The Politics of Intervention

32 THE POLITICS OF INTERVENTION

While Brooke wrestled with such sticky problems as paying
off the Cuban insurgent army and discovering Washington's
aims in Cuba, two of his subordinates were planning and
working on a Cuban policy of their own. Generals Wilson
and Wood were applying their considerable ability and po­
litical power to rehabilitate Cuba in such a way that the
Cubans themselves would seek annexation to the United
States. Though voluntary annexation was the goal of both
men, their prescriptions for internal reform differed.
Major General James Harrison Wilson, commander of the
department of Matanzas-Santa Clara, advocated a national
program of economic reform sponsored by the Military Gov­
ernment.^21 Wilson, a West Point graduate and Civil War
veteran, had left the service in 1870 for a career as a railroad
executive. A successful businessman, he was also a former
national committeeman of the Republican party. Like most
of the industrialists of his day, Wilson was a firm believer in
progress through economic growth. The efficiency and sta­
bility of any future Cuban government depended, Wilson
stated, on the health of the island's economy, for wealth (or
lack of it) dictated Cuban political behavior. Prosperity and
social stability were possible in Cuba because the white race
was in the majority, and their behavior, once they became
affluent, would be conservative and responsible. In his experi­
ence, Wilson said, "the fortunate and prosperous are scarcely
vicious."^22 Therefore he urged the Military Government to
sponsor agricultural reconstruction through liberal loans and
gifts of animals and tools. The United States should encourage
Cuban prosperity, moreover, by opening its markets to sugar
and joining the two nations in a customs and postal union.
If the two countries were joined economically, the political
merger, sought by the Cubans themselves, would soon follow.^23

The beauty of Wilson's program was that it gave the Cubans
the independence promised them in the Teller Amendment,
the idealistic appendage to the war resolutions of 1898. One
of its weaknesses was that it envisioned governmental activity
beyond what Brooke and the War Department considered