Cuba: Then and Now

Cuba: Then and Now

In the Treaty of Paris of 1898, Spain relinquished all sovereignty over Cuba. For a time, the policy of the United States toward Cuba was somewhat ambivalent. The Teller Amendment at the beginning of the Spanish-American War had pledged the restoration of Cuba to the Cubans. However, at the same time the United States was determined that it would not be placed after the war with Spain in a worse position in regard to its vital interests in Cuba than it had been when Cuba was a Spanish possession.

The two men most closely associated with the U.S. relationship and administration of Cuba were Elihu Root, Secretary of War, and Leonard Wood, Governor General of Cuba. At his Washington desk, Root spent considerable time keeping a sharp eye on the Cuban constitutional convention and directing the overall campaign.1

On the scene in Havana was Doctor Leonard Wood who had gone there as commander of the Rough Riders in 1898. His first major administrative task in Cuba after the war was in Santiago province where the death rate was two hundred a day, and the filth was terrible. After burning the dead bodies in town, he curtailed the inflation and cleaned up the refuse. In addition, Wood saw that jails were inspected and that schools were secularized. Because of his accomplishments in Santiago, he was appointed Governor General of Cuba on December 12, 1899. He kept the post until the formation of the Cuban Republic in 1902.

Wood did well as governor of the “Pearl of the Antilles.” On September 7, the Chicago Record-Herald reported that Cuba was on the high road to more prosperous times than it had ever experienced. There was no distress among the population of 1,572,797 other than what might be found under...

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...is point from 1901-34 aroused increasing bitterness, as Root’s interpretation was not followed. On May 29, 1934, it was abrogated by the United Sates.

11 Lyman Abbott, Reminiscences (Boston and New York: 1915), 438.

12 Congressional Record, 58 Cong., 2 sess., 3379; 180 U.S. 109 (1900).

13 New York Times, September 10, 1901, 5, c. 4.

14 Philip C. Jessup, Elihu Root (New York: 1938), I, 324.

15 Edmond Wood, “Can Cubans Govern Cuba?” The Forum, XXXII (September, 1901), 66-74.

16 Congressional Record, 56 Cong., 2 sess., 3344-45, 3348, 3375.

17 See above, 33-34.

18 New York Times, September 8, 1901, 3, c. 5.

19 Literary Digest: A Weekly Compendium of the Contemporaneous Thought of the World, XXIII (September 7, 1901), 274.

20 Nation: A Weekly Journal Devoted to Politics, Literature, Science and Art, (September 5, 1901), 180, c. 1.