A Fratricidal Arm: Cuban Agency and the Abrogation of the Platt Amendment
Creators: name: Lumsden, Charles Bracken
Publisher: name: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University Libraries
Year: 2017

description: This thesis challenges the idea that the diplomatic philosophy of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, known as the Good Neighbor Policy, was the primary reason for abrogation of the Platt Amendment. I focus on Cuban manipulation of the Permanent Treaty, especially during the last years of the Platt Amendment during the Machado dictatorship, to set the stage for abrogation. Diplomatic dispatches sent between the U.S. Embassy in Havana and the Department of State in Washington, D.C. reveal that Ambassadors Harry F. Guggenheim and Sumner Welles came to view the Platt Amendment as a hindrance and an outdated measure that disrupted Cuban politics. As such, my argument aligns with that of Louis. A Pérez, Jr., who asserts that the Platt Amendment perpetuated a cycle of interference that Cuban actors influenced. Additionally, my stance on Cuban agency contrasts with that of scholars like Russell H. Fitzgibbon, who alleges that the Platt Amendment caused "inevitable confusion of the Cuban mind" and that Cuban citizens were primarily disinterested observers of politics.  On the contrary, I will show that multiple Cuban political factions used the Platt Amendment for their own gain, and that interventions by the United States were not unilaterally implemented. Cuban historiography and first hand accounts of the period, such as El Proceso Histórico de la Enmienda Platt of Manuel Márquez Sterling, emphasize the importance of Cuban agency in negotiating an end to the Platt Amendment.  Cuban historian Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring further argued that Estrada Palma was even responsible for the creation of the Platt Amendment for his own gain.  My project concentrates more specifically on U.S. diplomatic dispatches from the last ten years of the Platt Amendment to analyze the process of disillusionment within the North American diplomatic corps and the State Department. After the chaotic years of anti-Machado revolution in the early 1930s, American ambassadors and diplomats realized the limits of the Platt Amendment, the obligation that it imposed on the United States to oversee the Cuban government, and the subsequent destabilization that it caused Cuban politics.
   Chapter One discusses the major implementations and interpretations of the Platt Amendment from 1901 to 1933 to show how Cuban politicians tried to elicit American intervention using the amendment. Chapter Two examines U.S. diplomatic records to show that U.S. political influence ultimately destabilized Cuban politics to the point that the State Department needed to withdraw public support from either faction. Finally, Chapter Three analyzes the appointments of Ambassadors Harry F. Guggenheim and Sumner Welles to argue that the State Department became disillusioned with the Platt Amendment because, through the Permanent Treaty, any Cuban faction could provoke American intervention, a situation that required constant oversight of Cuban politics to avoid. The persistence and consistency of Cuban manipulation from 1901 until 1934 shows that widely diverse Cuban political factions understood how to use the Platt Amendment for their own interests.