Reverse the status of Cuba and Puerto Rico
- Thread starter ahmedali
- Start date
Cuba never was a territory of the United States. Also getting the USA to annex it would require a POD before 1900.
Actually, Cuba briefly became a territory of the US after the Span-Am War with the provisional government set up there, before Cuba was made independent a few years later. There of course was always a keen interest in annexing Cuba into the US over the 19th century but it never happened.
But anyways, I'm surprise the OP stops there. I thought he was going to ask "What if Cuba was a US territory, and Puerto Rico was the independent nation that went communist?".
No, Cuba was occupied by the US military, but that doesn't make it a US territory. A US territory is a legal term. It does not just mean any place under American control that isn't a state.
Crazy Boris
Banned
The Treaty of Paris’ first provision was Spain abandoning all claims to Cuba and handing administration over to an American occupation force. The provision was meant to be a prelude to Cuban independence, and the Teller Amendment did forbid the USA from formally annexing the island, but from the treaty until 1902, Cuba was de facto American. It wasn’t a US territory in the strict legal sense of the term, but it was still de facto a territory of the US, in that it was under American jurisdiction. It’s a complicated arrangement, but Cuba certainly wasn’t Spanish anymore or independent yet, so American is really all it could be at the time.
American administration is different than being a US territory. After World War II, South Korea, Japan, and the American occupation zone in German were all under American administration, but they were never US territories. Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Phillipines became US territories at the end of the Spanish-American War, but Cuba did not, despite being under American military occupation.
You can't make Cuba similar to OTL Puerto Rico with a post-1900 POD. With a POD shortly before the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, you might be able to make it into something akin to the Philippines, IE a territory that's expected to go independent, but I think even that would be difficult. If you go with an earlier POD, maybe the USA could seize Santo Domingo and then seek to expand its holdings in the Caribbean, but that POD would be decades before the Spanish-American War.
The US buys Cuba from Spain sometime in the late 1800’s and integrates it into the country. Meanwhile Puerto Rico remains Spanish for most of the 1900’s before gaining independence alongside the rest of the Caribbean in the 1970/80’s
Pod before 1900 alfred Thayer manan never publishes the influence of sea power upon history. look at pr location on a map, from that position you control the entire Caribbean Sea, and great part of the Atlantic.