The International Journal of Cuban Studies Issue 2 December 2008

THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CUBAN STUDIES

(Print) ISSN 1756-3461 (Online) ISSN 1756-347X www.cubastudiesjournal.org

Jos Mart and US expansionism

Rodolfo Sarracino

Lacunae in the biography of Jos Mart oblige researchers to carefully contextualise his life and work. The essential elements have to be his actions and the logic of his principles and ideas as applied to the organization of a revolution in a colony of just over 1.5 million inhabitants, economically weakened by a prolonged war from 1868 to 1878: an island located just 90 miles from a new imperial Colossus, with more than 60 million inhabitants and abundant economic resources, whose expansive regional and even global ambitions were known to Mart, and to major European powers determined to limit those ambitions in defence of their own imperial interests. The hypothesis here, following that of Roberto Fernndez Retamar (2001), grounded on rigorous analysis of documentation which has recently become available (not true that is has recently come to light, just that Sarracino appears only now to have discovered Mahan, which was why I changed it), allows us to interpret hitherto unexplored passages in the existence of a man whose intense political life was always ruled by ethical principles. Mart was aware that he was simply an immigrant in the United States, a country whose centres of power were proposing the annexation of Central America, the Caribbean and, eventually, the whole of South America, and which, at the same time, was to be the most important rearguard, since the greatest human and material resources for the war of independence outside of Cuba were concentrated there. That paradox obliged him to be careful of more radical manifestations in his writings, which on more than one occasion were rejected by newspapers that adopted the submissive stance of local oligarchies and governments. Moreover, in the United States, the press was controlled by trusts and monopolies, which were beginning to merge with industrial and finance capital and inclined towards an expansionist foreign policy. The independence of the Hispanic-American islands advocated by Mart's revolutionary project, would have forced the US to rethink everything. Without controlling the island approaches, both the Panama isthmus and the canal crossing it could fall into the hands of the British or Germans, at that time highly active in the Caribbean and Pacific, and the world would certainly have been a different one. Both the complexity of the international panorama and his delicate situation in the United States obliged Mart to do everything "indirectly," as late in life he would confide to his friend Manuel Mercado. His political difficulties with the United States could not be solved via frontal shocks of ideas. Mart was but
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an migr, lacking the support of a state structure, closely watched by Spain and the US authorities. In his daily struggle for the revolution, he was obliged to moderate his radical thinking, mask his indignation - at times irrepressible - and avoid being charged with extremism in any form, which could have closed off his access to newspapers read by thousands of people in South America and other countries in the hemisphere, or even deportation. In these circumstances, one can understand that, at times, his silence was as eloquent as his words. But his accurate analyses, even under strict personal control, began to make certain Latin American newspaper proprietors nervous and could have irritated the US government. Mart as consul Such were the crucial times in which Mart was hastening to consolidate the revolutionary apparatus for the 'necessary war', while the United States marched rapidly towards its imperialist destiny and as 1890 approached, he was doing everything possible to avert the annexation of Cuba. The high esteem in which he was held by Latin American intellectuals in New York is evidenced by the fact that, in acknowledgement of his unimpeachable integrity, his vast culture and his literary talent, he was to be elected president of the city's Hispanic-American Literary Society on December 6th 1890. And in 1889, he was preparing to speak at the International Monetary Conference in Washington as a delegate from Uruguay. Then, in July 1890, the governments of Paraguay and Argentina, close to the cause of Cuban independence, followed the example of Uruguay in 1887 in a gesture as unusual then as today, and appointed Mart consul in the largest and most important city of the United States. Little is known of the motives that prompted the three governments to make that decision. Whatever they might have been, the decision was masked by a consular cloak, while making clear the gesture of solidarity with the people of Cuba and a veiled warning to the United States that Cuba was not alone. It would not be easy for Spain to use its diplomatic influence to achieve the limitation or expulsion of a consul of three South American countries. Mart was then able to move with greater freedom in order to fulfil his revolutionary tasks. With his prodigious capacity for work, Mart managed to fulfil his consular tasks and simultaneously increase his persuasive correspondence with the revolutionary clubs. Revolutionary plans progressed. However, the years 1889 and 1890 would bring the severest political tests for Mart. They would prove decisive in the plane of bilateral perspectives with the United States. In a report for La Nacin on the Washington International Conference, datelined November 2, 1889, Mart stated publicly for the first time that the event would reveal "those who defend the independence of Latin America, where the equilibrium of the world lies" (Mart 1889). And, from then until the end of his days, he reiterated this idea in one way or another, in letters and in documents programming the
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revolution, including the Montecristo Manifesto and the statutes of the Cuban Revolutionary Party. Nobody has explained why Mart decided, at this point, to publicly evoke that principle, of which he was well aware since his days as a student of international law at the University of Zaragoza and whose evolution he had observed during his life in the United States. In the conference he was forced to apply all his skills as a journalist and consul in order to prevent the concretisation of the US initiative to purchase the island of Cuba from Spain (with the mediation of various Latin American countries and a small group of pro-annexationist Cubans, headed by Jos Ignacio Rodrguez). The response is to be found in the historical conjuncture in the United States, in which powerful enemies of Cuban independence were acting, awaiting the appropriate moment for the annexation of the island. That was not his only battle at the high-level event. He also fought, from the pages of a number of Argentinean and Mexican dailies, against a draft arbitration bill proposed by the US government that was damaging to the interests of Latin American peoples; he also had to vigorously oppose the implementation of a customs union for the exclusive benefit of large US industrial and financial interests. Mahan and US expansionism Five months later, in March 1890, when the most controversial points of the prolonged conference were still being discussed, another event occurred, of singular importance for the Caribbean and Cuba in particular - and more political than literary. This was the launch in New York of The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1669-1793 by Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan. The book prompted admiration from the US Navy and other branches of the armed forces, but principally from conservatives within the Republican Party and the great naval powers of the world, who lost no time in proposing awards for the brilliant naval strategist. In his work, Mahan affirmed that control of seas and oceans was the key to national sovereignty, because that would guarantee its national trade with the world. The road to expansion and supremacy was clearly inferred. In August of that same year when, due to illness, Mart was resting in the Twilight Club in the Catskill Mountains, Mahan published an important article in the prestigious Atlantic Monthly magazine, "The United States Looking Outward", in which he discussed the possibility of a war with England, and certain relevant geostrategic aspects in the Caribbean region: "Among the islands and on the mainland there are many positions of great importance, held now by weak or unstable states. Is the United States willing to see them sold to a powerful rival? But what right will she invoke against the transfer? She can allege but one - that of her reasonable policy supported by her might. (Mahan 2005, online)
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"Might" would be key in its military and political strategy, up until the present day. In real terms, the United States had already tried to buy the island of Cuba on a number of occasions - and was once again attempting to do so barely had the International Monetary Conference concluded. In his unique style, Mahan was calling the attention of a group of his imperialist followers in government and in Congress to the existence of small and weak states located in important positions that could and should be controlled by the nascent US empire. That article was followed by others containing assessments of the potential of the islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific for US strategy. The essential islands included Cuba. Mahan's articles, widely circulated, provoked great debate in Congress and among the general public as to the possible expansion of the United States into the Caribbean and the Pacific. If Mart was in any doubt as to the annexationist plans of the US government, these dissipated with the media offensive originating within that country's armed forces and Congress. The situation was grave and even deteriorating. After US expansion directed at Mexico and Canada, further expansion, as Mart affirmed, would be directed "at us". At the Twilight Club Barely two months later, in October 1890, just before being admitted as a full member of the New York Twilight Club, Mart gave an after-dinner speech to its influential members. These included politicians; military personnel; high-ranking entrepreneurs; artists; Vincent T. Powderly, the most important workers' leader of the time; and writers of the national and international stature of Mark Twain, Walt Whitman and Andrew Carnegie among others. Mart transmitted to them a message that constituted a firm response to the government, to Congress, the armed forces and the national press - all immersed in the clamorous debate over the annexation of Cuba and other Caribbean and Latin American countries. An excerpt of Mart's speech, originally given in English, was published in October of that year in the New York El Porvenir newspaper, recently discovered during research at the National Library: " There was talk then, and it could be that there is still talk today, among ignorant and demented politicians, of dissimulated intrusion, with this or that plausible pretext, of these forces of the North in the meritorious, laborious, ascending peoples of Spanish America; of intrusion, in the name of freedom, into the freedom of others, which is a crime that must not be committed, because they barely know those who live there. But, by dint of their heterogeneous elements, what will triumph here at the end of the day is the great national consciousness, which will not allow such a stain. But if that violent union, of which demented and ignorant politicians are constantly talking, does not come about - doubtless on account of the nobility of the land that would have to impose it, and that of the lands that would have to resist it - there is another congenial and possible union, as appetizing on this side of the border as on the other side. And that is one that must be born from a mutual, carefree and just treaty of people from
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one area with people of another, of genuine people, cordial and cultured, like this assembly of firm heads and spirits that love justice, before which humble foreigners will place their thankful hearts." (Mart 1890:339. Retranslated from the Spanish.). As Club rules demanded, it was a brief speech and restrained in tone but not easy to present in the circumstances, since, in every way, Mart contested Mahan's expansionist project, his cohort of naval officers and the group of conservative Republican congressmen who were supporting him, particularly George G. Blaine. It is significant that the speech was received with applause, hand-shaking and embraces on the part of those present, as the newspaper mentions. Describing as "demented and ignorant" US politicians and military personnel within and outside of government, bent on intervening in Latin American countries, before a select audience - this called for bravery, since Mart was a consul and simultaneously organizing a war of independence in the colony of a country that had diplomatic relations with the United States. Mart accepted membership of the prestigious Club - which acted as a kind of national sounding board not controlled by the press and the US government. His action was successful. In 1896, barely one year after his death, the Twilight Club debated and passed an energetic request to the President Glover Cleveland to recognize the belligerency of Cuban people. But Mahan was moving ahead with his imperial project. For him, apart from being the ideal transport and trade route for a country with coasts on two of the largest oceans on the planet, the Panama Canal was, above all, a defensive or offensive means, according to circumstances, of accelerating the transfer and concentration of firepower in either of the ocean outlets of the two US fleets that were already being built as priority. On the other hand, the serious impediment of the continental dimensions of the United States was making transportation of its exports from the industrial centres in the east, northeast and central-east of the country to the Pacific more expensive via the unprofitable Cape Horn route. The US as a rising global power Mahan was instructed to draw up a secret study, asked for by his government in the context of an anticipated war on Great Britain - which reveals the gravity of the Britain's differences with the emerging US power. The US high command was planning not one, but a number of wars on Spain and probably on Germany as well. Mahan did not agree with the thesis of war on Britain and thus his conclusions expressed doubts: In conclusion, while Great Britain is undoubtedly the most formidable of our possible enemies, both by her great navy and by the strong positions she holds near our coasts, it must be added that a cordial understanding with that country is one of the first of our external interests." (Mahan 2005, online)

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One can perceive Mahan's authority from his public reference to what US foreign policy should be. His statements clearly exceeded his authority as a naval officer and revealed the solidity of his political backing. In the war of 1898 England was already inclining toward Mahan's logic, confronted with Germany, a potential European adversary as powerful as the United States and geographically closer to the British Isles. Mahan also published a number of articles in which he compared the geo-strategic characteristics of Cuba and Jamaica. The role that Mahan reserved for Cuba in these considerations is summed up in this eloquent conclusion: Regarded, therefore, as a base of naval operations, as a source of supplies to a fleet, Cuba presents a condition wholly unique among the islands of the Caribbean and of the Gulf of Mexico." (op.cit.) Thus, in his judgement, the final result of the comparison indicated: "The advantages of situation, strength, and resources are greatly and decisively in favor of Cuba" (op.cit.). Given its geographical dimensions, population, natural resources, industrial and agricultural potential and, above all, its proximity to the United States, Cuba had the necessary productive capacity to supply US naval squadrons deployed in the Caribbean. It was a favourable assessment for its annexation to the United States. The best justification for an action of this nature in relation to Cuba and other parts of the region was, therefore, the well-tried principle of "necessity;" in this case the defence of US maritime trade. Foreign trade was seen as the sole salvation for the backward US industry in its competitive difficulties with Europe. According to Mart himself, US foreign policy could be summed up: "this is mine because I need it." The focal point of Mahan's strategy in the Caribbean was control of the Windward Passage, an ideal route for the transit of US shipping to the Isthmus - which was not possible while Santiago de Cuba remained in the power of the Spanish and Port Royal, Jamaica, continued under British control. The Windward Passage is a region, affirmed the officer, "in which the United States is particularly interested," where the political conditions in the surrounding countries and colonies prevented US control. The hostile naval presence in Haiti, Santiago de Cuba and Port Royal, had placed in doubt US control of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, and above all, the Isthmus and its future canal, with the delay in the country's longed-for access to the large Asian markets. The above information comes from the 1890 article, in which Mahan alludes to the advantage that would be conferred on the United States by its proximity to any regional theatre of naval operations and the disadvantage of distance for Britain and Germany, its most dangerous European adversaries. It is clear that Mart was following the European and US battle for the future Panama Canal. Barely 12 months after establishing himself in New York, he wrote in the Venezuelan newapaper Opinin Nacionl on November 26, 1891, that the government of the United States:

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" looks on the Canal as its own property Great Britain, moved by just foresight and not jealousy, believes that it must guarantee the neutrality of the canal together with the United States, which would hinder them from regarding themselves as absolute owners of the canal that, if one part goes to the west of the North American Union, the other part leads to India." (Mart, 1891) The key to his writing is in the last word of the paragraph: unlimited access to the great markets of the Pacific and that initial leap towards world supremacy. The same year, when Mart had already written a number of articles on the sinuous course of the International Monetary Conference, the Mahan position as presented by Henry Cabot Lodge to the US Congress, had already captured the attention of legislators in both Houses, and was divulged by the conservative Republican group in Congress and President William McKinley and - after his assassination - by his successor, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt. For his part, Mahan did everything within his reach to make US citizens understand that their life and even the future well-being of their children depended on the country's expansionist policy, given the access that this would guarantee to its weak industry. Thus Mahan rose to a prominent position, although he is not always sufficiently recognized in Cuban historiography as among the most aggressive ideologues of US imperialism (see Guerra 1964:397). The Pacific had already started to become the scenario of intense commercial activity and political rivalries, in which the great powers, among them the United States, were players. It is important to highlight the serious clashes (chronicled by Mart) between the US and Germany around the Samoas and the Marshall Islands, in which Great Britain mediated. A similar situation was developing in the Caribbean, with growing British and German investment in Cuba and other neighbouring islands, in addition to Nicaragua and Venezuela. All of those reasons meant that, from 1890-1893 and even before, the Caribbean and Central American rapidly gained prominence in the scale of strategic values of US circles of power. It is thus clear that its immediate attention was centred on the Caribbean and the Pacific. Facing the North American Atlantic was Europe, whose industry was, in general, more efficient than that of the United States. Great Britain and Germany had the additional advantage of an effective financial policy: the granting of ample credit lines to their international clients, a policy not as yet applied by US banks in Latin America. That had been verified in 1884 by James G. Blaine, in preparation for the International Monetary Conference, which did not take place until 1889, after he sent a delegation of bank officials and senior representatives on a tour of various Latin American countries. During this tour, they confirmed the absence of financial backing for US enterprises in their competition with British and German companies for South American markets. Thus it was deemed necessary to penetrate Asian markets, considered more accessible and, hence, the essential shorter and more economic exit to the Pacific.
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It was not a case of initiating actions to take control of the canal, but of prior assurance of the accesses, routes and approximations to the isthmus: in other words, on the Caribbean side, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Jamaica and, on the Pacific side, Hawaii, the Philippines, Guam, Samoa and other islands. An imperial project That select group of proud imperialists - comprising James G. Blaine as secretary of state and Henry Cabot Lodge heading the House of Representatives; Theodore Roosevelt from the period when he was William McKinley's naval undersecretary; John Milton Hay; Joseph B. Foraker, a conservative Congress member; Alfred T. Mahan himself, inspirer of the expansion strategy; and including - in the early stages - Andrew Carnegie, the steel magnate, attracted by the enormous construction business of an armoured fleet with steel smelted in his plants equipped with the most advanced technology of the time - all made Mahan's ideas their own and dragged along in their wake the Republican Party, the banks and US heavy industry, which invested in weapons production with enormous profits. Mart synthesised the imperial project presented by Mahan in an article published in Patria in what might appear to be excessively concise, unless it is understood that elaborating too much on the US strategy was unnecessary and could even be dangerous. It was published when all the details and objectives were still part of a projected state policy. He spoke much more clearly about it to Manuel Mercado a few days before his death, in terms that are very well known: "The English-speaking neighbours (the United States) covet the key to the Antilles (Cuba) in order to close off all of the North for the isthmus, and then bear down with that all weight on the South. If our America wishes its freedom, help that by freeing Cuba and Puerto Rico." (Mart 1893:373) For Mart, the fate that the US military and congress members were preparing for Cuba and all of the Caribbean was evident, but he abstained from writing on that in full detail. To have done so would be tantamount to informing the US government as to what he knew: unwise to the point of risky. When Mart decided to address the members of the Twilight Club in October 1890, nobody knew what he was proposing to do, far less his reason for doing so. It is a fact that, in the brief summary of his dinner at the Club, which Mart published in the New York El Porvenir, he omitted the conversations he doubtless had during dinner. But, even so, his lines take on force when bearing in mind press coverage of the expansionist plans of the Republican Party and the high commands of the armed forces, with the Navy at the helm. It is not by chance that, in April 1895, Mart wrote two battle to the consuls of Great Britain and Germany reached the foreign ministers of both countries and in that a revolutionary victory would signify for them
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letters from the field of in Guantnamo, which which he assured them trade and investment
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advantages in Cuba. Time and strength were lamentably lacking for the Cuban revolutionaries facing an increasingly more powerful and aggressive United States. Nevertheless, Mart thought that his strategic objectives could be achieved, given the existence of a popular majority who had approved the presidential conduct of Grover Cleveland in 1884; the fight against corruption; administrative reforms without conquests or costly and bloody wars; condemnation of his fraudulent defeat in 1888; and his victorious return in 1892, unprecedented in the country's history. For Mahan and the State Department only one obstacle was interposed in the isthmus: the Clayton-Bulwer treaty of 1850 between Great Britain and the United States, which stipulated that neither of the two countries "would obtain or reserve for itself any right of exclusive control" over an inter-oceanic route. Thus it was already foreseen that neither the United States nor Great Britain could "occupy, fortify or colonise" the zone in question. When that treaty was signed, prior to the formulation of a new policy that proposed to liquidate Spain's inconvenient presence in the Caribbean, it was highly beneficial for US interests because, just at that moment, Great Britain had evidence of an activity in Nicaragua that was of concern to the United States. The Clayton-Bulwer treaty was finally repealed in 1900 after the war with Spain, and was followed by the Hay-Paunceforte treaty, which authorized the United States to build and fortify the Panama Canal. The agreement was a significant British concession, which made it apparent that, at the time, Great Britain was more fearful of the close military might of Germany than that of the United States. By 1890, Mahan's ideas were receiving support from wide political and business circles that united to promote the nation's imperialist future. With an already powerful and growing navy at the start of the war with Spain, President McKinley imposed the annexation of Hawaii via a joint Congress resolution. And immediately after the successful conclusion of the war with Spain in 1898, he assured control of the territories in which the naval bases suggested by Mahan could be established: in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, the Philippines and other small Pacific islands. Barely five years later, the US government forced the Cuban authorities - prior to the forced incorporation of the Platt Amendment to the constitution - to sign a treaty for the lease in perpetuity of the naval base in Guantnamo. Approaches to the future Panama Canal were assured. With its control of the isthmus secured, the canal was constructed from 1904 to 1914. The exactitude with which the US followed the strategy of Mahan op.cit.) - who had proclaimed that the US nation had "the irresistible vocation of the race to govern and trade" - was astonishing. Thus Mart's objectives could not be attained. With US intervention in the war of independence and the complicity of autonomists and annexationists incorporated into the new Republican government of Cuba, based on the triumph of US weaponry over Spain, Mart's aspirations towards world balance were liquidated: an outcome that contributed to his premature death.
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The consequences were of importance for the future: with the incorporation of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii and the Philippines into the US imperialist system and US control over the Panama Canal after a splendid "little war", the imperialist, principally Republican, group in the government and US Congress assured naval supremacy in the Caribbean and then in the Pacific. Germany and Great Britain did little to prevent it. In the midst of a wave of triumphalist optimism, the conservative groups in both traditional parties consolidated, throughout the 20th century, a strong imperialist alliance in the United States, whose blind obstinacy, colossal errors and most recent defeats have brought the world to the brink of disaster. Rodolfo Sarracino is based at the Centro de Estudios Martianos (Centre for the Study of Mart), Havana, Cuba. English translation by Angie Todd.

References Fernndez Retamar, Roberto (2001) Introduccin a Jos Mart, Havana: Letras Cubanas. Guerra, Ramiro (1964) La expansin Territorial de los Estados Unidos, Havana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba. Mahan, Alfredo Thayer (1890) The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 16691793, see http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ship/mahan.htm Mahan, Alfredo Thayer (1897) The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future, Rio Press Edition (abbreviated), 2005, available at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/15749 Mart, Jos (1889) "El Congreso Internacional de Washington (II)", in Obras Completas, Havana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba, 1964. Mart, Jos (1890) "Recuerdos de Verano", El Porvenir, New York, 29 Octobre, in Obras Completas, Havana: Instituto Cubano del Libro, 1973. Mart, Jos (1891) "Espaa", La Opinin Nacionl, 26 November, in Obras Completas (Europa), Havana, Editorial Nacional de Cuba, 1964. Mart, Jos (1893) "La crisis y el Partido Revolucionario Cubano", Patria, New York, 19 August , in Obras Completas, Havana, Editorial Nacional de Cuba, 1964.

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Copyright Copyright for this work is held jointly between Rodolfo Sarracino and the International Journal of Cuban Studies under a Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial-No Derivative 3.0 Licence

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