In a short video addressed to Cubans on Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that President Trump was offering them “a new path.”
Hours later, the Justice Department indicted Cuba’s former president, Raúl Castro, for having given orders to shoot down two small civilian planes in 1996. The indictment was part of a multipronged U.S. strategy to topple Cuba’s communist government, which has included threats from Mr. Trump that he will “take” the country.
But the latest U.S. pressure campaign against Cuba, including its attempts to control who leads the country, reflects a dynamic that is more than a century old. And the U.S. government’s decision to indict Mr. Castro on May 20 carries particular significance.
On May 20, 1902, the U.S. formally ended its military occupation of Cuba, which it had maintained in the years after a rout of Spanish colonial forces by a combination of U.S. troops and Cuban guerrillas who had been fighting an independence war for three decades. While other Spanish colonies like Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines became U.S. possessions, Cuba was granted independence.
Many Cubans “celebrated their independence to the tilt” at the time, said Michael Bustamante, who directs the Cuban American studies program at the University of Miami. “But it came with a big asterisk.”
There was more than one asterisk. The biggest was the Platt Amendment, which “basically authorized the United States to intervene in Cuban affairs going forward,” Dr. Bustamante said. Cuba was essentially forced to accept those terms or allow the U.S. military occupation to continue. During that era, U.S. business interests, particularly in sugar, began buying large plantations on the island.
Another asterisk was the granting of a perpetual lease over a strategic port in Cuba’s southeast that became Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.
The terms on which the U.S. lifted its military occupation “gave the United States many of the benefits of colonization without the responsibility,” Daniel Immerwahr, a historian at Northwestern University who studies U.S. colonialism, wrote in his book “How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States.”
Before the Platt Amendment was repealed in 1934, the U.S. would militarily occupy Cuba twice more, stepping in largely to protect its economic interests. The amendment helped destabilize Cuba, Dr. Bustamante said, because landowners would drum up unrest to precipitate U.S. intervention and the replacement of democratically elected leaders they opposed.
The communist government that came to power in Cuba’s 1959 revolution eventually abandoned May 20 as an official independence day. The White House, in a statement on Wednesday commemorating Cuban independence, said that the current government represented a “direct betrayal of the nation their founding patriots bled and died for.”
The choice of May 20 would resonate for most Cubans, said Dr. Bustamante.
“In the context of broader foreign policy worldview where the Trump administration is pushing to reassert U.S. dominance — their words not mine — in the Western Hemisphere,” he said, “they are hearkening back to this moment when the U.S. did treat Cuba as its backyard.”
Max Bearak is a correspondent for The Times focusing on breaking and international news.
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