When the people of Havana felt the explosion that shook the capital on the night of February 15, 1898, they thought a powder keg had exploded, that the city’s natural gas tank had exploded, or that a bomb had been planted.
They later learned that the battleship U.S.S. Maine, anchored in the bay for three weeks, had been blown to pieces and dragged 191 sailors to the bottom. Although that would not be its ultimate cause, the Maine’s explosion facilitated the United States’ intervention in the Cuban War of Independence.
During the four years between that event and May 20, 1902, the day the Republic was proclaimed, historical time would accelerate like never before.
After “a splendid little war” (Teddy Roosevelt dixit) lasting two months and six days, the Spanish surrendered to General Shafter instead of Calixto García, whose Mambí Liberation Army had decided the land battle of Santiago; U.S. troops pitched their tents in the Plaza de Armas and used the Castillo de la Real Fuerza as barracks, while building a permanent base, Camp Columbia, in a stretch of the Marianao highlands. The commander of the cavalry troops known as the Rough Riders, a military doctor decorated for his actions in the war against the Apache, was appointed governor of Cuba instead of the Spanish Captain General.
The new Cuba would be tied to the United States by “bonds of singular intimacy,” President McKinley ominously declared in his State of the Union address in late 1899, but “how and how much, the future will tell, according to the degree of maturity of events.” No one on the island could predict how long this military presence would last, or on what terms it would end.
Depending on “the degree of maturity of events,” the occupation would last three and a half years, leaving behind an anomalous republic: a supposedly independent nation in whose affairs the United States had the constitutional right to intervene.
On the Cubans’ side, the war of independence had been fought for “a free Cuba,” a republic, according to Martí, “with all and for the good of all.” If in 1868 it had been initiated by landowners and even slaveholders, by 1895 it had been declared and fought by an army and political organization created from the bottom up rather than from the top down, as Máximo Gómez put it.
The officer corps of the Liberation Army included not only plantation owners (many already ruined by the war itself), but also professionals, small farmers, and workers. Approximately 40% of them were not “white,” and the proportion rose to 60% among the troops. As Lt. Col. R. F. Bullard, a veteran of the occupation, would report in an article about the differences he noted between Cuba and the United States, published in the first decade of the 20th century: “For the American in our homeland, to see the Black man as an equal, from the social, political or even industrial standpoints, is an affront, an offense, and nothing less; in Cuba, it is not.”
The expectations of most of those who had fought for independence included not only racial equality, but also agrarian reform, an end to the extreme disparities between wealth and poverty, and rewards for those who had sacrificed themselves in exile, military service, displacement, or due to confiscations carried out by the Spanish. These expectations included a friendly foreign and trade policy toward the United States, but not one monopolized by it.
The Northern government was not seeking to hand Cuba over to Martí’s political heirs. When the Maine entered Havana Bay, negotiations were still underway to achieve an armistice and achieve semi-autonomous status for Cuba or its sale to the United States. Those negotiations continued after the battleship blew up. When Spain refused to sell, and the Mambí fighters continued to push for a free Cuba, McKinley opted for war.
There was also great empathy among the American public for Cuban independence, and even a segment of Congress expressed some resistance to building a U.S. empire on the remains of the Spanish one. Thus, in response to the declaration of war, the Teller Amendment was proposed and passed by both houses: “The United States rejects any disposition to, or intention of, exercising sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control over said island, except in respect to its pacification, and affirms its determination, when this shall be achieved, to leave the government and control of the island to its people.” Those words can still be read on the monument to the soldiers and sailors of the Maine on the Malecón. Cuban representatives in the United States also demanded guarantees that the U.S. withdrawal would accompany the payment of pensions for the demobilized independence army.
But not everyone on the island favored a sovereign and independent republic. Much of the commerce remained in the hands of Spaniards, who did not return to the motherland with the evacuated troops. Many conservative Spanish and Cuban property owners and professionals had called for U.S. intervention in the final years of the war, as many of them also feared Martí’s ideal.
For politicians like McKinley and Roosevelt, the “pacification” mentioned in the Teller Amendment entailed a government run by the propertied classes. Such a government might require the continuation of U.S. rule or, in any case, would constitute an obstacle to radical change.
Although the previous agreement stipulated the retirement of the Liberation Army, the Mambí troops insisted on surrendering their weapons to the local Cuban authorities and not to the occupying forces, and some units refused to accept their pensions or surrender their weapons until the occupation effectively ended.
For the elections to a Constituent Convention, Interventionist General Leonard Wood assured his government that “the Cuban people realize that they are not ready to govern themselves” and that they would elect “the best class of men.” Thus, he lent his support to “the best classes” by limiting suffrage through property and literacy requirements, although he would be forced to make exceptions for veterans of the Mambíi army. He also openly campaigned for his own candidates. However, most of them lost. In their place, many of “the worst political agitators and radicals” were elected.
In his secret reports, Wood conveyed total contempt for Juan Gualberto Gómez, the delegate of Martí’s Cuban Revolutionary Party in Havana, one of the few non-whites among the thirty-one members elected to the Constituent Convention. He was referring to him when he wrote to Teddy Roosevelt about some “degenerates in the Convention, led by a little black man named Juan Gualberto Gómez; a man of undesirable reputation, both morally and politically,” whose purpose was “to advance their own race and see what they could accomplish politically for their personal benefit.” Before sending the letter to Washington, Wood changed “degenerates” to “agitators.” But he maintained his complaint about the Cubans’ ungrateful attitude: “It is almost impossible to make them believe that we have only their interests in mind.”
In November 1900, after nearly two years of occupation, the convention delegates began meeting in what had been a ballroom converted into a theater, known as the “Coliseum of a Hundred Doors,” the Irioja Theater, renamed the Martí Theater. They ended up drafting a constitution, unique in Latin America, establishing the separation of church and state for the first time. Despite pleas from women’s revolutionary clubs, the convention rejected a proposal to allow women’s suffrage, deferring the matter to later legislation. However, they did adopt universal male suffrage, rejecting the racist rules promoted by Wood for the election of the constituents.
Under the leadership of Juan Gualberto, Salvador Cisneros Betancourt, and others, they twice rejected a proposal to limit Cuban sovereignty proposed by Senator Orville H. Platt of Maine and passed by the U.S. Congress. The Platt Amendment required the Cuban Constitution to ratify all decisions taken by the occupation government, grant the United States the exclusive right to build naval bases, and the power to intervene in Cuba as it saw fit, “for the preservation of the independence of Cuba, the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual freedom, and to fulfill the obligations imposed on the United States by the Treaty of Paris concerning Cuba.”
On March 2, 1901, 15,000 Cubans marched through the streets of Havana to reject the Platt Amendment. The protesters advanced along Prado, Neptuno, Galiano, and Reina streets, encouraged by many more on the sidewalks, balconies, and doorways. They paused outside the Teatro Martí to support the position taken by the delegates. They then advanced through the streets of Old Havana to the Palace of the Captains-General, where they presented a petition to General Wood, condemning the Amendment and the pressure exerted on the Assembly for its approval.
When the Constituent Convention attempted to introduce modifications to the Amendment, the U.S. government let them know that none would be accepted. If the Platt Amendment wasn’t accepted as is, the occupation would not end. They ultimately approved it by a majority, first by a margin of one vote and then (with four abstentions) by a margin of five.
At noon on May 20, 1902, with the Platt Amendment embedded in the new constitution, the Cuban flags finally replaced the U.S. ones, and the occupying troops withdrew. The Cuban people celebrated for days.
Subsuming May 20th in its negative context ignores what it meant at the time for those people, especially those at the bottom. What it represented as a leap forward for large masses of the population recently emerged from slavery; for the generations sacrificed in the most atrocious struggle for American independence, whose survivors were able to see the fruit, still incomplete, of so much bloodshed; for those who felt worthy of calling themselves Cubans and of continuing to climb toward the fuller Republic promised by Martí; for those who experienced that republican passion not as a constitutional attribute or institutional functioning, but as a conquest in the field of real social relations, political action, and the continuity of that struggle. This was felt by trade unionists, students, teachers, workers, intellectuals, poor farmers, revolutionaries of the 1920s and 1930s, those who came after them, and those who supported and followed them.
Since 1959, the significance of May 20th has polarized positions. In both, the institutional order of the Cuban state, established between 1902 and 1933, is often confused with Cuba’s extraordinary historical process until 1959. This reduction is limited to idealizing or demonizing, standardizing, and simplifying very different stages and moments in the nation’s social and political history, including relations with its northern neighbor. Moments such as the one that begins with the establishment of the first republic and its internal struggles, culminating in the revolution of 1930; and the one that accounts for the social, cultural, and ideological changes brought about by that revolution, which transformed the constitutional, economic, and political order, even within the framework of a dependent, neocolonial capitalism, and where possible reforms take root and gain meaning, as a step in the radicalization of other changes.
It’s logical, of course, that Cuban socialists have rejected the sacralization of that date, which celebrated a simulated independence, trapped in the semi-protectorate of the Platt Amendment and in the partisan games and pacts of convenience that turned politics into that immoral activity that Cuban families were taught to despise. And it’s also logical that the enemies of the national interest have hijacked and capitalized on that event, exalting it as the key to the “true Cuba,” donning the Phrygian cap while identifying with the most alienating aspects of that old regime, surviving in the culture of harsh exile, and most especially with the interests of the United States.
What seems inexplicable is that here and now, we ignore the complex perspective required by a sense of the most minimal historical moment regarding that event. That we continue to teach history without delving into those narrow, contradictory dynamics between what we call “lights” and “shadows,” as if they were always unrelated and separable, rather than threads in a drama whose protagonists are nothing more than heroes and villains. That all these challenges, shortcomings, and consequences remain fixed on a wailing wall. That we do not know what to do when this date arrives, leaving it as fodder for routine and intellectual mediocrity.
That we say “this is not the best time,” instead of “it’s like a May 20th.”
