21
than the situation on the ground in the earlier struggle, when the campaign remained
bottled-up in the east of the island.
The irony is that the planting class was right. They did lose control over their
economic lives and found themselves marginalized in the post-independence political
give-and-take. Following the end of the second war of independence, U.S. troops
occupied Cuba between 1899 and 1902. The country’s new constitution included a
provision, the Platt Amendment, which permitted U.S. involvement in Cuban politics.
Direct U.S. intervention, while it did occur, was rare. More significant were the more
unshakable day-to-day facts of U.S. domination of Cuban society, politics, and business.
In the early years of the Cuban republic, U.S. interests owned sixty percent of the
agricultural land, including most of the estates employed for the production of tobacco,
sugar, and other crops for the world market. Spanish interests held on to about fifteen
percent of the rural land, leaving a tiny share for Cubans. Similar domination extended
into other profit-making sectors, like trade and manufacturing, mining, transportation,
power utilities, and banking (Perez, Jr. 1995, 195-9). In the end, Cuban elites, so
concerned about surrendering power to people of color, found themselves instead
handing-over control of their economic lives to the United States.
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Notes
1
Of course, Cuban elites also spent time in the United States, often educated there. They
brought back with them the idea—seemingly incompatible with the concept of freedom, but
equally rooted in U.S. thought—that the laboring classes could be disciplined to accept the
misery of back-breaking labor. All in all, the Cuban planting class came to imagine the need for
a transition from slavery, but the economic costs of a poorly managed transition were potentially
ruinous. It was only after Spain abolished slavery in 1886 that planters could, for the first time,
contemplate separation from Spain as a solution to their problem, free of the prospect that such a
break would mean the end of their generations-old method of cultivation and production.
Convention