the United States militarily occupied Cuba in 1899–1902, 1906–1908, and 1912. Between 1917 and 1922 U.S. administrator Enoch Crowder governed the island from his staterooms on the battleship Minnesota.

The constraints that the U.S. government imposed on Cuban politics, along with its willingness to deploy troops and periodically establish military rule, created a safe and fertile environment for U.S. investment. As the first U.S. commander of Cuba, General Leonard Wood equated good government with investor confidence: “When people ask me what I mean by stable government, I tell them ‘money at six percent.’”6 Cuban farmers had been bankrupted by the war of independence that had raged since 1895. One hundred thousand farms and three thousand ranches were destroyed. U.S. investors flooded in. By 1919 half of the island’s sugar mills were owned by U.S. businesses. Small farms were consolidated into massive estates as twenty-two companies took hold of 20 percent of Cuba’s national territory. U.S. companies like Coca-Cola and Hershey were among the new landowners that took control of their most important ingredient: sugar.

The United States imported its prevailing racial policies to its new Caribbean territories. In Cuba, U.S. authorities encouraged political parties to exclude black Cubans. Black war veterans established the Independent Party of Color in 1908 in order to press for political inclusion. Party leaders Evaristo Estenoz and Pedro Ivonet sought to use the party’s potential electoral weight to incorporate black Cubans into government and education. The party was banned in 1910, and in 1912 its leaders organized a revolt that led to a violent backlash by the army and police, supported by U.S. Marines. The campaign against members of the party was followed by a wave of lynchings of black Cubans across the island. (See “Listening to the Past: Reyita Castillo Bueno on Slavery and Freedom in Cuba.”)

In Puerto Rico the influence of U.S. racism was more direct. In 1913, as the U.S. Congress debated granting Puerto Ricans U.S. citizenship, the federal judge to Puerto Rico appointed by President Woodrow Wilson objected and wrote to the president that Puerto Ricans “have the Latin American excitability and I think Americans should go slowly in granting them anything like autonomy. Their civilization is not at all like ours yet.” Later the judge declared, “The mixture of black and white in Porto Rico threatens to create a race of mongrels of no use to anyone, a race of Spanish American talkers. A governor of the South, or with knowledge of southern remedies for that trouble could, if a wise man, do much.”7

The United States instituted the “remedies” to which the judge alluded, such as the involuntary sterilization of thousands of Puerto Rican women as part of a policy aimed at addressing what the government saw as overpopulation on the island. In addition, Puerto Rican men drafted into U.S. military service were organized into segregated units, as African Americans were.