Cuba mexicana: Historia de una anexión imposible

Abstract

Recent scholarship has questioned the widespread notion that nineteenth-century Mexico pursued a foreign policy of survival—a policy designed to survive a brutal half-century of civil war, foreign intervention, and territorial annexation (1810–67), followed by liberal modernization unilaterally oriented toward the United States and western Europe. Instead, scholars have reexamined Mexican archival sources in the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores to conclude that nineteenth-century Mexican foreign policy was multilateral and surprisingly engaged with relations with other Latin American nations. Following in the footsteps of recent work on Mexican–Central American and Mexican–South American relations, Rojas has examined Mexican diplomatic sources to provide a long-range view of Mexican-Cuban relations between the early 1800s and the War of 1898 that ended Spanish colonial rule over Cuba and brought indirect U.S. rule. The result is a book that pays close attention to diplomatic and cultural ties between two areas of Latin America that shared important linguistic and political similarities, even as they were dissimilar in terms of economy, ethnicity, and race.The reader attracted by the exciting title and expecting to find an account of a Mexican attempt to annex Cuba will be disappointed. The book deals more with the complex Mexican diplomatic attempts to limit great powers in the Caribbean than with efforts to form a Greater Mexico that included Cuba. Rojas traces a careful and modest Mexican diplomacy in three long chapters dealing with New Spain’s financing of the Havana economy, Mexican policy toward Cuban independence movements, and Mexican attitudes vis-à-vis what the author calls the “Cuban nation”—a cultural construct that, according to Rojas, existed almost a century prior to the war of independence that ended in the U.S. intervention of 1898.As the author acknowledges, the Mexican government displayed an ambivalent attitude toward Cuba’s political future, balancing an abstract preference for independence against the potential of a U.S. military presence in an independent Cuba that could be harmful to Mexican national interests as construed by the governing elite. While Mexican officials discussed an outright annexation of Cuba, Rojas acknowledges that such an undertaking was always a most unlikely political project for a government that fought for the survival of the Mexican state during most of the period analyzed here. In the end, the author reinforces the scholarly consensus on Mexican policy toward Latin America in the nineteenth century. While Mexican policy makers stressed their country’s cultural ties to the rest of Spanish America and occasionally defied the imperialist ventures of the European powers and the United States, they were geopolitical realists who recognized the relative weakness of a Mexican projection over an area that was a target of intense imperial rivalry. In the same vein, in the early 1960s, the Mexican government defended the Cuban Revolution in international forums as an exercise of national self-determination, while falling in line with the United States in denouncing communism and Soviet policy. As in the 1800s, the outcome was a tepid defense of Cuban sovereignty against the backdrop of a realistic assessment of Mexico’s weak position in Great Power politics.The specialist in Mexican foreign relations will therefore find much of interest in this book, while noting the absence of any European archival material and even most English-language documents and scholarly literature. Nonspecialist readers who seek an understanding of the foreign policy of nineteenth-century Mexico will be confused by the absence of a clear thesis or even a set of conclusions at the end of the volume.