Imperial

President Theodore Roosevelt leaving the White House on Bleistein, 1903. Via White House History.

Peter Baker in the Times annoyed me a bit—

The historic deal broke an enduring stalemate between two countries divided by just 90 miles of water but oceans of mistrust and hostility dating from the days of Theodore Roosevelt’s charge up San Juan Hill and the nuclear brinkmanship of the Cuban missile crisis.

—leaving the impression that he and his copy editor don't realize San Juan Hill is in Puerto Rico.

Of all the major North American figures in the War of 1898, Teddy was probably the least interested in Cuba as a place or an issue, I imagine because President McKinley had laid down the ground rules that we were on no account to conquer Cuba; Cuba was to be an independent country, by God, or at any rate ruled by its English-speaking sugar planters. If you have to conquer something there's Puerto Rico, or Hawaii, speaking of sugar planters, or the Philippines.

Teddy had his eye on the Philippines and your proper pith helmet and half-dressed natives kind of imperialism and, as assistant secretary of the Navy, literally snuck in one day when his boss was sick to order Commodore Dewey and his fleet, hanging out around Hong Kong, to go conquer Manila. Before war was declared. Probably the most abusive defiance of Congress's war power of any US president and he wasn't even president yet, just a humble assistant secretary who was friends with Dewey—they used to go riding together in Rock Creek Park and chat about Alfred Thayer Mahan and projecting American naval power and Dewey getting a promotion. The Army got the Indian Wars, but the navy hadn't had a decent war in 38 years and Dewey was beginning to feel he could easily die before making admiral.

But the Maine had certainly been sunk (accidentally, experts now agree) by then and Hearst and Pulitzer were hungrily circling the wreck and the Cubans themselves were very far from feeling "mistrust and hostility" at that point; Baker is mistaken on that score too. Because, silly, they knew or thought they knew that America was not coming to conquer them, but to liberate them from the cruel Spanish yoke.

Which was, indeed, extremely cruel, maybe not up there on Saddam Hussein level, and not quite as bad as the Hearst papers put it—

Take this piece from the Hearst press describing the leader of the Spanish forces in Cuba: "Weyler the brute, the devastator of haciendas, the destroyer of families, and outrager of women... Pitiless, cold, an exterminator of men... There is nothing to prevent his carnal, animal brain from running riot with itself in inventing tortures and infamies of bloody debauchery."

 —but it was Spanish troops in Cuba who invented the concentration camp, you know.

I happened to be reading about this stuff around the time of the runup to the war in Iraq, at first purely coincidentally; I was having a Henry Adams thing, and learning to my distress that this literary hero had been acting like a Gilded-Age Christopher Hitchens or Kanan Makiya working the war, bringing together Cuban insurgents in Washington exile with his Senator friends and churning the latter up the way Hearst was churning up the masses (against a glorious antiwar movement that would eventually include William James, Mark Twain, and Finley Peter Dunne, not to mention Andrew Carnegie, actually can we just not mention him?). Adams and Roosevelt belonged, of course, to the same tiny social circle, the 0.1% of its day, and detested each other, Adams recognizing Roosevelt as a fake cowboy dude rancher and a talented writer wasting his talent on lying bilge and promoting himself politically, and TR regarding Adams as basically gay, meaning regarding women as human, and not working out with weights the way real men do. It must have been as deeply embarrassing to Adams to be on TR's side in this matter as for Hitchens to be on the same side as pure frauds like Sullivan and Brooks.

So I got a little obsessed with it, so deep were the parallels with what was happening in our world.

Ultimately, of course, the Cubans discovered that the Americans didn't really mean it, or meant it only in fits and starts because they were suffering from Imperial ADHD and couldn't remember what their opinions were much of the time or sit down long enough to do something about them.

I'm a little overwhelmed by the president's move here, it's a bigger thing than I would have dared to expect, like a repudiation not just of the dreadful imperialism of the Cold War, and Guatemala and Iran and Congo, but of the whole project going back before there was a Communism to be afraid of, Cuba in 1898 being the point where it went beyond the idiocy of Manifest Destiny, and the subjugation and murder of what we could regard, however insanely, as our own indigenous population, to the notion of taking over the entire world.

I'm, uh, what was that word? Happy. Literally.

“It is a fallacy that Cuba will reform just because the American president believes that if he extends his hand in peace, that the Castro brothers suddenly will unclench their fists,” said Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the outgoing chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and a Cuban-American.

Speaking as a one-time fairly dab hand at logic, I'm seeing two fallacies there, Senator, but both of them are yours.

It's a strawman fallacy when you decide to argue against a position that you just made up because the position your opponents are actually taking is too hard to dispute. Nobody said the Castro brothers were going to change their minds suddenly, or indeed at all. The idea is, rather, that it will help regardless of whether they change their minds or not, and they just might.

And it's the "insanity" fallacy when you insist that a policy that has utterly failed for 55 years must be better than any imaginable change. With that record, in fact, almost anything would be worth trying.