Liberal Pacts and Hierarchies of Rule: Approaching the Imperial Transition in Cuba and Puerto Rico

Abstract

One hundred years ago, as the Spanish-Cuban-Filipino-American War dealt a quick and decisive blow to an aging Spanish empire, few observers could anticipate the imperial transition soon to unfold. For most people directly touched by the fighting in the Pacific and the Caribbean, the occasion was much too joyous to entertain such consequences. Among the former colonials as well as the American victors, large majorities experienced the end of Spanish rule with a sense of relief, exhilaration, or both. After straying off course for several decades-since the age of Bolivar and Monroe-History finally seemed to be righting itself. Although a recent flurry of empire building by the major European powers in Africa and Asia could make the retreat of another empire look like an oddity, the long-awaited end of Spanish rule over Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines appeared almost natural and preordained -a denouement tailor-made for the positivist age. Signs of an impending climax, in the air for decades, had become unmistakable in the years since the eruption of the Second War of Cuban Independence in I895. A weakened Spain, unable to adequately provide a market for the colonies' chief exports (sugar especially), incapable of fully democratizing the political process, and too weak to stem the Cuban insurrection, had been losing control of its priceless plantation colony. Even before the breakout of the Cuban war, Spain's grip over all its colonies had evidently been loosening. Although the metropole maintained a stubborn opposition to any grant of autonomy, little by little, over the span of a couple of decades, it had handed over greater powers to local bodies and granted broader individual rights to its colonial citizens. Meanwhile, ethnic nationalism had been on the rise in the islands. For some time now, a strong sense of cultural difference and a desire for republican life had reinforced many creoles' belief that they were being