The thesis of Professor Hitchman’s book is clearly presented in its initial chapter, entitled “The Reasons for Occupation, 1898-1899.” They are, however, the same reasons then expounded by the apologists of territorial expansion, Hagedorn among them. But if we can understand these reasons in Hagedorn and his contemporaries, this is not so when Mr. Hitchman, a young American historian, now alleges that “. . . no power existed in the island capable of rebuilding a society weakened by nearly a decade (sic) of depression and revolution” in an effort to justify what happened in Cuba and from 1899 until the middle of 1902.
It seems that Prof. Hitchman did not do his homework thoroughly enough on the earlier history of Cuba, not measured in “nearly a decade,” but in some ninety years of costly efforts for independence. Had he done so he would have discovered that the struggle for “Cuba Libre” had begun many years before there was an “Asamblea de Representantes y Consejo de Gobierno” of the Republic of Cuba in 1895. After 1868 several Latin American republics had recognized Cuban belligerency and even independence. President U. S. Grant signed a proclamation granting belligerent rights in 1869, although Mr. Hamilton Fish, his Secretary of State, kept it under lock and key to prevent its being in force. In 1872 the government of Colombia formally proposed an inter-American agreement to negotiate with Spain the recognition of the Republic of Cuba, a proposal the United States did not accept.
“Until hell freezes over,” as the late ambassador Stevenson said at the debate in the United Nations over the Cuban missile crisis (1962), the Cubans will be asking themselves why Cuba had to be singled out as the only nation in the history of the world needing a foreign military intervention in order to have a republic, at the same time granting the United States the right to intervene in the new republic. After all, Burundi has had it easier to be recognized nowadays.
Nothing that Mr. Hitchman will say now, and Hagedorn et al. said before, will deny the fact that the Platt Amendment was a foreign imposition, typical of the times of imperialism, telling the Cuban people to accept it, or else. The Brezhnev doctrine is quite similar, and now the United States compromises with an extra-continental power, the Soviet Union since 1962, on the nuclear and naval presence of the latter in Cuba.
There were no “severe reprisals” against the Spaniards and the autonomists. That would have been against the respected dictum of Gen. Máximo Gómez: “Forget the past and put your hopes in the future,” was well understood by all. The “loyalists” in the United States well would have wished for such treatment after 1781.
At times Mr. Hitchman refers to my Historia de Cuba en sus relaciones con los Estados Unidos y España, now in its second edition, although it is obvious that he does not like it. Apparently he never consulted my Historia de la Guerra de Cuba y los Estados Unidos contra España. I do not see in his bibliography any mention of the bulky report issued by the U. S. Congress about Gen. Wood as a result of the hearings in which Gen. John R. Brooke and others had something to say about Gen. Wood.
Two really outstanding things done by Gen. Wood in Cuba were the development of the educational system and the eradication of yellow fever. Just ten lines are allotted to the yellow fever topic in this book and Mr. Hitchman forgets to state that both Dr. Aristidos (sic) Agramonte and Dr. Carlos J. Finlay were Cubans.
Mr. Hitchman skips the subject of the millions of dollars paid by Cuba to the “lobbyists” and claims that the noble joint resolution of 1898—the one that Senator Platt called “that foolish joint resolution”—was due to them. This is a point well documented in my work on Cuban-American relations. Trying very hard to save Gen. Wood from the accusation that he worked for annexation, Hitchman does not comment upon his letter to Pres. Theodore Roosevelt, written in September, 1901, in which he said: “the only consistent thing to do now is to seek annexation.” Gen. Wood had a very curious idea as to his job in Cuba; he told Oswald Garrison Villard: “I have done the President’s dirty work in Cuba for him and I want my reward.”
It is certainly strange that in these times there will be a book praising what Gen. Wood himself called his “dirty work in Cuba.”
