Earlier this week, after pleadings from the U.S. State Department, Egypt postponed a trial of forty-three workers from foreign-funded democracy-promotion groups. The defendants included sixteen Americans whom Egyptian authorities have accused of meddling in domestic political affairs. While diplomats may have defused the situation for now, the flap has raised the profile of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), institutions first formally defined by the UN that have expanded rapidly in the postwar era. But Americans have long supported nongovernmental groups that set out to save the world. And one such case—missionaries in Cuba—also backfired when fervent advocates of the American way upset the indigenous culture and authorities.
Deliverance from Misgovernment
On March 17, 1898, two weeks after the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor, Vermont Republican Redfield Proctor delivered the findings of his investigative trip to Cuba in a speech to his Senate colleagues. Since 1895, Cuban insurrectionists had been waging a protracted guerrilla offensive against Spain’s occupying forces. Proctor understood the horrors of warfare, having served as colonel of the Fifteenth Vermont Volunteers during the Battle of Gettysburg and, later, as secretary of war for two years under President Harrison. But as became evident during his speech, the wartime sufferings of Cuba’s civilian population under Spanish subjugation shocked even this combat-hardened legislator.
Proctor’s remarks to his fellow senators detailed the atrocities Spanish troops inflicted on their colonial subjects. Spanish general Valeriano Weyler’s policy of reconcentración, in which entire Cuban villages found themselves uprooted and relocated to fortified military encampments, had devastated the local population. Proctor described the conquered region outside Havana as rife with “desolation and distress, misery and starvation.” The lack of food had left “little children . . . walking about with arms and chest terribly emaciated, eyes swollen, and abdomen bloated to three times the natural size.” Cuban doctors confirmed Proctor’s worst fears. Their prognosis for the youngest victims of Spain’s inhumane conduct was “hopeless.” “Deaths in the street have not been uncommon,” said Proctor, before estimating that “out of a population of 1,600,000, two hundred thousand had died within these Spanish forts.” Any hope of eventual recovery appeared unlikely to the senator, as “nearly all the sugar mills have been destroyed.” The New York Times praised Proctor for shining “the clear light of truth upon the actual situation” on the war-torn island.
But Proctor endeavored to do more through his speech than merely detail Spanish crimes against Cuban civilians. He presented his oration as a call to arms for the United States to help the Cuban insurrectionists expel their Spanish oppressors. Unless American forces intervened against Spain, Cubans would never be “free from molestation,” unable to “rebuild their homes, reclaim their tillage plots, which quickly run up to brush in that wonderful soil and clime.” In one counterintuitive rhetorical flourish, Proctor downplayed the gravity of both “the barbarity practiced by Weyler” and the sinking of the Maine. Instead, he cited “the entire native population of Cuba, struggling for freedom and deliverance from the worst misgovernment of which I ever had knowledge” as the “strongest appeal” for American intervention. Like countless optimists who have advocated military ventures with unrealistic posthostility expectations, Proctor dreamed of a “wonderful prosperity that would surely come with peace and good home rule.” After evicting the Spanish colonial masters, “the large influx of American and English immigration and money” would guarantee Cuba’s recovery in Proctor’s estimation.
Boots on the Ground
American Protestant missionaries sought to make Proctor’s hopes for Cuba a reality. One month before the December 1898 signing of the Treaty of Paris that ended the war between Spain and the United States, a group of high-ranking officials from the American Methodist Church set sail for Havana, Cuba, aboard the steamship Mascotte. Leading the contingent was Bishop Warren A. Candler who, when not focused on the church’s missionary enterprise, spent much of his time attending to the spiritual needs of his brother Asa Griggs Candler, founder of the Coca-Cola Company. Accompanying Candler were Dr. W. R. Lambuth, then secretary of the Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, Dr. Charles A. Fullwood and the youthful Reverend Hubert W. Baker, who had grown up among Cubans in Key West, Florida. As the ship prepared to dock near Havana’s Morro Castle, Reverend Baker led the enthusiastic preachers in a spontaneous singing of the “Doxology.”
Comments
Great article and it presents us yet another reason not to defend "Democracy abroad" as the panacea to all the worlds ailments....Cuba wasn't the only one oppressed by the Spaniards before American intervention. Puerto Rico soon became ours after 1898 and our economy profitted heavily thanks to their sugar and coffee production yet theirs endured the opposite effect. The problem? Rather than sticking to the American interest and therefore allowing the Puerto Ricans to attain Independence, the colonization led to our finding ways to fix their economic issues. We attempted to do this with mass sterilization and the development of birth control, which Puerto Rican women might honorarily receive title as "US lab rats" for being the first to test out. Over a century later, our tax money continues to be filtered outside of our borders no matter the distance between us and Israel, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Iraq, Afghanistan, the list goes on extensively. It includes all the countries which our citizens believed our government or even NGO's were genuinely interested in helping, therefore they were supported beyond each citizen's familial interests, and capable of reaching such masked revolutionary cultural changes as Mark Brennan described for us of Protestant missionaries in Cuba.....Today our ochlocratic politicians aim to heal our current economic woes with birth control - already 50 million babies aborted just last year alone. When will they learn the lessons of the past and at the very least avoid destruction within the borders of the US rather than continue to spread sickness beyond them?.....I look forward to reading more on how "capitalistic, individualistic, democratic and anti-Catholic glory" dissolved our relationship with the Cubans. This experience involves a country that has been hidden in the closet of our past and a tool we refuse to use as comparison for how not to go about handling foreign policy today. Perhaps the topic is silenced due to our failure to successfully instill a military base on Cuba or even a puppet as their politician... Dissertations are usually quite lengthy. Hopefully this one will provide us many more experiences to learn from down the line.
Sending Christian missionaries abroad…ah, how so little has changed in 2,000 years of Christian history. I was, however, surprised to see such hostility among the Methodist missionaries in Cuba towards Sunday sports. In fact, I was reminded of King Charles I’s Book of Sports. Not since reading about those feisty seventeenth-century Puritans assailing bowling and bear-baiting, have I seen such vitriol heaved upon a Sunday diversion.I can appreciate this nugget of history as well as the many others Mr. Brennan surfaces in this fascinating piece. As a scholar of Colonial American history, I can appreciate the Methodists’ struggles to convert Catholics in Cuba in the 1900s. Colonial historians have long been puzzled by Protestants’ vehement, nigh pathological insistence upon complety changing the culture of those they attempted to convert. Catholics had long ago realized the importance and effectiveness of appropriating the culture of their prospective converts. For instance in the Andes, the indigenous people had long worshipped mountains. In response, the Catholic Church commissioned paintings of the Virgin Mary wherein her head and shoulders resembled the mountainous landscape of Bolivia and Peru. Protestant missionaries never seemed to embrace this tactic and as a consequence continued to face the resistance Mr. Brennan so masterfully describes here. A craftier, more subtle group of missionaries may have joined in the celebration for the Almendares Baseball Club, citing John Wesley's fondness for some primitive version of the game. What’s so interesting about Mr. Brennan’s piece is how opportunistic Methodist missionaries and U.S.politicians appear in the face of upheaval and political reform in Cuba. Though admittedly more imperialistic in tone, Redfield Proctor’s call to arms is not entirely dissimilar from the rhetoric we hear uttered from our current politicians. As Mr. Brennan so brilliantly shows us, we inherit the baggage of our forbearers. Where so many Americans may have chosen to forget or ignore the actions of our first NGO’s, Egyptian authorities – indeed many, many others around the world – have not.