On January 1, 1899, the American occupation of the island officially began, giving Washington a free hand to implement a policy of division and dissolution of independent representative bodies, ignoring 30 years of struggle.
Days earlier, on December 10, 1898, it was signed The Treaty of Paris after the end of the Spanish-Cuban-American War, without the presence of representatives of the Cuban people, and through which Spanish rule over Cuba ceased to exist and gave way to the rise of the modern empire of the United States.
According to this treaty, he paid Spain $20 million and took possession of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines.
That day culminated in one of the shortest and most profitable contests of the nascent North American imperialism, which intervened on the island, presumably to help the Cuban people consolidate freedom.
Years later, when the young Russian Marxist Vladimir Ilyich Lenin analyzed the development of this conflict, he described it as the first imperialist war of his time.
But while the transcendental changes in world geopolitics were being defined, the largest of the Antilles – regardless of the fate that awaited it as the center of its powerful neighbor's expansionist desires – also had nothing to celebrate about the end of the war that left the country in ruins, without independence and in which more than 200,000 of its children died, about a quarter of its population.
In the midst of this frustration is the Generalissimo Maximo Gomez masterfully summarizes the national panorama:
“The attitude of the American government towards the heroic Cuban people in these historic moments, in my opinion, reveals nothing more than very much, apart from the dangers that the situation poses for the country (…).”
Referring to the departure of Spanish troops, he specified: “They left sadly and we remained sadly; because a foreign power has replaced them (…)
“So the situation that has been created for this people; The material misery and grief that he causes due to inhibition in all his sovereign actions is becoming more depressing every day, and the day such a strange situation ends, it is possible that the Americans here will not even have a spark Sympathy will be left behind.
This imperial ploy of “business”, denounced by the great Dominican, had a fundamental collaborator in Tomás Estrada Palma, then delegate of the Cuban Revolutionary Party (PRC)who supported the imperial maneuver of having no counterpart among the patriots, dissolved this organization without consultation in December 1898 and completed its work with the closure of its organ, the Periódico Patria.
The next step taken by the interventionist authorities in 1899 was to disband the Liberation Army, which after the end of the war was exiled to places far outside the city and lived on the alms of landowners and farmers.
The maneuvers of the American press and its authorities were successful and aimed at fomenting divisions between the last representative body of the Mambisa Republic, the Assembly of Santa Cruz y el Cerro, and Generalissimo Máximo Gómez also over the conditions for the dissolution of the armed forces. mambisas.
In contrast to Gómez, the Assembly accepted the proposal of a donation from the North American government, dismissed the independence hero as general-in-chief and eliminated this position; Shortly afterwards, the dissolution of the Mambisa forces was achieved.
In addition, the deaths of important leaders such as Antonio Maceo and José Martí had a lot to do with the frustration and division in the ranks of the pro-independence people, who had a very clear strategy regarding the plans of the United States, which he already faced at the beginning of his letter warned Manuel Mercado, written a few hours before his fall in battle on May 19, 1895, in which he announced that all his political actions were aimed at preventing the emerging imperialism from falling with its force on Cuba and the Latin American peoples.
The first Yankee intervention on the island set the stage for the preparation of the neocolonial republic founded on May 20, 1902, which initiated a higher stage of the Cubans' struggle against the new system that would collapse on January 1, 1902. 1959, long before the American century that theorists of nascent imperialism believed would prevail in Cuba.