Cuban War of Independence – The Spanish-american War
by The United States watched the war unfold with more than just casual interest.
From the beginning, several sectors of political and public opinion clamored for U.S. involvement. In part, this
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excitement was generated by Cubans themselves. Rebel representatives based in New York City, led by future Cuban president Tomás Estrada Palma, brought accusations of Spanish brutality, especially under Weyler, to the attention of the city’s premier institutions of “yellow journalism,” namely, the papers of William Randolph Hearst. With such popular and favorable press coverage, supporters of Cuban independence were able to use the United States as a primary base to raise money, materials, and support for the war. For many Americans, including among leading African American intellectuals and media, the continued Spanish presence seemed to fly in the face of the anticolonial, post emancipation destiny of the Americas. Yet U.S. opinion was still divided over Cuba’s future. By the time the war broke out, less than 20% of Cuba’s sugar mills were Cuban owned, and at least 95% of all of Cuba’s sugar exports were destined for the United States. United States owners and investors in the Cuban industry thus watched with horror as their properties (and the business interests of the United States) came under threat not only from the cruelty of the Spanish but also from rebel troops whose insurgency unleashed an uncompromising slash-and-burn strategy in the Cuban countryside. For some of these U.S. investors and some Washington politicians, autonomy but not complete independence for Cuba emerged as an enticing option. The administration of Grover Cleveland refused to grant Cuban rebels the status of belligerents. Indeed, early in the war, Cleveland’s secretary of state explicitly urged Spain to offer autonomy in order to avoid ultimate U.S. intervention. After all, more threatening than the prospect of continued violence was Cuban independence. Spain at first refused, convinced at the time of its ability to win the war. Yet it soon saw autonomy as the only hope of holding on to Cuba and in late 1897 established a local autonomous government based in Havana. For the U.S. press, independence supporters, and the jingoist impulses that guided much of U.S. public opinion during this era of international manifest destiny, autonomy
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