The Politics of Intervention

172 THE POLITICS OF INTERVENTION

adjust their own affairs will more quickly bring about annexation or a
Protectorate.^10

Bishop Knight hastened to add that the Cubans themselves
wanted peace and independence, in that order. Their greatest
concern was to avoid the economic catastrophe of another
revolt. Although they were not sympathetic to annexation,
they valued the security provided by the American troops.
From widely scattered Army stations, the Military Informa­
tion Division received reports from its intelligence officers
that the talk of revolt was more than idle gossip. Caches of
weapons, used or recently smuggled, were constantly being
reported, and often linked with foreign property owners.
11

Sometimes the reports proved false or exaggerated, but the
rumors heightened the sense of insecurity the annexationists
were cultivating. When Colonel John Van Orsdale of the
Seventeenth Infantry told the Military Information Division
that two thousand new English rifles from Jamaica had been
smuggled into Camaguey, Captain C. I. Crockett looked into
the matter and found it a hoax. The Englishman who con­
vinced Crockett that the arms had never landed admitted,
however, that "it is necessary to show the Americans that they
must remain in Cuba."^12 After an investigation in Oriente,
Captains Charles F. Crain and Andrew G. Dougherty agreed
with an English hotel owner they interviewed that the plant­
ers in the province would eagerly contribute $50,000 to any
aspiring rebel. The planters' motive was to fight the United
States into annexation.^13 The Military Information Division
found substantially the same rationale behind a report by a
Mr. Barker, merchant of Havana, that nine thousand new
rifles had been landed at Mariel Bay for Pino Guerra.^14
The false alarms did not obscure a very real need to disarm
the Cubans. Lieutenant Colonel Bullard, for example, learned
that General Jose Luis Robau had eight hundred thousand
cartridges stored in Santa Clara and a large number of rifles.
He warned the jefe that any uprising would be crushed
quickly, and promised more public works for the province.^15
Bullard thought Robau's war-talk was simply part of the