November 21, 2018
Assignment #2
This Land is My Land: American Imperialism and its Influence (or Lack Thereof) on Cuba
Last week, during parents weekend, I was talking to my best friends mother. We were discussing how I was taking a class about Cuba and it’s diaspora. She remarked, “it must be hard to find out information from that country, they’re so stuck in the past!” She further remarked, “It’s a country must really have suffered without American intervention.” These feelings are not unique, as Americans throughout this country have a feeling that Cuba is a place that needs American influence to be able to move forward. This is not a new idea about Cuba. The past 300 years of Cuban history has been the story of the Cuban’s conquering by imperialist powers. Cuba is again in a period of conquering, now by American hoping to capture a land they have been excluded from for fifty years. The country is believed to be the same country that it was before Americans left. Due to Cuba’s reliance on foreign money, Cuba is incentivized to become the country Americans would like it to be.
Renato Rosaldo first defined the term “Imperialist Nostalgia” in a 1989 paper. Rosaldo says that “Imperialist nostalgia occurs alongside a peculiar sense of mission, the white man's burden, where civilized nations stand duty-bound to uplift so-called savage ones.” (Rosaldo, 3). This belief that Europeans must take countries who are not civilized in the same way as euro-centric countries are. They then are tasked with turning the countries into the white version of civilized. This attitude has controlled western expansion ever since Columbus landed in the West Indies in 1492. Rosaldo continues, “In this ideologically constructed world of ongoing progressive change, putatively static savage societies become a stable reference point for defining civilized identity” (Rosaldo, 3). Imperialist Nostalgia has also excused the constant genocide and aggressive expansion because of their lack of progress. These beliefs have been those of all countries who have controlled Cuba, starting with the Spanish, and extending to Americans, over the past 300 years. They have tried to control and civilize the country, trying to remove Cuban culture and convert them to a Christian, Eurocentric version of the conquering nation.
Cuba’s history is not unlike that of other countries on the western side of the Atlantic Ocean. Conquered by the Spanish at first, it lacked a “large indigenous population to exploit,” (Keen, 409) making it an island used almost exclusively as a stopover point between Central American precious metal mines and Spain. After the Haitian revolution, Spanish sugar planters left Hispaniola and came to Cuba to re-establish sugar plantations. Their movement to a new Caribbean island restarted the Spanish colonization cycle which happened all across Central and South America (Keen, 409-411). The United States had an equal interest in colonizing Cuba, due to feelings of Imperialist Nostalgia. In 1821, Thomas Jefferson said, “I have ever looked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of States” (Behar Time Stood Still, 1). Clear feelings that Cuba would be a crucial addition to the Union and America would do whatever necessary to make it theirs.
After two failed independence attempts from within Cuba in the late 19th century, the United States decided to go to war to attempt to free Cuba, in line with The Monroe Doctrine, which determined U.S. foreign policy in the western hemisphere. The Monroe Doctrine stated that “We owe it…to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety” (Monroe). The United States used this belief that America could help free Cuba from imperial rulers as reasoning to enter into the Cuban war for independence against Spain. However, America entering the war went against what “almost every major Cuban revolutionary figure” (Keen, 414) wanted, once again asserting the belief that America knows best. The way the war was framed to Americans was also vital in influencing American views about the island.
The pictures of Cuba during the Spanish-American war set a clear description back to Americans of what Cuba could be. “Havana’s image was disseminated abroad, becoming an object of popular interest in the United States…transform[ing] the Cuban Revolution of 1895 into the global imperial project” (Dopico, 457). Americans saw that they could make Cuba theirs. It could become a land to be conquered by the Americans, which went completely against the second half of the Monroe doctrine. It states, “But with the Governments who have declared their independence and maintained it…we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny” (Monroe). America was supposed to help free Cuba from their rulers, and then allow Cuba to control itself. Instead, they saw that Cuba was a place which could fulfill “commercial opportunities, missionary agendas, and geopolitical necessities” (Dopico, 457). American’s quickly abandoned their original goal in freeing Cuba from imperialist exploitation, and instead decided to exploit Cuba themselves.
Americans simply restarted the colonial cycle, instead of breaking it. In 1899, after successfully freeing Cubans from Spanish control, the Americans “bought off the army by offering to purchase its arms” (Keen, 414) and “offered key rebel leaders well-paid positions” (Keen, 414) in the first step towards imperialism. General Leonard Wood, an American officer who became appointed governor of Cuba in 1899, said these actions were done to “put down the ‘agitators who began to grow restive at the presence of the Americans” (Keen, 414). Even though Cubans did not enjoy their American leadership class, the Americans stayed. These actions were set up to control and exploit Cubans, much in the same way the Spanish had just a few years earlier.
Furthermore, all of these actions were paid for “from the Cuban treasury” (Keen, 414), in another critical step to conquer Cuba. Over the next 35 years, American troops or ambassadors were sent back to Cuba in 1906, 1917, 1921, and 1934 to interfere in political discussions and make sure colonial aims were continually carried out (Keen 415-418). These political aims were accomplished because the country’s infrastructure had been ruined in the Spanish-American war, and had also run out of money. Americans began to bring in cash in the forms of investment and tourism.
Cuba very quickly became the paradise Americans wanted it to be. As Louis Perez says in his essay “The Circle of Connections,” “Cuba became then and thereafter a place of exotic promiscuity and license, where the illegal was permissible–a place, one travel writer exulted in 1923, where ‘conscience could take a holiday’” (Perez, 173). Cuba became the metaphorical Eden that Americans could escape “repressive morality” (Perez, 173), and use the country as their playground, to their heart's content. However, Cubans realized that “emulation could not produce authenticity, that North Americans could not deal with them on any other terms than instrumental ones” (Perez, 177). Cubans realized that the way Americans were using Cuba was unsustainable and detrimental to the country’s future. When Fulgencio Batista had taken over in 1952, and the United States supported the dictator, Cuba finally had enough.
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bsp; After Batista had taken control, “the apparent indifference with which the U.S. government reacted to the abrogation of civil liberties in Cuba shocked and appalled many on the island” (Perez, 448). Batista’s government removed freedoms from its citizens, the American government acted with indifference, towards a population they had determined they wanted to protect through the Monroe Doctrine. The Cuban people finally had enough and overthrew Fulgencio Batista. As Louis Perez says it in his essay, “God endowed Cubans with the moral resources and collective will to resist possession” (Perez, 162). An uprising by the 26th of July movement successfully staged a coup, and Batista and his allies fled the island on January 1st, 1959. This overthrow, the second change in power in 7 years, led Cuba to establish a socialist government, in turn causing Americans to place a blockade between the two countries.
During the early days of the Castro regime, the U.S. put an embargo in place which cut the United States and its people off from the country. The vast tourist industries and ease of travel for people from Miami and various other points from the United States were almost immediately cut off. Furthermore, all American industry nationalized, and American business interests evaporated with the Batista government. The country that was once portrayed in ads as the “nearest truly foreign country;” and “no passport needed” was no longer a place Americans were allowed to go. However, their fascination never wavered. Once the country opened back up, the urges of Americans to conquer the country returned.
The Special Period marked a period of great famine and poverty across the island. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s primary trading partner, Cuba faced extreme shortages due to the lack of support provided to Cuba from outside sources. Amelia Weinreb best explains it, “While shortages are not as extreme as they were in the early 1990s, where and how to obtain desired items-before they run out-is still central to everyday neighborhood talk. ‘No es facil’ (it's not easy) is the chronic refrain” (Weinreb, 65). The special period gave way to new words to describe Cuban ways of life, and the things they struggled with on a daily basis. These words include; “luchar, ‘to struggle’; the master term of the era; conseguir, ‘to get hold of’; resolver, ‘to resolve’; and inventar, ‘to invent:' This cluster of verbs has taken on new and specific meanings in this historical moment” (Weinreb, 65). These words describe the incredible resolve of the Cuban people, and instead of being fed up with their situation, they create new ways to survive. For example, Cubans find ways to get much-needed supplies by “pilfering goods from the state warehouse, working without a license, evading taxes on income, or avoiding state services through a black market network” (Weinreb, 67). Cubans found a way to survive whatever was thrown at them, a remarkably resilient population, who survived and evolved, without American intervention.
The economic devastation of The Special Period led to an official act passed by the government in November 1995. The Foreign Investment Act ended up “demolishing forty years of socialist economic policy and officially inviting foreign investment on a massive scale” (Dopico, 460). This period highlighted “new possibilities for political intervention, and a new wave of Cubanology” (Dopico, 461) for Americans to take part. After thirty years of America being unable to exploit the island, the island was once again open for business and tourism. As Ruth Behar said in her Huffington Post column, “Curiously, the fascination that Americans today have with the island has everything to do with the fact that Cuba managed to exist for a half-century without the United States being there” (Behar, 2). The self-centered belief that a country can not advance without U.S. intervention is an extension of the imperialist nostalgia explained by Renato Rosaldo in his paper. America could not accept that the island had changed without American intervention.
In 1999, National Geographic went to Cuba and took pictures showing an “ultimately imperial globalizing gaze cast on Cuba” (Dopico, 477). These photos helped remind the U.S. of what it was missing, or that “Cuba has remained frozen in time for more than 50 years” (Behar, 1), and a country that could once again be molded into the American ideals for it. The National Geographic form of Cuba is “reproduced within the tropes of nostalgia and suspension, echoing the cultural symptomatology…a familiar imperial possession that for almost fifty years has remained just beyond its grasp” (Dopico, 480). These visions of Cuba sent back to the United States shows a land believed to have been stuck in time for fifty years, and that just because the U.S. was unable to influence it, Cuba could not have evolved or changed as a country.
This, of course, was untrue, as they had changed in many ways, which is best explained through the almendrones, or almond husks, the Cuban name for American cars from the 1950’s. The American classics left behind after the revolution still run on the streets throughout Cuba, but have been updated and fixed through Cuban ingenuity. As Ruth Behar explains, “if you pop open the hood you’ll see that all the innards have long since been replaced by modern Lada, Toyota, and Hyundai parts” (Behar, 3). This best explains the American beliefs of what Cuba was. The exterior to the country had not changed, so Americans believed it was impossible what had happened across Cuba could have changed.
This self-centered imperialist belief is extended into the Buena Vista Social Club. This film depicts American musician Ry Cooder going to Cuba to assemble an all-star crew of Cuban musicians. The perception given to Americans is that “if not for the intervention of Ry Cooder, the talented members of the ensemble he put together would have perished without national recognition” (Hernandez, 62). However, the people who were a part of this club were already famous, going against the narrative that Americans had saved these singers from abject poverty. For example, lead singer Ibrahim Ferrer is described to American viewers as a shoe shiner. However, in reality, Ferrer says “I didn’t need to shine shoes for money…I have to stay busy” (Hernandez, 63). Furthermore, the Cuban music that is of interest to other countries is not that of current times, but “Cuban music of a bygone era…focus on pre-revolutionary musical styles completely overlooks the upbeat and nationalistic character of most popular songs in contemporary Cuba” (Hernandez, 65). Americans have once again cherry-picked the parts of Cuba they would like to highlight, which then turns the country towards making the music that Americans will buy. Cubans are also then incentivized to perform the music which American tourists want to hear; not the Cuban music nationals wish to listen to, due to Americans having more disposable income they can spend on these performers.
Cuban’s also have different access to their land as foreign investors. As Yoani Sanchez says in her blog post titled “The Unbearable Roundness of A Golf Ball,” “our government has extended to 99 years the right of foreign investors to use our land…meanwhile local entrepreneurs are granted the use of agricultural land, in usufruct, for a mere ten years” (Sanchez, 2). Furthermore, some of the land that foreign investors are using will be used for golf courses, which are commonly known throughout the world as a sign of wealth and exces
s. Sanchez explains further how many parts of Cuba only get water twice a week, yet the golf course will be watered every single day, showing how other countries citizens take precedence in Cuba because they bring the dollars to the country.
In a country so dependent on foreign currency and foreign intervention to be able to have enough money for the citizens to survive (Behar Waiting for Ferry, 202), Cuba is incentivized to act the way tourists want them to in exchange for cash. This money further increases the speed with which Cuba’s becomes imperialized in whatever style which tourists best approve. A country in dire economic need such as Cuba will do whatever is necessary to survive. Unfortunately, this will most likely lead to it once again become a country that is not self-sufficient, and all the creativeness will leave the island, becoming another cookie cutter paradise for Americans on spring break.
Bibliography
Behar, Huffpo
Behar, Waiting for Ferry
Dopico
Hernandez
Monroe https://web.archive.org/web/20120108131055/http://eca.state.gov/education/engteaching/pubs/AmLnC/br50.htm
Keen
Perez
Rosado
Sanchez
Weinreb