Neither Victor nor Vanquished: Reckoning Deferred

This chapter focuses on the US armed intervention and military occupation of Cuba, spanning the years 1898–1902. Attention is directed to the processes through which the United States intervened on behalf of a collapsing Spanish colonial system for the purpose of foreclosing the triumphant ascendancy of a biracial insurgent coalition, thereby thwarting the success of the Cuban independence project. The US occupation served as a means through which to reconstitute the former colonial polities and at the same time revive the very hierarchies of race that had sustained Spanish colonial governance. That is, the conditions that had served to bestir Cubans to repeated mobilizations on behalf of an independent sovereign nation all through the nineteenth century persisted largely unchanged.