The Politics of Intervention

The August Revolution 77

consequences will be absence of legal power, and therefore

the prevailing state of anarchy will continue unless the United

States Government will adopt the measures necessary to avoid

this danger."^66

Roosevelt Acquiesces in Intervention

The landings from "Denver" and "Marietta" may have
saved lives and property, but their greatest importance to the
Cuban civil war was their impact on the strategy of both
the government and the rebel leadership. Both sides appar­
ently saw the landings as the first step of an American mili­
tary intervention, and both renewed their efforts to insure
that intervention would serve their purposes. Fearing con­
tinued fighting and an insurgent victory, Estrada Palma was
determined to throw the government into the United States
hands if Roosevelt would not support him militarily. He was
convinced that Cuba's future peace and economic stability
were at stake, that under the Platt Amendment Roosevelt
must act to prevent the Republic's collapse.^67

The Liberal leaders were equally interested in American
intervention because they thought if free elections were held
they would win and, in any event, their government would
need the United States approval to survive. Despite threats,
their treatment of American property was hardly destruc­
tive. Rather, they held the sugar plantations hostage, while,
for Roosevelt's benefit, they demonstrated Estrada Palma's
military weakness. The Liberals gambled that Roosevelt
would avoid a guerrilla war if possible, that he could not
bear, politically, the expenses of a permanent or violent
occupation. They interpreted the landings to save lives and
property as the first step in American mediation and from
that point did little more than encourage the rumors of
chaos and destruction, which they knew Roosevelt could
not ignore.^68

At Oyster Bay, Theodore Roosevelt struggled to find a
way out of the Cuban impasse, which to a degree he had