The Politics of Intervention

The Second Intervention 103

To secure the successful accomplishment of this purpose as speedily

as possible, all friends of Cuba ought to unite their earnest efforts. With

hopeful courage and determination on the part of Cuba's real friends all

this wretched business will soon be over, and we shall look back upon

it as merely a hard lesson in the course of Cuba's development in the

art of self-government.^68

At the Havana end of the "wretched business," William
Howard Taft also did all that pleasant speeches could do
to disarm the Cubans and to insure that they did not mis­
understand the United States intentions. In an address at
the opening day exercises of the National University, the
Provisional Governor spoke with Hispanic courtesy and deli­
cacy. He praised the accomplishments of Spanish culture and
the progress of the nation: "The island of Cuba, established
as a Republic four years ago, made such rapid progress in
four years as almost to intoxicate those of us who believed
in popular government." Now, however, Cuban democracy
had faltered, and it was necessary for the United States to
catch Cuba in "its stumble in the progress toward self-
government." Sadly but willingly, the United States, proudly
showing its readiness "to expend its blood and treasure" for
the "progress of popular government," would help Cuba move
forward again. Taft's major suggestion was to be less class
conscious, less committed to Utopian ideals, and much more
interested in business:

Therefore I urge upon the young men who are going out into life
to-day... that they devote their attention, if they have estates in the
island, to the betterment of those estates; and that others who have not
estates, if they can get into commercial houses and into commercial
pursuits, do so that when twenty-five years hence, a sympathetic
stranger comes here again he may not find the governing or political
class, the commercial class, the class representing the sciences and the
professions, all different and divided, so that you do not have the
benefit of a mixture of all those classes to form that without which a
successful republic is absolutely impossible—a safe, conservative, pa­
triotic, self-sacrificing public opinion.

Exhorting the Cubans to "be not discouraged," Taft concluded
his speech with the lesson that disappointment often leads to