Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War. Benjamin Balthaser

Abstract

On 8 November 1931, the New York Times published an anonymously authored piece titled, “Ills of Cuba Laid to Our Policy Over There.” Reporting on a lecture delivered by Cuban editor, lawyer, and ethnomusicologist/anthropologist Dr. Fernando Ortiz to the Committee on Cultural Relations with Latin America, this provocatively titled article focused specifically on the vexed question of US intervention. Just three months prior, on 14 August, Cuba had survived a failed rebel attempt by student groups, organized labor, and middle-class professionals to overthrow President Gerardo Machado, who had initially promised his constituents that he would make the Caribbean nation—via open markets, large-scale public works programs, and political neutrality—a “Switzerland of the Americas.” While Machado had begun his tenure in 1924 with high public opinion and popular support, by 1931 Cuba’s fifth president was beset with allegations of corruption and tarnished by his dictatorial abuses of power, which involved the state-sanctioned expulsion of university student protestors and included the use of secret police (the “Porra”) as a means of violently suppressing in-country dissent. As the Cuban president’s fortunes continued to fade, US interest in the region increased, albeit under the auspices of a progressive agenda and political reform. Ortiz, who had previously allied himself with Machado, was at the time vice president of a key rebel delegation. Without hesitation, he warned against such involvement, stressing that what Cubans wanted was not intervention but an end to intervention. Ortiz then clarified, stating that the current Cuban government, despite public scandal over corruption, had maintained power due to the implicit and explicit support of the United States.