The age of modern imperial hegemony developed as European countries began to colonize the world for the purpose of extracting natural resources and commanding labor forces. As countries developed due to technological advancements, the growth of empires led to the
organization of the world-system to support first European imperialism and then United States hegemony. In the 1800s, with the foreign policy known as the Monroe Doctrine, the U.S. began to exert military, diplomatic, and later corporate control of regions, specifically in Latin
American countries. The Monroe Doctrine informed Europe that they were to stay out of the region, asserting the U.S. as the sole foreign policy leader of the Western Hemisphere.
The twentieth century rise of the U.S. as a growing world power (because of warfare and the development of the concept of Manifest Destiny in 1840) led to the invasion of Mexico in 1846. During this time, the U.S. established intervention as a policy to control Latin American affairs. With the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), the United States initiated the process of taking over lands and subduing independence or sovereignty movements in the western
hemisphere and beyond (as in Cuba and the Philippines in 1898). In addition, the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. constitution (1868) was co-opted by various corporate interests and subsequent U.S. Supreme Court decisions (1886 and 1888), fostering the rise of corporate personhood. This exacerbated the unequal relations between corporations and the American people, as major financial interests grew to dominate politics in the United States, especially the control of U.S. foreign-owned properties. The Mexican and Cuban Revolutions became
important historical confrontations with the U.S. and its developing hegemonic control over the Western Hemisphere.
As the U.S. began to implement a combined Monroe Doctrine/Manifest Destiny policy, it developed an imperial capitalist ideology. As a powerful nation in the Western Hemisphere, the U.S. exported its economic, political, and social ideals for the purpose of “civilizing”
(democratizing the world for its corporate benefactors).97 Intervention through military,
diplomatic, and corporate efforts followed a pattern throughout a twentieth century characterized
by increasingly more subtle forms of intrusion (interferences). Called by a variety of titles early in the twentieth century: Gunboat Diplomacy, the Open Door Policy, and the Roosevelt
Corollary, these interventions and later interferences remained a combination of efforts that, after World War II, fell more and more under the influence of the multinational corporations (MNCs). In 1960, President Dwight D. Eisenhower named the alliance the military-industrial complex (MIC). It was the first time that anyone in an official capacity had openly acknowledged the association of government, military, and the MNCs. The MIC was the culmination of the rise of the MNCs and their ability to influence domestic and foreign policies that in the 1950s and 1960s made the U.S. very powerful. As the MIC evolved, Wallerstein describes that “the long run cost to the MNCs of interventionists actions on their behalf by core states in weaker states have risen considerably, and relatively more than the costs of co-optative strategies.”98 Eisenhower’s warning has been recognized as an important declaration, but one that has not entirely been heeded, as intervention since 1960s has remained a policy used on behalf of protecting the MNC’s properties and assets.
The “civilizing” project according to Wallerstein stems from European colonial ideologies that saw itself as the center of the world, defining itself as the birth of civilization, and that undeveloped lands were uncivilized and it was the “responsibility” of Europe and later the U.S. to engage in the civilizing project of conquering the world and making it into the image of the Western world. This strategy eventually morphed into the foreign policy mask of
“democratization” that worked to install pliable governments and leaders who would follow the foreign policy recommendations of the U.S. State Department and later the MIC. In essence the civilizing project continued, led by the U.S. using military interventionism creating the pressures and conditions that led to national liberation anti-imperialist struggles.
II. Military Interventions and Anti-imperialist Struggles
In Latin America, Cuba was the last country to win independence, ending Spanish colonialism while influencing nationalist movements to establish sovereignty and control of resources. In the 1890s, the U.S. had secured its continental territory after defeating the Confederacy, Mexico, and the Native American tribes, setting the stage for efforts to control different regions of the world. In World Crisis in Oil Harvey O’Connor describes the West’s belief it could end Latin American nationalism through military force: “The rise of Latin
American nationalism was disregarded as a temporary phenomenon which would go away if the Marines were kept handy.”99 Lázaro Cárdenas also describes the same history through the Mexican Revolution and its relations with U.S. imperialism, detailing the ways in which various Mexican governments dealt with threats made by the petroleum MNCs and their U.S.
government backers. The Mexican Revolution created institutions (1917 Constitution) for the establishment of national sovereignty, and in post-revolutionary Mexico implemented those laws by nationalizing petroleum.
The history of Mexican-U.S. relations provides a litany of transgressions against Mexican sovereignty. John Mason Hart’s work Empire and Revolution provides a record of U.S. efforts over a long period (1865-2000) describing the wholesale control of Mexico begun in earnest after the American Civil War (1861-1865).100 It is an expansionist history preceded by the destruction of the Southern Confederacy (a foreign and feudal society) and the complete
subjugation of the Native American (“uncivilized”) populations, clearing the way for the defeat of Mexico (1848) and the seizure by the U.S. of half of its territory that included major labor and land resources.
99 O’Connor, World Crisis in Oil. 99.
100 John Mason Hart, Empire and Revolution: The Americans in Mexico since the Civil War, 1st ed. (University of
The history of Latin America is replete with examples of U.S. imperialism in action via military interventions in Cuba (1906-1909), Haiti (1914-1934), and Mexico (1913-1918). Interventions in the twentieth century were preceded by warnings from Simón Bolívar (1824) and José Martí (1895), whose anti-imperialist writings warn of the “colossus of the North.”101 Both men called for Latin American unity as a precursor to the national liberation (anti-systemic movements) that in the twentieth century resulted in revolution. Rebellion involved campesino- led armies with a history of people of mixed class and ethnic backgrounds that have long been engaged in the liberation of Latin America (1806-1828). The revolutionary armies of twentieth century Latin America are part of the historic trajectory of national liberation. As leader of the Cuban Revolution, Castro unites the collective history of national liberation to end imperialism:
In the fight for a liberated Latin America, in front of those obedient voices who usurped official representation, now surges, with an invincible potential, the genuine voice of the people…where rotos, cholos, gauchos, jíbaros, the heritage of [Emiliano] Zapata and [Augusto César] Sandino, aim the weapons of their liberty, a voice that resounds through their poets, novelists and students, from women and children and the disheveled elders. That collective voice.102
A collective Latin American nationalism originates from the anti-imperialism of the nineteenth century, as Bolívar and subsequent revolutionary leaders sought to liberate the
Americas from colonial Europe (1828 Battle of Ayacucho).103 Twentieth century revolution is in the historical trajectory established by Toussaint L’Ouverture (Haiti 1804), Bolívar (South America 1828), and Martí (Cuba 1898), and these movements inaugurated what Wallerstein describes as the rise of anti-systemic movements challenging the capitalist world-system.104 By invoking Zapata and the Mexican Revolution, Castro brings together the collective Latin
101 Hugh Thomas, Cuba: A History (Penguin Books, 2001), 176–178. 102 Castro, Latinoamericanismo vs. Imperialismo, 53.
American and Caribbean challenge to end the imperial domination of the marginalized.105 In a speech in 1961, Castro stated, “in Latin America the poor from the countryside constitute a tremendous revolutionary force with potential.”106
In the last country in Latin America to gain independence from Spain in 1898, Cuba’s poor were accustomed to U.S. domination in a historically significant switch from colonial Spanish to U.S. imperial rule.107 The U.S. even went so far as to demand that the Platt Amendment be included in the 1901 Cuban Constitution, because of its history of considering Cuba a part of the U.S. itself, codifying the right of the United States to intervene as it would internally. Moreover, the rise of U.S. dominance over Latin America became more pervasive than colonial rule
because it established the notion that the United States was serving a benevolent interest in promoting “Washington style democracy.”108 According to Castro, U.S. interventionism placed a military, political, and corporate yoke on Cuba as,
That force was the imperialist penetration from the United States in our homeland; that force frustrated our complete independence; that force did not allow Calixto García and his brave soldiers into Santiago de Cuba (1898); that force impeded the liberation army to start a revolution….109
Castro explains the “imperialist penetration” that began with Cuba’s efforts towards
independence and self-determination. The repeated use of the word force describes the need for violence to stop Cuba’s efforts at national sovereignty.
The 1898 change in control of Cuba from Spain to the U.S. through neocolonial elite rule sent a clear message to Latin America and later to the Mexican revolutionaries looking back at 1898. A rebellion that began as a fight between one elite versus another, ultimately (and
105 Castro, Latinoamericanismo vs. Imperialismo, 83.
106 Ibid. “en América Latina la población pobre del campo constituya una tremenda fuerza revolucionaria potencial.” 107 Thomas, Cuba: A History, 239-240.
108 Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, 1st, First Edition (Holt
Paperbacks, 2004), 104.
unintentionally) unleashed a class struggle and ten years of rebellion.110 In both countries, elites, be they rural or urban, were heavily influenced by U.S. foreign policy and the MNCs beginning in the 1870s with petroleum companies buying property in 1907.111 Cuba and Mexico share a similar history of diplomatic and military intervention by the United States, in Mexico, U.S. Ambassador Henry Lane Wilson was personally involved in the assassination of President Francisco Madero (1913) in a failed effort to impose greater U.S. control over Mexico.112 In the case of Cuba, the Platt Amendment was the constant reminder to Latin America of U.S.
diplomacy. As 1913 was the year that launched the Mexican Revolution against U.S.
intervention, twenty years later Cuba began another rebellion against U.S. dominance with the overthrow of the Machado dictatorship in 1933.
III. Diplomatic Interventions: from Henry Lane Wilson (State Department) to the Dulles