262 THE POLITICS OF INTERVENTION
the Provincial Government was unable to take advantage of
the security given it by the Army of Cuban Pacification to
work basic social and economic changes in Cuba. To a large
degree, Magoon and his advisers were limited in their policy
choices by Roosevelt, Taft, and Root who guided policy
under two basic assumptions: that Cuba should not be an
nexed and that there was no chance of altering the two
nations' economic relationship. The Provisional Government's
mission was to hold elections and withdraw. In order to do
this, to restore some order in Cuba, it did improve transporta
tion, government services, and, by its stability and fiscal
policy, the economy. The laws drafted by the Advisory Law
Commission and put into effect by Magoon were badly
needed, but more related to establishing the machinery for
American withdrawal than to promoting long-term reforms.
Governments, however, are built on men as well as laws,
and the political program of the Provisional Governor and
the administrative reforms initiated by the Army officers on
his staff contributed to Cuba's problems rather than solved
them. Magoon, Taft, and Roosevelt believed that political
parties were an expression of popular will and necessary to
representative government; their faith in the American ex
perience was obvious. Beyond their ideological commitment
to party government, they recognized that parties were essen
tial to the elections which would return Cuba to its own
government. Ironically, while the Provisional Government's
constitutional reforms were in accordance with the Cuban
conservatives' suggestions for cleansing the government, the
United States, through elections, turned the whole apparatus
over to men whose political values did not include belief in
a division and balance of power, limited government, efficiency,
honesty, and public interest, as Americans prized them.
Within the Provisional Government, the greatest impulse
for change in Cuba came from the officers of the United
States Army. Their experiences with Leonard Wood and in
the other insular possessions convinced them that the former
Spanish colonies needed long periods of tutelage and control
if they were not to slip into anarchy or absolutism. They saw