This 1897 cartoon shows Liberty attracting poor (and Black) Cubans beside an Uncle Sam blind to the atrocities

By 1898, Spain was a dying empire, fighting hard to keep living. Since Caracas rebelled in 1810, it has lost all its richest colonies from California to Patagonia. When the 20th century approached, the kingdom had depleted its treasure, and society was exhausted from domestic conflict. That empire so large that King Philip II boasted the sun never set had shrunk to Cuba, Puerto Rico, the archipelagos of the Canary Islands and the Philippines, and some territories in mainland Africa: Ceuta, Melilla, the so-called Spanish Sahara and Equatorial Guinea. Spain needed to retain Cuba and the Philippines at any cost, against the increasing pressure of the independence movements led by intellectuals like José Martí and José Rizal, and engaged in brutal guerrilla combat with Spanish troops on the terrain.  

At the same time, the United States was feeling entitled to become a new empire. After taking half of Mexico in 1848 and winning the Civil War in 1865, the Union had just completed the conquest of its own land by decimating and displacing the Indigenous nations between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. So they looked at the islands Spain still held, which could serve as coaling stations and stepping stones toward South America and Asia. Some American leaders had dreamed about them for decades; planters actually tried to annex Cuba as a new source of fertile land where slavery was legal until 1866. 

Soon, Spain would give an excuse for the Americans who wanted a war of conquest. Ambitious men like a young and energetic New Yorker, Theodore Roosevelt, would take up the opportunity with unstoppable enthusiasm. 

The American invasion of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines would mean many things. Roosevelt would launch a career that ultimately led him to the White House; American journalists on the tropical battlefield would leave behind the 19th-century moralizing perspectives and open the path to authors like Ernest Hemingway; thousands of soldiers and nurses would die of tropical diseases like yellow fever, way more than under enemy fire; and Washington would learn that demonizing another people and leveraging its military might meant access to more riches and markets.

The news of this humanitarian crisis created by the Spaniards shocked the very religious American public, stirred by the Cuban exiles in the US.

This is the story told by the American historian Joe Jackson in a celebrated book: Splendid Liberators: Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance, and the Birth of American Empire. Jackson traveled to Cuba and the Philippines, following the tracks of his main characters, but his main sources were journals and letters of military officers and nurses in the field, and stories by famous writers on the battlefield like Steven Crane, the author of The Red Badge of Courage.

These written sources from the US inform Jackson’s perspective and tilt the book toward a protagonism of American voices, but Jackson didn’t deliver a patriotic book. Born in 1955, he belongs to a generation of Americans that grew up during the rise of their country as a superpower and the mess it left behind in Vietnam, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, plus the diverse degrees of intervention in Latin America and other parts of the world. He might have some bias (we all have it when researching and writing), but he’s able to sustain his thesis: when the Americans saw in Spain’s decline the chance to join the exclusive club of world rulers, they did it with a supremacy complex made of racial prejudice, disinformation, and economic voracity. 

From “Cuba libre” to economic domination

After several attempts, a new war of independence was raging in Cuba in 1896. When the militias led by Máximo Gómez began to control the countryside, the colonial troops burned the farms and pushed the inhabitants to concentration camps to stop them from helping the mambises. As a result, at least 200,000 men, women, and children died of starvation and disease. They were the reconcentrados: the first victims of concentration camps in the modern era. 

The invaders preferred to work with some officers of the ancien régime and the land barons that used to support Spanish rule.

The news of this humanitarian crisis created by the Spaniards shocked the very religious American public, stirred by the Cuban exiles in the US. Two newspapers competed for attention by inflaming the public ire, the ones from rivals Joseph Pulitzer (yes, the journalism prize is named after him) and Willian Randolph Hearst (also known for being the inspiration for Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane). More and more politicians started to say that a nation destined by God to bring justice to the Earth could not allow that holocaust to happen a few miles south of Florida. President McKinley ended up joining the frenzy, and in February 1898 everything set in motion when the USS Maine, a warship anchored in Havana to protect American citizens, exploded in the port, killing dozens of sailors. 

The remains of USS Maine after being blown up in the port of Havana. An investigation later found it was an accident

When Hearst, among others, spread the theory that it was an attack, President McKinley ordered the Navy to retaliate against the Spanish warships guarding the Bay of Santiago. The old Spanish ships were sunk in no time by the modern American destroyers, and the US Army —made of rough veterans but also thousands of volunteers who flooded the recruiting offices— invaded the Oriente province. The Spanish fought back, but they were unable to repel the invasion. In August, Spain offered capitulation. 

The problems came when the guys who had dedicated their lives to fighting the Spanish regime, the Cuban rebels, were immediately relegated to the role of cannon fodder and deprived of decision-making about their own country.

The invaders preferred to work with some officers of the ancien régime and the land barons that used to support Spanish rule. One of the insurgent generals broke his alliance with the Americans with a letter saying that “you have left in power in Santiago the same Spanish authorities that for three years I have fought as enemies of the independence of Cuba.” The reaction of the American general in charge of the invasion: complaining that the Cuban general “expected to be left in command of this place.”

The US Navy chief who was waiting on a boat to rule the Philippines, Commodore Dewey, wrote to Washington: “I never dreamed that they wanted independence.”

The American soldiers were astonished that the Cubans, few of whom were white, did not show the gratitude they expected. And started to despise them. Officer Samuel Young wrote that “the insurgents are a lot of degenerates, absolutely devoid of honor and gratitude… They are no more capable of self-government than the savages of Africa.” Meanwhile, US newspapers were printing headlines like “New Cuba More Attractive than Yukon Gold Fields”, as The New York Times did in July 1898. In December 1898, Spain and the US signed in Paris a treaty that formalized the independence from Spain of Cuba and Puerto Rico. No Cubans were allowed to take part in the treaty. American capital took over a great mass of land, mostly for sugar and tobacco, and the island was ruled by an American military governor. 

This is how the first American experiment in nation-building started. Spain surrendered Cuba and Puerto Rico, and the mambises demobilized after their leaders quit, under the US military occupation. In 1901, the US troops left the island, but Cuba had to reform its constitution to allow tight political and economic control from Washington. When the Cubans tried to change that, the US invaded again and occupied the country for three more years.

The Philippines as a new Far West

The Americans’ success in Cuba made the government think that controlling the Philippines would be easy as well. They saw the archipelago as key to expanding their footprint in Asia. Jackson quotes the US minister to Siam (now Thailand) in 1898, saying that “it is of the greatest importance that the United States should take the Philippine Islands”. The officer’s name: John Barrett. Yes, exactly the same as the current US chargé d’affaires in Venezuela.  

As in Cuba, the Filipinos had tried for years to expel the Spanish army. Their movement also included poets and fundraisers, exiled in Hong Kong, and rural guerrillas. But the situation in the Philippines was quite different. By May 1898, when the Americans had already built a close relationship with the Filipino leaders, the rebels were killing or capturing Spanish soldiers by the hundreds. They took cities, ports, and entire regions, and Spain was overwhelmed by the guerrilla tactics and popular support the nationalists used to their advantage, as well as the archipelago’s intricate terrain of many islands and inaccessible jungles. In June, the Filipino leader Emilio Aguinaldo besieged Manila and offered the Spanish governor a chance to surrender, while declaring the country’s independence (in terms similar to the US Declaration of Independence of 1776). The US Navy chief who was waiting on a boat to rule the Philippines, Commodore Dewey, wrote to Washington: “I never dreamed that they wanted independence.”

When the US and Spain signed peace in August, the Filipino rebels were already ruling a large part of the island and signed a Constitution based on Spain’s liberal constitution of 1812 (the one we call La Pepa in Spanish). “In less time than Cubans, or even Americans one century earlier,” wrote Jackson, “Filipinos had proved they could ‘self-govern’ their new nation.” But the abuse of American troops against the civilian population, and their increased hostility towards the Filipino nationalists who were building a republic on the ashes of colonial rule, led to the first deadly clashes between Americans and Filipinos by the end of 1898. Two months later, a new war had emerged, and it would be way more brutal and devastating than the one the US had just finished with Spain. It was the war against the “bandits”, “Indians,” and “savages” who did not accept that the Americans took over the country they had fought for. 

History does not repeat itself, but to what point is the Trump administration resolved to “make America great again” by implementing a new version of what it did in Cuba and the Philippines?

From then on, until 1902, the Filipino nationalist troops would be exterminated along with entire villages. Some Buffalo Soldiers, as Black soldiers were known in the American army, deserted and began fighting along with the locals, convinced that they had more in common with Filipinos than with the white Americans who even abroad continued to discriminate against them. 

The story of the “splendid war”, as some propagandists of the time called it, is ugly. That might be the reason it’s been forgotten, deliberately hidden. According to Jackson, the Americans discovered with that war a side of themselves they still refused to see after what they had experienced during their violent 19th century. Just like the conquistadors in the 16th century, who had just pushed the Arabs out of the Iberian Peninsula, and the Spanish soldiers in 1815 who invaded Venezuela after fighting the French, many Americans sent to Cuba and the Philippines were hardened by previous wars. Their colonels and generals had served in both armies of the Civil War, and later in the campaigns against the Sioux and the Apaches. They knew how to fight, and they dehumanized their enemies through racism: they learned to see Cuban and Filipinos as brown savages incapable of governing themselves, and ultimately unworthy of being treated as human beings. “As we’d already done to Native Americans, in order to save them, we had to kill them.” 

Pretty much what would happen in Vietnam six decades later.

Theodore Roosevelt, among others, believed Americans belonged to a superior race that, like others in History, had to prove its value on the battlefield, as much as with technological progress, entrepreneurship, and commerce. “Americans broke promises implicit in the way they imagined themselves”, wrote Jackson. “Cubans hoped to manipulate the northern giant, and learned otherwise. Filipinos were the most tragic, naive in their choice of saviors, realizing too late that they’d exchanged one master for another.”

The American Century

For Spanish historians Fernando García de Cortázar and Manuel González Vesga, the war of 1898 was a national tragedy for Spain because it happened at the hands of a foreign power, not as the result of a war between Spanish subjects, as happened in the South American republics. For the US, it started the American Century. The Monroe Doctrine was tested by events like the naval blockade of Venezuela in 1902, when the US sent gunboats to expel the European vessels bombing and besieging La Guaira, and expanded in the Roosevelt administration to big projects like the Panama Canal. Cuba and the Philippines remained under control for decades. Guam and Puerto Rico still belong to the US as unincorporated territories. 

Seen with Venezuelan eyes in 2026, the parallels are disturbing. We see videos on social media made from the air, with boats exploding like the USS Maine. We witness how entire immigrant communities and nationalities, Venezuelans included, are demonized in conservative media and by Trump himself. We see the extraction of Maduro and Trump boasting about how he is getting millions of oil barrels from Venezuela while keeping, as a branch of his tycoon government, the dictatorship that ravaged our country, promising to control it for years.   

Yet this is not 1898. Today’s Venezuela, as dismal as its economic and social state is, still has a democratic experience that Cuba or the Philippines did not have at the end of the 19th century. US troops have not invaded Venezuela. They are not shooting Venezuelan militias in the countryside, not even in the mines in Las Claritas. They are not wiping out civilians. We still must expect Venezuela will see more investment than fire from the US. And there’s no doubt we need it.

That said, we can’t ignore some questions. History does not repeat itself, but to what point is the Trump administration resolved to “make America great again” by implementing a new version of what it did in Cuba and the Philippines? How many Venezuelans, from all walks of life, are actually wishing that, instead of rebuilding our republic from the chavista disaster, it will be annexed by the US one way or another? And what can we do, the rest of us who want a fruitful relationship with the US but also a truly independent, democratic Venezuela?