Second U.S. intervention or the consolidation of imperialist domination

September 29, 1906 marked the beginning of the second U.S. intervention in Cuba, as per the Platt Amendment requested by President Tomás Estrada Palma to cope with the armed uprising of his adversaries of the Liberal Party, opposed to his reelection, calling it fraudulent and contrary to the stipulations of the Cuban Constitution.

Following a number of unsuccessful attempts to mediate between the contenders, the Theodore Roosevelt Administration accepted the request and appointed the Secretary of War William H. Taft as Provisional Governor of Cuba, eventually replaced by Charles E. Magoon for the duration of the intervention.

In 1905, as Estrada Palma’s mandate was drawing near, Estrada Palma decided to run for a second term, supported by the Moderate Party, which included the most reactionary sectors of the time, among them the former members of the Autonomist Party, an organization that congratulated the Spanish Captain General Valeriano Weyler when Antonio Maceo died in 1896.

To this end, they even had recourse to crime, masterminding the treacherous killing of Quintín Banderas, General of the three liberation wars. A year earlier, in September 1905, the young colonel of the Liberation Army, Enrique Villuenda, a prominent liberal politician and hard opponent of the president's plans, had been assassinated in the city of Cienfuegos by the police, under strange circumstances.

José Antonio Frías, of the ruling party, who publicly boasted about having ordered Villuenda's death, was honored by President Estrada Palma a few days later.

Behind his outlook as a selfless patriot, Estrada Palma had actively worked with the U.S. Congress to have the U.S. Army intervene in Cuba, promising to protect the interests of the large Yankee corporations during the new republic.

His endorsement as the providential man of the nascent imperialism to preside over the interfered Republic, proclaimed on May 20, 1902, was supported by many Cubans who knew his past and ignored his silent betrayal.

Unable to keep things at bay after the electoral fraud was consummated in December 1905, Estrada Palma requested the US intervention and resigned, thus creating a power vacuum that would force the US to intervene.

During the second intervention, the US authorities distributed money and gifts among corrupt politicians on both sides of the aisle at the expense of the national budget. They also strengthened the army, so the interests of the Union ended up pervading most of the Cuban economy.

The occupation lasted until January 28, 1909, when General José Miguel Gómez, central figure of the Liberal Party opposed to Estrada Palma whose scandalous plundering of the nation's wealth led the population to describe him as “a shark that gets wet but also shares the water”.

During the intervention, the empire strengthened the armed forces, the police, and the institutions of political and cultural control, but mostly the bases of the rampant corruption of the pro-Yankee political class that led the traditional parties, which stole by turns while in power thanks to their so-called "representative democracy".

Thus U.S. control over the Island was further guaranteed and, therefore, the Cuban people were pushed into a stage of profound frustration of the independence ideal from which only the progressive forces would emerge in the early 1920s, led by a new generation of revolutionaries led by Julio Antonio Mella, Ruben Martinez Villena and others who spearheaded the awakening of the national conscience.