In 1960 Robert F. Smith published his penetrating study, The United States and Cuba: Business and Diplomacy, 1917-1960. In two chapters Smith demonstrated that New Deal Diplomacy relative to Cuba in the period 1933-1934 was characterized not, as usually conceived, by a fundamental change in American diplomatic policy but in a change in the tactics of American diplomacy. While overt intervention in a military sense in Cuban affairs tended to decline, the United States continued to intervene to maintain a government favorable to American business interests. Even the abrogation of the Platt Amendment marked no real change, and was essentially “an inexpensive gesture to Cuban nationalism” (p. 157).
Now in Roosevelt and Batista, Gellman substantiates Smith’s conclusions with a detailed study, based on research in the correspondence of American ambassadors to the island, of the Good Neighbor Policy in Cuba. Essentially Gellman demonstrates in greater detail what Smith had already set forth in a more general way—namely, that the Good Neighbor Policy, including the abrogation of the Platt Amendment did not significantly decrease American intervention in Cuba’s internal affairs. He points out, too, that when the United States initiated its sugar control program and quota restrictions, Cuba became increasingly dependent upon the American government for economic survival. In short, all who wish to understand the step-by-step process by which New Deal diplomacy functioned in preserving a friendly stable Cuban government after the overthrow of Machado, and, in the process, held back the process of revolutionary change, all with the objective of protecting American business interests, will do well to read Gellman’s study.
Unfortunately, before the reader can obtain the full benefits of Gellman’s research, he is required to absorb a rather confusing presentation of the forces in Cuba leading to the overthrow of Machado and operating in the months after the ouster of the hated dictator. Although Gellman concedes the depth of popular “disenchantment with existing conditions” (p. 35), he never clearly states just what these conditions were. In addition, we are given such confusing concepts as “a highly nationalistic formula calling for the reorganization of the economic and political systems by means of a constituent assembly” (p. 43), and “the malcontents demanded a genuine social revolution based on their desire to promote Cuban nationalism” (p. 53). Since Gellman never spells out what the Communists, who were the chief “malcontents,” advocated, the reader is left in the dark as to what is meant by “a genuine social revolution based on their desire to promote Cuban nationalism.” Of course, as Gellman demonstrates again and again, to Sumner Welles, our man in Havana, anything that smacked of fundamental change was sheer anarchy. But since the author himself does not indicate what program was advocated by the revolutionary forces in Cuba, the discussion in these early chapters tends to become chaotic.
Once, however, Gellman moves into the operations of Good Neighbor diplomacy, he hits his stride and achieves clarity, both in organization and interpretation. If the reader passes quickly through the opening three chapters and concentrates on the remaining nine, he will be rewarded with an excellent case study of how the United States was able to maintain and strengthen its political and economic control over Cuba while seeming to relinquish it.