The Platt Amendment

By the start of 1901 the American army had governed Cuba for two years, and the Teller Amendment obliged it to leave. Secretary of War Elihu Root did not think an independent Cuba could be relied upon to stay solvent, orderly, or out of European hands, and he drafted the terms on which the United States would go. Senator Orville H. Platt of Connecticut attached them to the army appropriations bill, and President McKinley signed it on March 2, 1901. Cuba was to be free on conditions written in Washington.

There were eight of them. Cuba could make no treaty impairing its independence and could contract no debt beyond its ordinary revenues. It had to validate every act of the American military government and to carry on the sanitation programs begun during the occupation. It had to leave the ownership of the Isle of Pines to later settlement. And it had to grant the United States both a standing right to intervene for the preservation of Cuban independence and the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty, and the right to buy or lease coaling and naval stations.

The Cuban constitutional convention refused for months. General Leonard Wood, the military governor, made clear that the alternative was continued occupation, and in June 1901 the delegates adopted the amendment as an appendix to their constitution by sixteen votes to eleven. American troops withdrew in May 1902, and the terms were restated in a permanent treaty the following year. The intervention clause was used: the United States occupied Cuba outright from 1906 to 1909 and sent troops again in 1912 and from 1917 to 1922. The naval-station clause produced the 1903 lease of Guantanamo Bay at two thousand dollars a year in gold.

Franklin Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy abrogated the amendment in the Treaty of Relations of May 1934, in the hope of repairing relations soured across Latin America by three decades of intervention. Everything went except the Guantanamo lease, which the 1934 treaty preserved and which can be ended only by mutual agreement — the reason the base is still American, and why the Cuban government since 1959 has declined to cash the rent. The Platt Amendment gave the protectorate its American form: formal sovereignty for the smaller country, control of the essentials for the larger one.