In a mere 133 pages, Pérez cites scholar after scholar, from the turn of the century to the 1990s, whose interpretations of the war are informed by the idea that the United States “freed” Cuba from Spain. Understandably, the more recent works note that the spoils of the war included annexations and heavy-handed occupations. Nevertheless, most seem concerned with demonstrating that despite these aspects of the war, the episode was, however clumsily or incompletely, an expression of American idealism. I will spare you here the names of the scholars and the innumerable quotations from their works. Still, it is instructive to learn – as I did while searching the Web – that the liberation theme is still to be found at the core of historical narratives of the war. At the Library of Congress Web site the pages on the “Spanish American War” (the name of the war itself speaks volumes, as Pérez reminds us), written by a highly respected scholar, inform the reader/viewer at numerous points in the text that the McKinley administration demanded that Spain grant “independence” to Cuba. In summarizing the events of the period, the final sentence of the essay reads: “These policies, in keeping with American values, were decidedly anti-imperialistic in both the formal and informal meanings of the term.” The role played in this self-flattery by several generations of historians should be taken, I think, as a warning to the discipline.

What is needed, it seems to me, is an unblinking look at the complexity of 1898, including the ways in which it twisted, perhaps beyond recognition, the idealism that did indeed figure in the popular response to the independence movement in Cuba. Seen from the Cuban perspective, which Pérez has done so much in his other works to give us, the independence rebellion that broke out in 1895 can be understood as part of a long historical trajectory in which declining Spanish power approached the point of intersection with an intensifying Cuban nationalism. The U.S. failure to understand the roots and intensity of that struggle may have been the product of the century-long assumption that Cuba would one day come under U.S. influence. From the time of Adams and Jefferson no other future for Cuba was expected or, I suggest, would have been tolerated. The events of 1898 take on a very different meaning seen from this perspective.

It is also helpful to understand 1898 as part of the domestic history of the United States. The public clamor for war needs to be set in context. The decade of the 1890s was one of great unrest and uncertainty, which, one could argue, it would be Cuba’s unfortunate role to help allay. The Cuban rebellion found the United States in the midst of an economic depression that intensified a class and culture conflict brought on by the century-long transformation from an agrarian to an industrial way of life. Industrialists sought out legislators to prepare (and often to pay for) a system of law that would protect their novel form of property. In the same period, their workers were beginning to take desperate measures to assure their livelihood and their dignity within a world built upon floating wages and a heartless business cycle. The small farmer-businessman, unnerved by the growing substitution of urban for agrarian values, was becoming convinced that large-scale capital and industry were squeezing them out of the once proud place that the yeomen had held – in American myth if not in fact. To complicate this picture, third- and fourth-generation farmers also saw the mostly immigrant working class as the product of a soulless city that severed the ties between the world of work and the world of nature. This devolution was the doing of the bankers who made money out of nothing and of the corporate managers who made money out of the sweating bodies of the immigrants whom they attracted to the farmer’s “America” in growing numbers.

Into this scene we also need to place the pre-industrial and industrializing elite of nineteenth-century America; the landed gentry, old style merchant princes, professionals, and intellectuals who were used to setting the more sober parts of the agenda for a continental republic. Some merely lamented that the new industrial elite that was replacing them had more money (and love of money) than character. Some feared that if an army of farmers and workers was sent abroad to battle with the lesser breeds that their finely crafted republic would begin to crack. Others among them were more confident and more aggressive. They wanted to revitalize themselves and the sons of the moguls through a life of stern challenge that would once again place men of virtue at the helm. All manner of “race” thinking influenced their programs for renewing America’s role as an agent of civilization. Without such revitalization these men feared that the grasping nature of the captains of industry, the narrow fears of the agrarians or the brute force of the industrial underclass might prevent America from advancing into the ranks of the great powers. The vigor of such powerful competitors might then wall off the places of opportunity abroad, thereby preempting the destined role of America.

A host of vitalisms were put forth as solutions to the sense of mounting greed and decay. Some involved the nation purifying itself by a return to first principles – though many of these were now no more than pieties. Other stimulants drew upon the legacy of the continental empire whose expanding “frontier” had hewn out of the American “wilderness” a successful experiment in white, male self-government on a terrain swept clean of its natural and human impediments. For many of these men the next stage should involve the uplifting or controlling (by means ranging from education to warfare) of lesser peoples in other lands. Sometimes the lofty position given to the Anglo-Saxon “race” by these men seemed to assure an unimpaired advance as the unfit “vanished” (as had the Native Americans) before the surging white man. At other times, however, the softness that seemed to afflict the progeny of the old and new elite was taken as a sign of racial “decay” and as evidence that the white men might be “outbred” or inundated by a flood of lesser peoples. Confident or fearful, such racist and ethnocentric views raised the stakes in the battle for civilization.

The foregoing context, it seems to me, is a better one in which to assess the thinking of those who guided U.S. foreign policy in 1898. It was with this mixture of confidence and doubt that they turned to note the plight of the failing Spanish “race” in its effort to maintain its unenlightened rule over Cuba. Their goal, I would contend, was to end the conflict in a way that allowed for the smooth transfer of hegemony over the island. The McKinley administration ignored the insurgents and continually increased the pressure on Spain to withdraw in an orderly manner. The administration also maneuvered so as to avoid the possibility that a remnant Manifest Destiny and a new racial Darwinism wielded by angry farmers, by immigrants eager to prove themselves “Americans,” or by the less responsible members of the expansionist elite would force its hand.

Indeed, by early 1898, support for a “free” Cuba was strong in the popular mind, in much of the press, and in Congress, a point that rests at the center of the explanations of 1898 by the liberation “school.” Much of the press engaged in demonizing the Spaniard and in a “whitening” of the Cuban rebels – without which racial sleight of hand Cuba might have been placed alongside of Haiti and thus beyond redemption. One can literally watch the skin tones in the cartoons change as Americans first glorified and then (after 1898) infantilized the rebels. Even without sensational events such as the explosion of the Maine, business and Republican party leaders (still shaken by their close brush with cheap money and rural community in 1896) were sensitive, I would suggest, to the charge that they were too cowardly to fight. The result was McKinley’s last minute, businesslike intervention as a neutral party on “humanitarian” grounds.

It may also be fruitful to see the war as an event that helped to shift the arena in which the class, sectional, and cultural conflicts of the 1890s were played out as each domestic antagonist sought to redefine America by means of combat against a dying way of life and for a broadening of the realm of freedom outside its borders. That the dying way of life was soon to include racially “unfit” Cubans and that the new realm of freedom was to be opened up by powerful U.S. corporations indicates that the nation would not only take into foreign lands concepts of growth and freedom that had made her mistress of a continent but would also modernize the frontier spirit to meet the need to carve out markets rather than territories.

It is also important to note that those expressions of support for Cuban independence that found their way into headlines and, occasionally, into diplomatic correspondence, do not appear in retrospect to have had in mind a sovereign nation. The history of the U.S. occupation government, I think, makes this clear. Perhaps the Republican party platform of 1896 is typical in its call for the United States to “restore peace and give independence to the island.”

In several previous works, Louis Pérez has laid out, with the help of Cuban sources, how the “liberation” of Cuba led to the “protection” of that “independence” by the Platt Amendment, then to a long period of a “special relationship,” and after 1959 to decades of covert efforts to “free” Cuba once again. Until the last CIA agent puts away the last covert plan of destabilization, this era will not have truly ended.

Pérez does the scholarly community a great service by reminding us that by leaving Cuba out of the “Spanish American War” and thereafter out of the U.S. histories of the war, we have constructed Cuban independence as a status “given” to the island. One wonders what our understanding of ourselves as a nation might have been had the preponderance of scholarship since 1776 described the late intervention of France in the long independence struggle of certain British colonies in North America as an act by which France “gave” the colonies their independence.