Restoration and Withdrawal 259great moral and material progress, Roosevelt had not learned
that partisan politics, "good" and "educating" from a North
American's point of view, had been in Latin America a
source of criminality:Liberty is invoked in order to establish tyrannies; in its name grafters
fight one another to divide precious resources; administrative honesty,
free elections, and true suffrage are promised by those who proceed in
the opposite manner, and sensitive people have seen with sadness in
Colombia, in Mexico, in Paraguay or in Cuba, that the triumph of the
evil ones has not been over the good, but, in most cases, over the poor.
Politics in our unfortunate lands consists of alternating between two
different, demoralizing systems, under tyranny or under chaos, under
the rapacious power of reactionaries or under the anarchistic power of
equally rapacious demagogues. Politicians, in the step from colony to
independence, have made reform a deformation of social character.^53Cuba's war of liberation had placed political power in the
hands of men who knew how to use violence as a political
weapon, but who knew little else. They could hardly have
been less prepared for constitutional government. As one
Cuban conservative reflected: "When the last soldier of the
war of independence is dead... when there is no longer
left any soldier or General of the rebellion of ... 1906, then
and not until then, will it be wise for the United States to
trust us with a second experiment in self-government."^54
Of equal consequence was the fact that free Cuba retained
its colonial economy. The economic and social destruction of
the war of 1895-98 sped the trend to sugar monoculture, the
heart of Cuba's economic instability. For Enrique Jose Varona,
the lack of domestic capital was a more important problem
than foreign ownership, and he urged the government to
assume a positive role in economic development. If the eco
nomic situation did not change, Varona wrote in 1906, the
Cuban people would be in an increasingly weak and desperate
position. "If this is so, the resulting irreconcilable confusion
of mind will sustain the sordid agitation I see everywhere,
the budding anarchy becoming evident in so many places,
the malevolence and mad hostility with which we persecute