The Second Intervention 109Peace Mission before the occupation was a week old.^92 The
Taft-Roosevelt correspondence and the full report of the
Peace Mission were made public two months later. The docu
ments printed in the Taft-Bacon Report and Foreign Affairs,
1906 have in fact perpetuated the Roosevelt administration's
interpretation of the Peace Mission's conduct, and American
historians (critics and apologists alike) have largely accepted
Roosevelt's evidence.^93 Conceding Roosevelt's thesis that he
did not want intervention for both the United States and
Cuban interest, one must still conclude the Taft-Bacon Mis
sion was sent as much to protect Roosevelt's political leader
ship at home as it was to stop the war in Cuba. To a large
degree, Taft's job was to negotiate the United States out of
the impasse Roosevelt helped create when he sent ammunition
and ships to Havana. In the eyes of Cubans of varying politi
cal persuasions, the United States, until the Taft-Bacon Mis
sion arrived, was stiffening the otherwise impotent Cuban
government.^^4
The contemporary Cuban reaction was a mixture of relief,
political self-justification, and despair with the nation's politi
cal weakness, but few dismissed the revolt lightly. Representa
tive of the Liberal-nationalist viewpoint, Enrique Collazo
described the revolt as the necessary destruction of a non-
Cuban government built upon the moral and economic preju
dices of Leonard Wood and Estrada Palma.^95 Outraged by
the political nihilism of 1908, Roque E. Garrigo emotionally
deplored the Cubans' inability to reach the social harmony of
their ideal:
In the Nation, in the provinces and in the Cuban municipalities,
there are, nor can there be, more than two points of view: that of the
privileged ones, vile adultorers of the [political] system now marvelously
full of their bastard ambitions, their stupidities and their frauds; and
that of those who suffer in placid tranquillity, lacking the spirit of
true citizenship, in unqualified fear of the abusers.^96
For Enrique Jose Varona, who had watched the events of
September take place with characteristic sang-froid, the Ameri
can commissioners had destroyed the Cuban government