The Politics of Intervention

80 THE POLITICS OF INTERVENTION

for warships. The insurgents' public statements, on the other
hand, showed deeper political and military wisdom. They
judged that Roosevelt would not risk an unpopular war on
the side of a weak and "unjust" government.
Roosevelt's grasp of the Cuban crisis was complicated by
the Steinhart-Sleeper competition at the Havana end of the
diplomatic channel, but both men accurately passed on the
news they received and neither controlled Cuban affairs. As
sympathetic as Steinhart was to the Estrada Palma govern­
ment, he did not have to encourage the Cuban president to
ask for help. More serious was Steinhart's judgment on
Sleeper's competency, but his own prejudices and interests
were known to Roosevelt and Bacon. While they communi­
cated to Estrada Palma through Steinhart, they also weighed
Sleeper's cablegrams which continued to come to them. How­
ever misleading or excited Steinhart and Sleeper might have
been, it was Roosevelt who failed to realize how inaccurate
one of his basic assumptions was: that the Cubans would
compromise their differences rather than turn the island over
to the United States to govern again. Perhaps if Roosevelt
had had Elihu Root's counsel, he would have seen some other
diplomatic alternative, but even Root could not have changed
the military implications of a Cuban intervention.
The crucial decision not to support Estrada Palma, for this
is what the Gonzalo de Quesada letter was, rested primarily
on military considerations. Roosevelt, Taft, Bell, and Funston
were in essential agreement that a guerrilla war in Cuba
was a real possibility and that such a war would be costly
in lives, American property, and the administration's popu­
larity at home. Throughout their deliberations, they were
aware that they risked another war on the Philippine model
if they aided Estrada Palma. Furthermore, though the Army
and Navy were better prepared than in 1898, troops and
ships could not be moved rapidly enough to save the Cuban
economy if the insurgents decided to live up to their Septem­
ber 15 deadline to destroy foreign property. The naval inter­
vention, by itself, was of little assistance to the planters in
the back country.