Crossroads: High School Curriculum
Unit VIII: Waves of Reform: 1880s to 1921
Lesson 2
SITUATIONS IN BRIEF
Cuba
The close of the nineteenth century marked a major turning-point for the position of the United States in world affairs. During the nineteenth century, the nation had expanded across the continent and emerged as the world's leading economic power. Isolated from the Old World by two great oceans, Americans gave little thought to affairs overseas. As the United States changed, however, so did American expectations about foreign policy. Many Americans believed that their country should take a more active role in world affairs. The Caribbean region, particularly the island of Cuba, held special interest.
American attention focused on the Caribbean for a number of reasons. First, geography brought the people of the United States and the peoples of the Caribbean together as neighbors. Cuba is only ninety miles from the southern tip of Florida. As the importance of naval power increased in the nineteenth century, many American leaders became convinced that the United States needed to control the Caribbean to protect its own shores and shipping. Second, the United States and the Caribbean region were linked economically. American companies invested heavily in the sugar, coffee, and banana plantations of the Caribbean, especially as plans to build a canal across the isthmus of Central America advanced in the late 1800s. (In addition, in the 1840s and 1850s, Southern politicians looked to Cuba as a potential source of slaves and a theater for expanding slavery; in the weeks before Fort Sumter, Secretary of State William Seward proposed that the United States invade Cuba and oust the Spanish, to defuse tensions that were to bring about the Civil War.)
Finally, American interests in the Caribbean coincided with the Cuban people's struggle for independence from Spain, as Americans began increasingly to sympathize with the Cubans and look askance at the Spanish. Since the sixteenth century, Spain had ruled Cuba. Most Americans in the nineteenth century resented the colonial powers of Europe, and Cuba was the last major European colony in the Western Hemisphere. Moreover, Americans were increasingly angered and offended by Spain's brutal attempts to crush Cuban resistance.
It is 1898; the conflict over Cuba is boiling over, and the United States must decide how to respond.