The Platt Amendment, a burdensome monstrosity for a supposedly independent country

Orville Platt was an obscure U.S. senator who gained fame as the author of the bill bearing his name intended to become an annex to the 1902 Constitution of the Republic of Cuba, as a condition to be proclaimed as the new nation.

The bill included the recognition of the U.S.’s right to organize a military intervention and stated that Cuba could not have sovereign political and commercial relations with other countries without the approval of the White House, among other onerous conditions for a supposedly independent country.

The Platt Amendment also forced the Cuban government to cede some of its best bays for U.S. naval bases and to tolerate the possible annexation of the Isle of Pines, whose status would be defined in a future treaty.

In the absence of leaders such as José Martí and Antonio Maceo, the pro-independence fighters could not prevent this imperialist strategy from succeeding, taking into account that the plan was to sow discord among the Cuban patriots organized in the last vestige of independence, the Assembly of El Cerro, which dismissed Máximo Gómez as head of the Liberation Army.

The fledgling U.S. imperialism used the Platt Amendment as a key to set up the neocolonial system that followed the intervention in 1898 that frustrated Marti's hopes to an independent Cuba to close ranks with Our America and stand up to the designs of the northern giant.

General Leonard Wood, military governor of the Island during the American occupation, was very clear in his private correspondence in defining his policy when he expressed: (...) "Of course, Cuba has been left little or no independence with the Platt Amendment and the only thing indicated now is to seek annexation. (...) "With the control which will undoubtedly soon become possession, we shall shortly practically control the sugar trade of the world"....

The Amendment found great opposition in the Constituent Assembly, whose members concluded that, by accepting it, Cuba "will not have sovereignty, nor absolute independence, nor will it be a Republic". However, as a result of the enormous pressure on the assembly members to say yes as a condition for the end of the occupation, the Amendment was finally approved on June 12, 1901, by 16 votes to 11.

In 1934, the United States and Cuba signed a new treaty that abrogated the Platt Amendment, although the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo was not negotiable. Nothing better could be expected from a government led by Fulgencio Batista, the main ally of imperialism in a new stage of domination that would only come to an end with the triumph of the Revolution on January 1, 1959.

That century-old monstrosity of imperialist domination has acolytes within the Cuban-American mafia and some U.S. power circles. Beyond the disagreements between their traditional parties, they keep in place and maintain a sort of copy of the Platt Amendment, namely the Helms-Burton Act that underpins a brutal economic, commercial and financial blockade.

The dreams of restoring their imperialist domination in Cuba are bound to fail after more than 60 years of struggle and achievements of the Cuban people in defense of their national independence and for the construction of socialism.