Cuba and the United States: Ties of Singular Intimacy

1. The Origins of Relations

The Origins of Relations Relations between Cuba and the United States began modestly enough through irregular commercial contacts, mostly illicit, between European colonies in the New World, trading to obtain otherwise scarce commodities or to elude exorbitant colonial taxes—and sometimes both. This trade was both practical and logical for each partner, but especially forthe Cubans. Theeighteenthcenturybrought comparatively good economic times to Cuba, a period of sustained if not spectacular economic growth. Local producers and consumers were in need of wider markets for expanding production and increased imports in response to growing consumption. Much of this expanded trade centered on the production of tobacco commodities, largely in the form of powdered tobacco for snuff, cut tobacco for pipe smoking, and leaf tobacco for cigar manufacturing. The productionof hides also expanded, and exports both legal and illicit soared. But it was sugar that registered the more notable advances during the first half of the eighteenth century. The number of millsincreased, the cultivation of cane expanded, production modernized. During the 17305, Cuban annual output reached a record two thousand tons, more than doubling by the end of the 17508 to fifty-five hundred tons.l But the expansion of the Cuban economy was not an unmixed blessing . Its success, especially during the reign of the Bourbons, brought Cuban prosperity to the attention of the always penurious royal exchequer . The Bourbons had introduced a new efficiency to colonial administration, and there was no mistakingthe purpose of the policy: it aspired to nothing less than complete controlover colonial resources and receipts. The early Bourbons promoted the development of state monopolies, most notably the Factoria de Tabacos (1717), to control production, prices, and distribution of tobacco, and the Real Compania de Comercio (1740), to regulate trade and commerce between Spain and Cuba. The results were not long in coming. To the dis1 i 2 CUBA AND THE UNITED STATES may of Cuban producers and consumers, the opportunities to export their goods and the prices paid for their products declined even as the supply of imports diminished and their prices increased. But Cuban complaints were not confined to state monopoly schemes. No less irksome to local producers and consumers was the endless proliferation of new taxes and the increase of old ones. Indeed , taxation was a central feature of the Bourbon strategy for transferring revenues from the colony to the metropolis. The number of taxes increased and methods of collection improved. Profits went down, prices went up. No sector of Cuban society was immune from taxes, in one form or another, on one product or on one service or another. There were other problems, most of which had less to do with colonial administration than with economic organization. In fact, rising Cuban production had overtaken existingtransportation capacity and available markets. Twodevelopments were occurring at once: increasingly transportation bottlenecks—from production points to ports, but especially from ports to overseas markets—were frustrating Cuban efforts to expand production. Spain could not provide Cuban producers with adequate shipping, on a sufficiently regular basis, to accommodate expanding sugar production, both actual and potential. Increasingly, too, and equally troublesome, Spain was losing the capacity to absorb Cuba's rising production but resisted Cuban demands for free access to wider markets. Spain was not always consistent in these efforts, nor were the efforts always successful. That was part of the problem. These conditions underscored the growing anomaly of a dynamic colonial economy dependent on a stagnant metropolis. Spanish producers were losing the ability to provide the island with sufficient imports at reasonable prices, both of which were necessary to sustain continued economic growth in Cuba. No less important, Spain's inability to provide Cuban planters with African slaves in adequate numbers, with regularity, and at reasonable prices acted in still one more fashion to thwart the expansion of Cuban production. On all counts, and all at once, Spanish colonialism was straining to accom- 3 The Origins of Relations modate to the changes transforming the Cuban economy and increasingly revealing itself incapable of doing so. Some of the more opprobrious features of Spanish colonialism were made bearable during the early decades of the eighteenth century by the occasional availability of alternative markets and new sources of imports, principally in the form of trade with North American colonies . Spanish authorities had long looked upon trade between Cuba and British North America with some ambivalence, alternating between passive acquiescence and active resistance...