Blessings of Liberty: The United States and the Promotion of Democracy in Cuba

Abstract

Only a few visitors to Washington's Arlington National Cemetery wander off the main tourist circuit, attracted by the mast of the battleship Maine, to a quiet knoll behind the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the resting place for z6o sailors killed when the ship exploded in Havana's harbour in 1898. With the towering monument drawing their eyes upward, these visitors rarely pause to look at the individual tombstones, so virtually no one ever sees the handful of nearby markers identifying the graves of soldiers who participated in something called 'The Cuban Pacification' from 1906 to 90o9. And even if an occasional individual should happen to notice these words chiselled into the granite stones, few would be able to explain their meaning that, at least, has been my experience with a quarter-century of university students, not one of whom has ever heard of The Cuban Pacification. It was not anything like a war, of course; it was a takeover. Coming only four years after the United States had granted Cuba its independence and two years after Theodore Roosevelt's Republicans had congratulated themselves in their party platform (' We set Cuba free'), the purpose of the 1906 seizure was never clearly explained. The best President Roosevelt could manage came in two sentences before a Harvard audience: 'I am doing my best to persuade the Cubans that if only they will be good they will be happy. I am seeking the very minimum of interference necessary to make them good.' Now, nearly a century later, we need only substitute 'democratic' for 'good' in order to capture post-Cold War US policy toward Cuba or, as President Clinton explained in his own two sentences about Cuba during the 1999 State of the Union address: 'In this