The Politics of Intervention

256 THE POLITICS OF INTERVENTION

To avoid being governed by others, they must prove their

ability and desire to govern themselves.^42

Restoration and Withdrawal

The new year, 1909, found the Army of Cuban Pacification

packing for home. In a gala round of banquets, the Pro­

visional Government prepared to turn over power to Jose

Miguel Gomez and his friends. The first American soldiers

(the Twenty-eighth Infantry) sailed on New Year's Day

and the Eleventh Infantry and Fifteenth Cavalry followed

shortly thereafter.^43

While there was still talk of the permanency of a future

intervention, the Havana correspondent of the Times

(London) reported that the Americans were satisfied that

Cuba was better off for the occupation, but that the British

interests were skeptical.^44 One American visitor to Havana,

editor-publisher Henry Watterson went to the heart of Cuba's

immediate political future. "The Cubans," he wrote, "are

presently to be freed from the despotism which has flung

around their political cradle the spell of a prospering but

to them an oppressive ministration." The Provisional Govern­

ment had given "benevolence galore without finding the

least assimilation." The Cubans preferred Spain to the United

States as a ruler, and the mass of the people resented Amer­

icans. What the future held for Cuban-American relations,

one could not say:

The Havanese hate us, but would not fight us. The "rurales" do not

hate us, but would fight for the republic we promised them. But the

riff-raff, Lord, the riff-raff; injin, nigger, beggarman, thief—"both mon­

grel, puppy, whelp and hound and cur of low degree."... When the

pie is cut, when the offices are all filled, what of the rejected ones?

Will each turn conspirator?^45

As the Army of Cuban Pacification folded its tents and
packed its haversacks, it received praise from the President
and the Havana press for its conduct of the occupation.
Roosevelt sent, "on behalf of the whole American people," his