Six thousand American troops participated in the British occupation of Havana in 1762-3, but the island was exchanged for Florida at the peace treaty of 1763. The independent United Stated flirted with the idea of annexing Cuba from the time of Thomas Jefferson’s’ administration. In the 1840s and 1850s, US leaders saw Cuba’s strategic importance in the Caribbean and feared British sea power there. Southern politicians were anxious to add another slave state to the Union, and Presidents Polk, Pierce, and Buchanan tried unsuccessfully to buy Cuba from Spain. The Ostend manifesto of 1854 recommended seizure if Spain would not sell.
Among Cubans at this time, the desire for separation from Spain focused on possible annexation to the US. Fearful the United Kingdom might force Spain to abolish slavery, or a Haitian-type rebellion occur, many Creole planters, and not a few writers and intellectuals, saw numerous commercial and security advantages in a close relation with the North. These élites seriously questioned the future of Cuba under Spanish rule, while characterizing the ordinary Cuban as “a slave, politically, morally, and physically.” Annexation would ensure “Cuba’s peace and future success; her wealth would increase; liberty would be given to individual action, and the system of hateful and harmful restrictions which paralyzed commerce and agriculture would be destroyed.”
There were, however, risks in promoting annexation. Threatened with losing Cuba, Spain might free the slaves and use them against the white planters (as the British had done to a limited extent during the American Revolutionary War), or the Blacks themselves might see the struggle as an opportunity for liberation. Yet the example of Jamaica, where a slave revolt had been crushed just before Britain’s 1839 abolition of slavery, encouraged the annexationists, as did the awareness of their own power. In 1847 the pro-annexation Club the la Habana was formed and in 1847-51 Narciso López made several attempts to overthrow Spanish rule, apparently with annexation in mind.
Several events in mid-century weakened the annexationist movement. For one thing, the fears of the Cuban planters were somewhat appeased when Spain stiffened its resistance to British pressure to end slavery. The violent expansion of the United States into Texas, northern Mexico, and California, and the lukewarm attitude of its government to annexation were discouraging. The northern American states would not consider the admission of another slave state, while the southern states only wanted Cuba admitted as a slave state. The development of an incipient nationalism, particularly among Creole intellectuals, offered the élites an alternative to annexation, while López’s failure showed how little support the movement had among the mass of ordinary Cubans. Finally, the United States Civil War dealt a deathblow to those who still hoped for a close relation with a similar slave society.
By the 1890s, however, expansionists in the United States were again pressing for annexation and were almost successful when the Spanish-American War resulted in the first United States intervention. But, although there was still some support for annexation among Cuba’s economic élites, the US government felt it could not pursue it without the acquiescence of the general population, nor was it keen to assume the island’s huge public debt. Cuba was made independent in 1902. Only after the end of the second US intervention in 1909 did annexation cease to be a serious political option.
