The Anglo-Cuban Treaty of 1905

El Tratado anglo-cubano de 1905: Estados Unidos contra Europa
Jorge Renato Ibarra Guitart
La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2008
269 pages

The United States and Great Britain were not always as closely allied as the current received wisdom would have us believe and there was a time when commercial competition in Latin America produced considerable tensions between the two powers. Jorge Ibarra Guitart's new book El Tratado anglo-cubano de 1905: Estados Unidos contra Europa (The Anglo-Cuban Treaty of 1905: US against Europe) usefully examines in detail one aspect of the US challenge to British commercial hegemony within its self proclaimed "backyard".

Following US intervention in the Cuban war of independence, the notorious Platt Amendment severely restricted the independence of the new republic. Less widely discussed is the Reciprocity Treaty of 1903, which gave the USA commercial advantage over other countries by reducing customs duties on American goods, although the reciprocal tariff reductions on Cuban exports to the US were not nearly so far-reaching. In an attempt to assert a greater degree of independence from their northern neighbour, the new Cuban government agreed to negotiate a commercial and navigation treaty with the United Kingdom. Ibarra's book uses the events surrounding these treaty negotiations to demonstrate both the way in which the US used extra-economic coercion within Cuba to enforce its domination of the island's economy and, on an international level, how Cuba became a diplomatic pawn in the wider relations between the two larger powers.

The most shocking example of the way in which the Treaty of Reciprocity favoured US interests above the Cuban concerns, was in the importation of rice - then as now a staple part of the Cuban diet and, at the time, almost entirely imported from British India. US rice growers from Louisiana, aided by the US ambassador to Cuba, Herbert Squires, exerted influence on the Cuban House of Representatives to approve the application of the reciprocity treaty in such a way that US rice would be greatly favoured over its Indian equivalent. Not only would this have raised the price of rice to a level that would have caused hunger in poorer Cuban families, US production would not have been enough to fill the market requirements. However, in addition to the local outcry, many US liberal newspapers opposed the measure as shameful and the "Rice Law" was finally blocked by the Cuban Senate. Nevertheless, the incident illustrates the extent to which the Cuban sugar oligarchy willingly sacrificed the potential for national economic development and wider international trade to their narrow sectional interest in maintaining preferential access to the US market for their sugar exports. Even in the matter of sugar, Ibarra argues that a more independent trade policy, which could have taken advantage of the opportunities opened up by the 1902 Brussels Convention to trade sugar more profitably in Europe, was rejected by a bourgeoisie that had already abandoned the desire for real economic independence.

This subordinate attitude is one of the themes of the book and most of the Cuban élite are seen as willing collaborators in the corruption and blackmail that the United States used to maintain its economic and political dominance over Cuba. The book's account of the debate in the Cuban senate over ratification of the treaty makes compelling reading with the antagonism between the President of the Foreign Affairs Commission, Antonio Gonzalez de Bustamante, who opposed the Anglo-Cuban Treaty, and the nationalist opposition around Senator Manuel Sanguily raising issues that would recur throughout the rest of Cuban history. Simultaneously, the shadowy activities of Ambassador Squires, manipulating Cuban politicians behind the scenes, represent another repeated thread in the story of Cuba in the first half of 20th century.

The failure of the treaty to finally achieve ratification comes at a time when America's economic star was rising while British capitalism had passed its peak. The US economy was expanding and seeking foreign investment possibilities and, by exerting its dominant position in Cuba to Britain's disadvantage, not only were US profits assured, but a valuable springboard was created from which to expand into the rest of the region. In the end, Britain had greater need of US support in China and Africa and, despite the pleading of the British Ambassador, Lionel Carden, sacrificed the needs of British business engaged in the Cuba trade to its wider imperial interests, a move, however, that started the long slow decline of British commercial interests in Latin America.

If the book has a weakness, it lies in the subtext: this implies that Cuba could have better developed its economy by relying on the British to a greater extent. There is no explicit recognition that many countries in the British sphere of influence in the rest of the world found themselves as disadvantaged by this domination as Cuba was by its relations with the US. This is a minor quibble however in the context of an excellent account of a little known chapter in Anglo-US relations which could usefully be translated into English and thereby find a wider audience on this side of the Atlantic.

Steve Cushion is based at London Metropolitan University's Caribbean Studies Centre, conducting doctoral research on the subject of the organised working class and the Cuban Revolution.

Copyright
Copyright for this work is held jointly between Steve Cushion and the International Journal of Cuban Studies under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative 3.0 Licence
IJCS Volume 1 Issue 2 December 2008