Take the Spanish-American war and late nineteenth-century US interventions in Cuba. There are many reasons that the United States intervened in the ongoing Cuban War of Independence against Spain in 1898, first as attempted mediator, and later as co-belligerent to the Cuban revolutionaries. For example, American planters had significant financial stake in a stable and productive Cuba (a recurring theme in U.S.-Latin American relations in the years to come), and many Americans were genuinely horrified by the brutal anti-insurrectionist tactics of General Valeriano Weylar, who, in 1896, ordered all Cuban civilians to travel to fortified towns and camps held by his troops. These are widely considered some of the first concentration camps in modern history.[3] Americans saw in the Cuban insurrectionists the heroes of their own revolution, and many called for the United States to support the revolutionaries. But when the USS Maine sank in Havana harbor and the United States emerged victorious against Spain, business and military interests intersected with white supremacy to ensure that neither the Cubans nor the Filipinos saw true independence for another half-century.
But the cancer of white supremacy would not be limited to Cuba. There is a persistent rumor that President McKinley, when told of the victory of the Pacific Fleet at Manila Bay, could not find the Philippines on a map. This fiction is part of a long trend that seeks to cast the Philippine-American War as an accidental empire, as if the United States, fighting for Cuban freedom, tripped and fell into imperial status. This fiction is the result of decades of work to hide the American empire, work that continues to this day. America did not want an empire, the fiction goes. America accidentally gained an empire and quickly worked to guide its territory to independence, the fiction goes. The truth is that US foreign policymakers had been looking west since they reached the shores of the Pacific Ocean. American businessmen wanted access to the ports of the Far East. Hawaii, with its Pearl Harbor, and the Philippines, a final stop on the trade routes to China, were part of those steps of realizing the not-an-empire, an empire that white America would not allow to integrate with the continental United States.[4]