Cuba

The island nation of Cuba found itself the object of American advocates of Manifest Destiny and proslavery expansionists in the antebellum period, as the United States sought to extend its influence and continue to wrestle with the issue of slavery.

The sugar industry exploded after 1791, when French planters fled a slave revolt in Haiti and settled in Cuba. Sugarcane rapidly blanketed the island, and as a result 700,000 Africans were imported to work the plantations over the next 40 years; they eventually outnumbered whites on the island. Cuba was the world’s largest sugar producer, and the newly independent United States was its biggest market. Meanwhile, the criollo bourgeoisie (born in Cuba of Spanish descent) was becoming wealthier and impatient with Spanish rule. By 1825, there were only two Spanish colonies left in the Americas: Cuba and Puerto Rico. The United States twice attempted to buy Cuba from Spain, in 1848 and 1854, but the colonial power refused to sell. In the 1850s, nationalist pressure for self-rule began to build and soon became unstoppable.

Having acquired East and West Florida from Spain in 1819, the United States had expanded to within 90 miles of Cuba. In a letter to Minister to Spain Hugh Nelson, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams described the likelihood of U. S. “annexation of Cuba” within half a century despite obstacles: “But there are laws of political as well as of physical gravitation; and if an apple severed by the tempest from its native tree cannot choose but fall to the ground, Cuba, forcibly disjoined from its own unnatural connection with Spain, and incapable of self support, can gravitate only towards the North American Union, which by the same law of nature cannot cast her off from its bosom.” Cubans called this policy la fruta madura (ripe fruit); Washington would wait until the fruit was considered ripe for the picking.

By the end of the 18th century the United States had begun to play an increasingly prominent role in Cuba. With Spain involved in the European wars of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the U. S. government was in a good position to take advantage of the situation. It was geographically well-positioned, since Cuba was only 90 miles away; the United States was growing in population; and the U. S. economy was expanding.

By 1850 the United States, Great Britain, and Spain accounted for 80 percent of Cuba’s total foreign trade, with the Americans capturing 39 percent of the market, the British 34 percent, and the Spanish 7 percent. Spain’s importance to Cuba had diminished relative to that of the United States, and Spain could guarantee neither adequate markets for Cuban goods nor sufficient supplies. Yet while Spain’s importance was declining, the government refused to relinquish its hands-on approach to Cuban affairs and continued to regulate Cuban trade by levying customs duties on imports and taxes on exports, thereby lowering profits for Cuban producers and increasing prices for the island’s consumers.

In 1825 Mexico and Venezuela planned an expedition to Cuba in order to help the struggle for independence. But the United States, fearing an independent Cuba would lead to the end of slavery with repercussions in the southern states, let it be known that it would block any move to liberate Cuba from Spain.

Throughout the 1840s there had been several invasion attempts by southern expansionists, in the hopes that the slave-owning elite would declare independence from Spain. Once Cuba was independent, it would be invited to join the Union as a slave state. In October 1849, the first filibustering expedition by Narciso Lopez, with the intention of invading Cuba, ended in abject failure. Lopez led a second expedition in May 1850 and, after that failed, another expedition in August 1851. On this third attempt, Lopez was captured by the Spanish army and publicly executed in Havana.

In 1853 President Franklin Pierce covertly supported a new Cuban expedition led by John A. Quitman, an associate of Narciso Lopez and former governor of Missouri. While Quitman was building his forces, Pierce offered Spain $130 million for Cuba, which was refused. In Havana, Spanish police boarded an American merchant ship, the Black Warrior, and imprisoned her crew under the charge of “violating customs regulations.” The Pierce administration tried to take advantage of the situation by threatening to declare war on Spain, but northern Democrats would not support Pierce’s attempt to take Cuba by force, so the ploy failed.

Under instructions from Secretary of State William Marcy to put pressure on Pierce to seize the island, the American minister to Spain, as well as the ambassadors to France and Great Britain, sent an inflammatory message to Pierce that became known as the Ostend Manifesto. Invoking the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny, the three American diplomats declared that the United States was justified in seizing Cuba. Quickly leaked to the press by antiexpansionists, the Ostend Manifesto triggered a new wave of northern resentment against the South and forced Pierce to halt his efforts to acquire Cuba.

Further reading: Louis A. Perez, Jr., Cuba and the United States: Ties of Singular Intimacy (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990).

—Richard Friedline

Dana, Richard Henry (1815-1882) lawyer, writer Author and lawyer Richard Henry Dana was among a small group of Eastern literary figures (including Francis Park-man) who wrote about the West. Born in Massachusetts in 1815, Dana entered Harvard College in 1831 at the age of 16. Dogged by health problems, especially failing eyesight as a result of an earlier bout with measles, he withdrew from college. His family then sent him on a long sea voyage to recover his health. In 1834, he sailed as a common seaman on the brig Pilgrim, bound from Boston to California by way of Cape Horn. Arriving in California in 1835, Dana witnessed the trade in hides and tallow characteristic of the California economy at the time. He returned to Boston in excellent health in 1836, reenrolled in Harvard College, graduated in 1837, and then read law and was admitted to the bar in 1840. That same year, he published Two Years Before the Mast, an account of his two-year voyage and sojourn in California.

Dana’s book gave him something of a national literary reputation and became known for its descriptions of the brutal treatment of common sailors on ship. In additional to the physical hardships of poor food, little sanitation, and crowded living conditions, sailors were subjected to arbitrary and brutal punishment by officers, especially flogging, for a variety of transgressions. The book was also an invaluable account of life in Mexican California, if not the most important detailed description of the Californios’s existence before their lands and culture were submerged by the great influx of Americans after the California gold rush of 1849. Dana’s depictions of the California ranchos and the elaborate pastoral economic and social life built on trade in hides and tallow have become a necessary historical document for understanding life in California before 1848. The book was later reprinted in English and French editions.

Dana practiced law with great success, specializing in admiralty cases. He also pursued an interest in politics, becoming an important figure in the Free-Soil Party. In 1851 he acted as attorney for the defense for Shadrach

Minkins, who was rescued by abolitionists, in Boston and also defended fugitive slave Anthony Burns in 1854. Dana’s interest in politics had a patrician slant to it. He believed strongly in the principles associated with political parties and their platforms (hence his support of the antislavery doctrines of the Free-Soil Party), but he had no taste for campaigning, and he intensely disliked the corruption and favoritism popularly associated with successful political campaigns.

Dana continued his successful law practice for the next 30 years. In 1866 he lost a contest for a seat in the U. S. Senate to Benjamin Butler. A decade later, President Ulysses S. Grant nominated Dana as ambassador to England, but the Senate refused to confirm him because Grant had acted without consulting party leaders. In 1882 Dana died in Rome, Italy, while on a tour of the continent.

Further reading: Robert L. Gale, Richard Henry Dana (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1968).