Platt Amendment Enacted - Cuba Becomes U.S. Protectorate

Congress enacts the Platt Amendment as part of the Army Appropriations Act, stipulating seven conditions for withdrawal of U.S. troops remaining in Cuba after the Spanish-American War, plus an eighth condition requiring Cuba to sign a treaty accepting these conditions. The amendment, spearheaded by Senator Orville H. Platt (chair of the Senate Committee on Relations with Cuba), General Leonard Wood (Governor of Cuba), and Secretary of War Elihu Root, originates from American mistrust of the Cuban Constituent Assembly and desire to maintain Cuba as a “self-governing colony” under U.S. control. The legislation severely restricts Cuba’s sovereignty by denying its right to sign treaties with third powers, allowing the United States to oversee Cuban government finances, declaring U.S. right to intervene in Cuban affairs to preserve Cuban independence and maintain order, and requiring Cuba to cede land for U.S. military bases including Guantanamo Bay. Cubans reluctantly incorporate the amendment into their constitution under duress, recognizing that rejection would mean continued direct military occupation.

The Platt Amendment exposes the hypocrisy of the Spanish-American War’s humanitarian justifications: while the 1898 Teller Amendment prohibited the U.S. from retaining formal ownership of Cuba, the Platt Amendment establishes parameters of U.S. control and limits of Cuban sovereignty that effectively make Cuba a U.S. protectorate rather than the independent nation promised during the war. The amendment allows intervention whenever the United States determines order needs maintaining—a deliberately vague standard that permits military action at American discretion. The requirement to cede Guantanamo Bay creates a permanent U.S. naval base that remains operational even after the amendment’s 1934 repeal under Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy. Cuban resentment runs deep as Cubans realize they have simply exchanged Spanish colonial rule for American neocolonial control, with their sovereignty constrained and their economic policy dictated by U.S. interests—particularly sugar corporations that dominate the Cuban economy post-annexation.

The Platt Amendment establishes the template for American neocolonialism in Latin America: formal independence undermined by treaty obligations that grant the United States intervention rights, economic control, and military bases. Cuba’s compelled acceptance demonstrates how military occupation can coerce supposedly sovereign governments into accepting permanent limitations on their autonomy. The arrangement benefits American sugar corporations like United Fruit Company (later Dole) that come to dominate Cuban agriculture, while Cuban economic development becomes oriented toward serving U.S. market demands rather than domestic needs. The amendment’s intervention clause will be invoked repeatedly over the next three decades whenever Cuban governments pursue policies threatening American business interests, establishing precedents for interventionism throughout the Caribbean and Central America that shape U.S.-Latin American relations throughout the 20th century. The permanent Guantanamo Bay lease, surviving even the amendment’s repeal and the Cuban Revolution, symbolizes how imperial arrangements resist reversal even when their legal foundations are discredited.