These two works consider the balance between continuity and change in the countries affected by the Spanish-Cuban-American War, focusing not only on historical events but also on the representation and interpretation of events in historical studies. They share several major themes. First, they present the Spanish-Cuban-American War as a transitional moment in deeply entrenched United States ambitions in Latin America and the Caribbean. Second, they seek to capture Latin American and Caribbean perspectives on the war, occupation, and resultant U.S. interventions in other countries. Finally, they are concerned with the century of interpretations that have followed the war itself.
United States policy in the Western Hemisphere receives the most consideration in Walther Bernecker’s work, which pays particular attention to the rivalries between the United States and Europe for primacy in Latin America. Not only did 1898 see the expulsion of Spain from the Americas, but it also witnessed the inauguration of more confrontational dealings of the United States with Great Britain, Germany, and France. In different instances Reinhard Doerries, Ralph Dietl, Thomas Schoonover, Ragnhild Fiebig-von Hase, Thomas Fischer, Alfredo Figueroa Navarro, and Walther Bernecker have shown the rise of United States aggression in the area, whether through intervention in Panama and Haiti or by forcing European capitulation to the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary. Of particular interest in Bernecker’s collection is the treatment of the growing rivalry between the imperial parvenus, Germany and the United States. Friction between them on the world stage, for instance in Venezuela, Haiti, and the Philippines, foreshadowed the entry of the United States against Germany in World War I.
Louis Pérez similarly treats the events of 1898 as a moment in longer-term U.S. foreign policy ambitions, though his focus is more on Cuba. The War of 1898 begins with a quick survey of the long-standing belief among U.S. political leaders that the United States was the arbiter of Cuba’s fate. For most of the nineteenth century, the United States defended Spanish rule, under the assumption that when a transfer of sovereignty in Cuba occurred, it would not be to a European rival, nor to the Cuban people themselves. Henry Clay’s judgment that “the population . . . is incompetent, at present, from its composition and amount to maintain self-government” (p. 13) was echoed by Senator Albert J. Beveridge’s question in 1901: “Is it not our duty to see that they are not destroyed by themselves?” (p. 31).
Pérez then juxtaposes those deep geopolitical attitudes with explanations of the United States’ motives in the Spanish-Cuban-American War. After 1898, U.S. historians have generally explained their country’s intervention in terms of contingency, chance, and humanitarian goals. The explosion of the Maine, the scandal caused by the De Lôme letter, and the feverish public response to those events whipped up by the yellow press eventually drove a hesitant (and enigmatic) McKinley into declaring war on Spain. According to Pérez, U.S. historians have consistently emphasized the reluctance to intervene and the primacy of humanitarian outrage caused by Weyler’s policy of reconcentración in forcing both the intervention and the Platt Amendment, which effectively impeded Cuban sovereignty after the United States withdrawal in 1902. Pérez’s point is not that those factors were unimportant, but that they obscure the strategic interests of the United States and the duplicity of many of its military and political leaders.
Pérez notes that the actions of the United States look quite different from a Cuban perspective. During the Cuban Republic, revisionist historians began to argue that Cuban forces had essentially won the war against Spain and that the United States intervened to head off their triumph. After the Cuban Revolution of 1959, that position became quickly entrenched in Cuban historiography. Whereas U.S. historians have emphasized idealism and chance, Cuban historians have highlighted the opportunism and deep historical structures of the United States. One of the most compelling aims of Perez’s study is to suggest the possibilities for a dialogue between these entrenched and increasingly static creeds.
Several essays in Bernecker’s volume also inquire into Antillean perspectives on the war and the relationship between the United States and the Antilles. Joan Casanovas and Josef Opatrný look at Cuban politics before 1898, Casanovas making an important argument about the centrality of the urban labor movement to the development of Cuban nationalism, Opatrný detailing José Martí’s growing concern with U.S. “pan-Americanism” in the 1880s and 1890s. Ute Guthanz and Wolfgang Binder consider the impact of the United States on Puerto Rico, Binder giving an interesting account of the rise of hispanophilia among Puerto Rican cultural elites in the twentieth century.
Binder’s essay also touches on what is the most telling contribution of these works: the appraisals of the intellectual and cultural responses to the war over the course of the twentieth century. Elena Hernández Sandöica offers a review of recent Spanish and Cuban histories that have dwelled on the imperial transition. Many of these studies have noted continuities in the relationship between Spain and Cuba after 1898. While not denying the importance and novelty of these findings, Hernández Sandöica shrewdly questions their institutional underpinnings, calling attention to the vigor of the recent Hispano-Cuban collaboration, while also pointing to the conditions that limit its possibilities.
Pérez and Arcadio Díaz Quiñones provide especially suggestive discussions of the development of post-1898 interpretations of the war. They concur that nationalist historiography has run its course in the twentieth century and that the next century will have to resort to new historical paradigms. Díaz Quiñones comes to these conclusions by reflecting on the mutual incomprehension between Spain and Puerto Rico. Spanish scholars, such as the great philologist Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, were unable to classify Puerto Rican culture because of their inability to comprehend “una sociedad cimarrona” (p. 28) in which people sought to escape the state and plantation, thereby eluding the historical and literary archives. Similarly, Puerto Rican intellectuals have reified “Spain,” either through a conservative hispanophilia or through anti-imperialist critiques that have sought to embrace popular and non-Spanish elements of Puerto Rican culture. Díaz Quiñones argues that nationalist paradigms have obscured the heterogeneity of both the former colony and the former metropolis and that the shared and contentious history of the two countries has yet to be written.
Pérez, too, concludes his work with a forceful criticism of the insularity of nationalist historiographies, in this case in Cuba and the United States (pp. 131-33). United States ignorance of Cuban nationalist goals, and Cuban disbelief in the humanitarian motives of many Americans in 1898 and after, have essentially brought interpretation of the United States intervention to a standstill. Only by including the perspectives and archives of the other country into their accounts can Cuban and United States scholars begin to write new histories of 1898.
Pérez and Díaz Quiñones’s observations suggest that historians of 1898 find themselves in a “deconstructionist” moment. I refer not literally to the method but to the broader dissatisfaction with the grand narratives of the twentieth century that have pretended to explain 1898, especially those associated with nationalism and the nationstate. The coming century will bring with it new narratives, by no means antinationalist, but more attuned to the porousness and heterogeneity of the nation.