British Diplomacy and US Hegemony in Cuba, 1898-1964

Christopher Hull has discovered that, whereas Cuban diplomatic records remain closed to investigation and US records only occasionally mention British involvement, British governmental records offer an “uninterrupted and revealing” source of information about British diplomacy and policy toward Cuba, with many insights about the relationship between the United States and Cuba (p. 14). Working through the files of the Foreign Office as well as other British governmental records, Hull offers in British Diplomacy and US Hegemony in Cuba, 1898–1964 an engaging new perspective on the history of Cuban foreign relations, an important contribution to a historiography too often fixated narrowly on the Havana-Washington axis.The narrative proceeds chronologically from perfidious Albion's seizure of Havana in the Seven Years' War to Britain's gradual acceptance of the “‘natural hegemony’ of the United States in its own sphere” (p. 24). Chapters 2 and 3 describe waning British influence in the island as US investment overtook British investment during the First World War. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 offer new insights into the tumultuous period from 1929 to 1952, when Cuba experienced, in 1933, a populist revolution and a series of anti-imperialist labor policies threatened the viability of foreign, including British, companies on the island. Chapters 7, 8, and 9 examine British responses to Fulgencio Batista's military coup in 1952, Fidel Castro's revolution in 1959, and the events that followed, including the Bay of Pigs debacle and the Cuban Missile Crisis.The study focuses on whether British policy in Cuba was determined independently or confined to the “margins of US acquiescence” (p. 90). Hull finds that British diplomats most often chose to defer to the United States' policy preferences. Yet it was not passive acquiescence but rather caution and alertness to opportunity that defined their method. These diplomats balanced advocacy for British interests in the island against the possibility and consequences of offending US interests. There were many noteworthy exceptions to a policy of acquiescence, when Britain challenged or deviated from US designs. The balancing and the exceptions reveal a complex and delicate triangular web of interests that underwent considerable transformation from the end of Spanish rule to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.The earliest clash of interests emerged in the first few years after the US occupation. British diplomats cautiously discouraged Cuba from signing the treaty of trade reciprocity with the United States, seeking instead to open the island to free trade with an Anglo-Cuban most-favored-nation treaty. The effort failed as the State Department objected to British interference and the Cuban Congress doubted whether a treaty signed with another foreign power would be tolerated by the United States. Tensions between British economic interests and US political preferences in the island recurred over the decades and reached a head with the fall of Batista and the rise of Castro. The US imposition of an arms embargo on the Batista regime clashed with Britain's reliance on trade and shipping. Criticizing the embargo as “clumsy and tactless,” Britain sold 17 fighter planes to Cuba (p. 150). When Batista's government imploded before all the planes had been delivered, Britain shipped the remaining planes to the Castro regime, considering it harmful to its interests to halt delivery and unwise to become embroiled in the US-Cuban conflict. The contrast between the United States' fear of communism and Britain's principled commitment to open trade kept tensions alive and defined the triangular relationship in the formative years of Castro's revolutionary regime.The words and observations of British diplomats, acting as a third party, offer many fascinating insights into the complex relationship between Cuba and the United States. On several occasions, for example, during the revolutions of 1933 and 1959, British diplomats foresaw mistakes made by the State Department through the lens of their experiences in Egypt. As early as 1960, the Foreign Office warned that “excessive pressure” from the United States could have “a counterproductive effect” (p. 167). Similarly, in 1933, observing Sumner Welles's handpicked replacement for President Gerardo Machado, an officer in the Foreign Office commented, “The Americans have now, by inducing President Machado to relax his grip, set in motion a revolutionary force which will not easily be checked” (p. 82). Shortly afterward, the State Department — but not the Foreign Office — was taken by surprise as Cuba was gripped by a sergeants' mutiny and a populist revolution.If there is weakness in the book, it is that these insights appear ad hoc in an analysis of British diplomatic acquiescence to US interests. A systematic examination of the insights that British diplomats, experienced in the administration of a vast empire, could offer to the American imperial experiment would have made the narrative less predictable, and it would have more thoroughly exploited the new dimensions that the study of the British perspective has to offer. This, however, should not detract from the work's valuable accomplishments. British Diplomacy and US Hegemony in Cuba masterfully “dilute[s] the [usual] narrow US-Cuban focus” and offers a fresh and indispensable new look into twentieth-century Cuban history (p. 14)

Diplomacy · Economic history · Hegemony · Political science · Politics · Cuban History and Society · History · Law

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