Cuba: An American History, Ferrer - B+, Inc.

               "More than a history of Cuba, then, this book is also a history of Cuba in relation to the United States, a history of sometimes intimate, sometimes explosive, always uneven relationship between the two countries." 

                Columbus was the first European to visit the 750 mile long island. The initial Spanish settlement was two decades later.  A harsh occupation and the introduction of European diseases led to the death of 95% of Cuba's population. After the Spanish announcement that all trans-Atlantic sailings carrying the plundered wealth of Latin America to Spain must have no less than 10 ships, there was a revival on Cuba. As the Gulf Stream began just off the coast, the hamlet of Havana was the last port of call for the treasure ships. The Crown built forts to protect the harbor and safeguard the city. Slowly, the population was replaced by African slaves. By the eighteenth century, Havana was the third largest city in the Western Hemisphere.  It became "the inviolate symbol of Spain's sovereignty in the west." In 1762, it fell to the British after a seven week siege. The British occupation was brief but quite significant. At that time, sugar was becoming an internationally traded commodity and the source of vast wealth in the British West Indies. Two-thirds of the 11 million African slaves brought to the New World were sugar workers. The British imported slaves and expanded the sugar industry in Cuba. "The island's reliance on sugar as the basis of its economy would expand significantly in the decades after British rule: indeed, it would endure for more than two centuries."  They doubled down on sugar and imported 270,000 Africans between 1790 and 1820. It was soon the largest exporter of sugar in the world. 

                "The US acquisition of Florida from Spain in 1821 fed speculation about US designs on Cuba." Cuba was America's  second largest trading partner. It was an economy based upon slavery, and many of its elites hoped for a US annexation. Knowing that the British had their eyes on Cuba, the US announced the Monroe Doctrine, proscribing European colonization in the hemisphere. With Great Britain out of the picture, the two slavery based economies continued to prosper together.  Although the Atlantic slave trade was illegal, innumerable slavers, often American, kept up the business of capturing Africans and bringing them to Cuba right up to the Civil War.  During the US Civil War, Spain recognized the CSA as a belligerent and welcomed Confederate ships in Cuba's ports. Appomattox ended the dream of an American Cuba. 

                The first Cuban War of Independence began in 1868 when an aristocratic planter freed his slaves and declared the end of Spanish rule. It took Madrid a decade to quell the rebellion. In 1880, slavery was abolished in Cuba. A decade later, Jose Marti founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party in NYC. In 1895, he declared independence, returned to the eastern portion of the island to participate in the fighting and was soon dead. The fighting spread to all of Cuba. Years of violence proved inconclusive. In 1898, the US stationed a warship, the USS Maine, in Havana harbor to help protect American interests in Cuba. Wealthy Cubans were now looking to the US to protect them as Spain was losing it grip on the colony, and the US was seriously considering intervention due to a lack of faith in the revolutionaries. In February, the Maine blew up killing over 260 sailors. Two months later, the US declared war. The war was over in four months, with the US experiencing 400 battlefield deaths. The US occupied the island, raised the Stars and Stripes, and ignored the locals, particularly the dark-skinned ones, who had been fighting the Spanish for decades.  It would be four years before the US turned over the reins of government to the Cubans. Even then, the US retained the legal right to intervene in Cuba's domestic and foreign affairs. Soon, the majority of land, and certainly the important sugar plantations, were owned by Americans. Unrest among the veterans of the wars of liberation led to another three year US occupation beginning in 1906.

             This is a superbly written Pulitzer winner, but I just can't keep my nose to the grindstone.