Fifty Years of Revolution: Perspectives on Cuba, the United States, and the World

2. An Island on the Doorstep of the World: Cuba’s Place in U.S. Global Visions

2 An Island on the Doorstep of the World Cuba’s Place in U.S. Global Visions Ronald W. Pruessen The United States was a “Great Power” with global ambitions long before Fidel Castro’s forces took control of Havana in 1959—and there has always been a deeper saga at the core of the old and complex Cuban-U.S. relationship . While contemplation of the Cuban Revolution’s fiftieth anniversary has a way of prompting special attention to cold war conflicts, it is essential to keep in mind that this most recent half century in fact unfolded against a backdrop—within a context—that reveals patterns and dynamics of striking consistency as well as change. It would not even be too much to say that the cold war decades of Washington-Havana (and Washington-Moscow) tensions have been something of a “play within a play.” The Castro years (vis-à-vis the Eisenhower-Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon-Ford-Carter-ReaganBush -Clinton-Bush-Obama years) have had highly distinctive features, to be sure, and many of these are carefully explored by other contributors to this volume. The same years, however, also make up a later stage in a two-century plot line and the sweeping arc of the encompassing drama reveals many acts: a young nation’s break from the British Empire in the late eighteenth century, the emergence of a vision bright with expectations of a glorious future, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century steps that brought dramatically expanded power (even hegemony) in the international arena. And Cuba appeared on the stage very early on—as a flashing will-o’-thewisp for early dreamers and schemers, then as an irresistible, exploitable opportunity “right at our door” (as William McKinley put it).1 An Island on the Doorstep of the World · 31 I Aspirations to influence and status within the international arena were already in evidence among the Founding Fathers, those eighteenth-century leaders responsible for moving a rebel colonial cohort to nationhood. Alexander Hamilton once called his country “a Hercules in the cradle,” and those who struggled alongside him worked steadily to breathe life into such a vision. Even Hamilton’s frequent rival Thomas Jefferson did not shy away from ambitious expectations: when he arranged for the Louisiana Purchase, he rushed the pace of American movement toward transcontinental breadth. This was a goal that proved equally enticing and energizing to the founders’ successors—from John Quincy Adams in the 1820s to the Manifest Destiny advocates of the 1830s and 1840s.2 A national reach that stretched from the original terrain of the Atlantic coast to Texas, California, and the vast plains and mountains west of the Mississippi River served as the foundation for yet greater ambitions in the aftermath of the Civil War. A move from “continental” to “international” activism was made possible, in particular, by an economic transformation whose scale and speed were essentially unparalleled in previous world history . Blessed with abundant natural resources, technological inventiveness, a magnetic attraction to immigrants, and the ability to learn lessons from the early Industrial Revolution (to name a few key advantages), the United States galloped toward industrial and financial preeminence. Its population doubled between the Civil War and the turn of the twentieth century (from 35 million to 70 million) and prodigious productive feats became evident on almost every hand; for example, a railroad system that grew from 30,000 to 260,000 miles; industrial output that surpassed Great Britain’s and Germany ’s; exports that leapt from $280 million in 1865 to $1.2 billion in 1898.3 Both U.S. leaders and citizens flexed their ever-stronger muscles in the global arena of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From the purchase of Alaska to the annexation of Hawaii and the Philippines, from the building of a powerful navy to the construction of the Panama Canal, from scrapping with Great Britain during the Venezuela Boundary Dispute to tangling with Boxers in China, the United States had taken major strides toward Great Power status by the time William McKinley and then Theodore Roosevelt occupied the White House.4 Cuba figured both regularly and significantly in the U.S. ascension. The island had been part of American imaginaries early on—leading John 32 · Ronald W. Pruessen Quincy Adams famously to ruminate in Newtonian fashion: “There are laws of political as well as physical gravitation,” he wrote, “and if an apple severed...