When Barack Obama met Raúl Castro, in an attempt to re-forge friendship, he stressed continuities that bind Cuba and the U.S. His claim that the same ideals inspired both can probably be dismissed as rhetoric. He surely spoke from the heart, however, when he averred, with only a little exaggeration, that “like the United States the Cuban people can trace their heritage both to slaves and slave-owners.”
The most conspicuous links between the two countries, however, have been political and paradoxical: Cuba has spent its entire existence as a state and much of its late colonial past in Uncle Sam’s purported backyard, threatened with annexation or subject to domination, economic exploitation or enmity. On the other hand the U.S. has harbored most of the exiles who conspired and fought for what Hugh Thomas, in the best history of the island, called Cuba’s “pursuit of freedom.” As in much of the Americas, the U.S. in Cuba has been a benign example and a malignant master. Ada Ferrer’s “Cuba: An American History” focuses on the equivocal relationship of the two countries, and presents it convincingly as symbiotic.
Early American politicans’ designs on Cuba seem “strange” in retrospect, writes Ms. Ferrer, a professor of history at New York University. Yet annexation might well have succeeded. Before 1861, submission to the U.S. was the best bet that wealthy Cubans had for prosperity: It promised to prolong slavery, which Spain had formally abolished but which had continued, protected by inertia and graft. Annexation might also have mitigated competition from Louisiana’s sugar industry. It would also have brought free trade with the island’s biggest market and source of supply.
In the 19th century, U.S. governments repeatedly offered to buy Cuba. Some sought to seize it. By the time the U.S. adopted the role of successor-empire to Spain’s in 1898, the best chance had gone: Slavery had vanished, thanks to economic change rather than political will; Louisianan sugar never recovered from the Civil War; and the long struggles against Spain had given Cuban elites a taste for independence. So, in the great lurch of U.S. imperialism that overleapt Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, the Panama Canal zone and the Virgin Islands, “that infernal little Cuban republic” (as Teddy Roosevelt called it) escaped, like a minnow from between the gaps in Leviathan’s dentures.
The jaws stayed menacingly open. The U.S. kept its Guantánamo base and imposed a settlement that conferred a right—formally, an obligation—to intervene, in effect, at will. This was a prerogative, as Ms. Ferrer says, “to exercise permanent, indirect rule.” Foreigners took over most rural property and almost the entire sugar industry. The arrangement favored corrupt and sometimes criminal elites.