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With Fidel Castro in the hospital, there's lots of talk
of regime change
in Cuba. And if it weren't for a
prominent figure in Colorado history, there might be no
more interest in Castro's health than there is in the
current medical status of Anbal Acevedo-Vil, the governor
of Puerto Rico.
The Colorado connection here is Henry Moore Teller, whose name adorns our geography in many locations: the Teller House hotel in Central City, Teller streets in Gunnison and Salida, the ghost town of Teller City in North Park and, of course, the Teller County whose seat is Cripple Creek.
Teller, who lived from 1830 to 1914, was a U.S. Senator from Colorado in 1898 when the United States went to war with Spain. In those quaint times, American presidents often followed the Constitution before dispatching soldiers and sailors to battle in remote places.
Thus Congress voted on a declaration of war that April,
and our senator attached the Teller Amendment
to the
declaration. It stated that the United States hereby
disclaims any disposition of intention to exercise
sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control over said island
[Cuba] except for pacification thereof, and asserts its
determination, when that is accomplished, to leave the
government and control of the island to its people.
Why did Teller specify Cuba, when there was other
potential booty from a war with Spain, like Puerto Rico,
Guam and the Philippines? To quote from his biography
(Henry M. Teller: Colorado's Grand Old Man
by Duane
A. Smith):
Teller was concerned about the growing interest in
making the island an American colony. That imperialist
impulse alarmed Teller, compounded by the fact that
Colorado had started raising sugar beets. Duty-free Cuban
sugar threatened a growing Colorado industry. Yet Henry was
sincerely worried about colonies, obligations, and naive
assumptions about the wonderful benefits of being a world
power.
The idea of annexing Cuba to the United States was
nothing new. It was a staple of American politics in the
years before the Civil War. Cuba had slavery, and if it
joined the Union, the slave power
would be more
powerful.
For instance, an 1842 Cuban census showed 601,129 free
inhabitants and 436,495 slaves. Had it been part of the
United States in 1840, only Virginia would have outranked
it among the slave states. Under the three-fifths
rule,
Cuba would have had a dozen representatives, as
well as its two senators -- more federal muscle than
Massachusetts or Illinois.
As early as 1823, Thomas Jefferson observed to James
Madison that I have ever looked on Cuba as the most
interesting addition which could be made to our system of
states.
In following years, there were several efforts
to raise irregular armies of Americans to take Cuba.
Franklin Pierce, U.S. president from 1853 to 1857 and a
firm supporter of slavery, made a serious effort to buy
Cuba from Spain for $130 million.
So Henry Teller had reasons to believe in 1898 that a war with Spain to liberate Cuba would be a war to make Cuba a U.S. possession, rather than an independent nation.
That hands-off attitude endured only until 1901, when
the Teller Amendment to the declaration of war was
superseded by the Platt Amendment to an army appropriations
bill. Named for Sen. Orville Platt of Connecticut, it gave
the U.S. the Guantanamo Bay naval base, as well as total
control over Cuba's foreign policy. The latter lasted until
1934 when it was repealed as part of Franklin D.
Roosevelt's Good Neighbor
Policy.
But still, thanks to the Teller Amendment, Cuba was officially an independent country. It might have been dominated by American interests before Castro took power in 1959, but it was not part of the United States.
Had it not been for our Sen. Teller and his amendment, Cuba might have become a state of our union, or something like the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico -- not a territory, not a state, but still part of the United States. In either case, no Batista or Castro dictatorship, no Bay of Pigs, no Cuban missile crisis, no politically active exile community in Florida, no Mariel Boatlift, no Elian Gonzales controversy.
Henry M. Teller led a long and prominent political life
in Colorado, starting with the battles over statehood, his
selection as one of our first two U.S. Senators, his 1882
nomination as the first Westerner to head the Interior
Department, his return to the Senate in 1885 and his
leaving the Republican Party in 1896 because it would not
support the free and unlimited coinage of
silver.
In the general run of American history, though, he is known only for his 1898 amendment -- proposed with good intentions, but resulting in an excellent illustration of the Law of Unintended Consequences.
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