1898–1958: From the Imperialist Domination to the Guerrilla Warfare

Cuba’s dependence on the United States has represented a major, decisive and very precocious phenomenon, the commercial driving force of which has long been the dynamism of their bilateral exchanges, with slavery as productive support. The latter also decisively marked the social trajectory of the United States, where it was the most massive in the history of the world, and the crux of the confrontation between northern and southern dominant classes that ended up settling its Civil War. Furthermore, slavery, in its modern form, constituted a structuring element of the capitalist system of the period of original accumulation and the domination of merchant capital, at the same time as, let us not forget, a matter of classes, within a social order where the division of labor implied a racial hierarchy consolidated for almost four centuries. The history of Cuba and that of the United States therefore turn out to be closely intertwined—even though it is much more intimate ties, of mixed blood, which weld the centuries-old relations of the Caribbean island to Spain.