Restoration and Withdrawal 267political hostages when a faction wanted to coerce the United
States government. Not to intervene, to allow American lives
and property to be destroyed, was to risk widespread criticism
at home and economic collapse in the affected Caribbean
country. The problem had another dimension. The employ
ment habits, the marketing risks, and the patterns of wealth
distribution that characterized the Cuban economy in 1906
(the result of the increasing dominance of industrialized, cash-
crop agriculture) were in themselves a cause of political insta
bility. The Provisional Government became increasingly aware
of this, yet, except for temporary palliatives, it could not
change Cuba's economic structure. Among the restraints were
the direct limitations imposed by the United States gov
ernment and the economic preconceptions of the Americans
serving in Cuba. The causes of Cuba's economic instability
were clear enough. Yet this understanding of Cuba's economic
vulnerability did not prevent the Taft administration from
encouraging American investors to create similar problems in
other Caribbean nations by introducing or expanding economic
institutions similar to Cuba's. If the economic phase of Dollar
Diplomacy was based on the impact of foreign capital on
the Cuban political system, it was an unwise precedent to
follow. The Cuban experience demonstrated that the poli
tics of violence were part of the cost of a certain form of
economic development.
The social and political insecurity of Cuba's type of
economic growth far outweighed the stabilizing effect brought
about by a simple increase of the nation's wealth. However
imperfectly stated, this was the argument the officers of the
United States Army serving in Cuba wanted to present, that
stability without reform and institutional change brought no
peace at all. In retrospect, the authoritarian American gov
ernment the officers wished to establish for Cuba, in order to
reshape the Cuban way of life, might have been a humani
tarian, just, and effective alternative to the indigenous, self-
determined Cuban government created in the image but not
the spirit of American economic and political liberalism.