The Corbitts, the HAHR, and United States—Cuban Intellectual Relations

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On a mid-afternoon in late August 1927, a man stood near his parked Model-T and squinted through simmering heat and glaring sunshine at passengers disembarking the steamer Cuba. The man was Dr. Harry Brown Bardwell, missionary president of Candler College, a Methodist institution. Bardwell often drove his Tin Lizzie to the Havana wharves to welcome new faculty arrivals and to give them their initial tour of Havana and its environs. This time he met Duvon and Roberta Corbitt and motored them over the six-mile route from the docks to Candler College, which overlooked the porcelain blue waters of the Florida Straits.' The arrival of the Corbitts in Cuba gave every indication of routine. Protestant missionaries had trickled into the island as early as the 1880s, but with the beginning of U.S. occupation on January 1, 1899, the trickle became a steady flow. By 1920 the Methodists, the most active Protestant denomination on the island, had attracted 4,700 Cuban members and created an impressive educational system.2 Although historians do not dispute the rapid growth of Protestantism in Cuba, they find its effects upon islanders harder to assess. The recent historiographical trend is to view Protestant missionaries in Cuba as North American imperialists. In his 1961 book, Kenneth MacKenzie depicted the Methodists as spiritual imperialists who believed that the Spanish-American War would liberate twelve million people from hispanic and Roman Catholic traditions and that God had des-