History Absolves Tomas Estrada Palma, Cuba’s 1st President
By Roland Armando Alum*
HAVANA TIMES – This October 10, 2024, Cubans everywhere commemorate the 156th anniversary of the beginning of what is known in Cuban history as the “Ten Years War.” This essay is inspired by the excellent book authored by Margarita Garcia: Before Cuba Libre–The Making of Cuba’s First President: Tomas Estrada Palma (Outskirts Press, 1916; also in Spanish by Editorial Betania).
Garcia, a New Jersey-based Cuban-American university psychology-professor-turned-historian, refutes the distortion attempts vs. the legacy of Cuba’s first elected president, Tomas Estrada-Palma, launched by the Castros’ socialist regime (in the Spanish tradition, Estrada was his paternal, and Palma his maternal patronymics).
It is customary in modern nation-states to honor the memory of their first presidents (e.g., George Washington in the US.); but socialist Cuba is a notable exception. Like all dictatorships routinely do, the Castro brothers’ government has attempted to rewrite history, disparaging its predecessors so as to justify its autocracy, but Estrada-Palma [TEP from now on] has been a particular target.
TEP renounced his “bourgeois” life-style, joining the independentist insurgents soon after the October/1868 rebellion in his native city of Bayamo, ultimately rising to the presidency of the Republic in Arms (1876–1877). However, he was captured and jailed in Spain; although released after the 1878 armistice, he was not allowed to return to Cuba.
He then moved to Honduras invited by his cousin, the poet Joaquín Palma (author of the Guatemalan national anthem’s lyrics) who had become an aide to the Honduran reformist-liberal President Marco Soto. TEP excelled in organizing the Honduran mail service, the public hospitals’ system, and the teachers’ training school, while marrying Genoveva Guardiola, daughter of a late Honduran president (in 1902 she became Cuba’s first, First Lady).
When the Soto government collapsed in 1883 under military pressure, TEP moved to Central Valley, a small hamlet about 50 kms. North of New York City, where he ran a celebrated bilingual, multiracial private school.
By 1892, the exiled independentists were united under the charismatic leadership of Jose Martíi who in April 1895 sailed clandestinely to Cuba to join the guerrilla fighters (“mambises”) that had taken up arms that February. Upon Marti’s death in combat in May/1895, TEP succeeded him at the helm of the Cuban Revolutionary Party, that had been founded in New York for the independence of Cuba and Puerto Rico.
Following the Maine battleship’s explosion in Havana, the U.S. intervened militarily in April/ 1898. The U.S. troops found a country devastated by war, rampant with hunger and epidemics, exacerbated by the notorious Spanish troops’ cruelty. In today’s Marxist parlance, the colonial soldiers repressing Cubans were mostly Spanish “lumpen-proletarians,” a cadre that included the Castros’ own father.
The (first) US occupation sanitized the island, built hospitals, aqueducts, highways and bridges, created a public educational system, and called for elections for December, 1901. Reluctantly, TEP acquiesced to run for president. Opposing him was veteran General Bartolome Maso, who withdrew at the 11th hour alleging an electoral conspiracy against him presumably backed by the US. But in my own research, I learned that, curiously, Maso had been on the Intervention Government’s payroll in his hometown of Manzanillo.
In fact, TEP was elected in absentia while still in Central Valley and took a circuitous trip to the homeland he had last seen a quarter of a century earlier. Tellingly, Maso hosted the president-elect when TEP passed through Manzanillo on his way to his inauguration in Havana that took place on Tuesday, May 20,1902. It was a gentlemanly gesture, quite the opposite of the divisive, hate-mongering modus operandi of the Castros. Given the Latin-American republics’ early record of militarism and TEP’s own experience with the Honduran military, the TEP-Maso embrace symbolized a hopeful success for civilian government in the nascent Antillean republic.
Yet, admittedly, during Cuba’s Republican era (1902-58) the military interfered repeatedly in politics. Indeed, a key objective of the 1950’s liberal-inspired political rebellion against Afro-Cuban General Fulgencio Batista (and don’t call it a “revolution”) was to finally return the troops to the barracks. Ironically, under the Castro siblings, Cuba has been largely ruled by self-appointed “generals,” now in their old age still chanting passé Marxist-Leninist slogans.
Likewise, for the last 65 years the Castro family —an unelected, de facto dynasty— has persistently accused TEP of turning Cuba into a “Yankee vassal state.” Soon after 1959, government-sponsored fascist-styled mobs vandalized a monument in Havana erected in TEP’s honor. Paradoxically, the Castros turned Cuba into a vassal state subservient to the distant, failed Communist Soviet Bloc.
Among TEP’s accomplishments were; he: 1) launched the first nationwide literacy campaign (and without partisan indoctrination goals); 2) limited the number of U.S. naval bases from the seven requested of the budding republic to one: Guantanamo; 3) and succeeded in having the U.S. recognize Cuba’s sovereignty over the adjacent Isle of Pines, which many in the US coveted.
Unfortunately, TEP violated his own promise not to seek a second term. This was his final downfall which precipitated an upheaval that triggered the second US intervention (1906-1909) under the invocation of the contentious Platt Amendment (later abrogated through diplomatic negotiations).
Still, in contrast to Socialist Cuba, freedom of expression was respected, and the economy began to improve after the virtually 30 years of war. There was no cult of personality; no official hatemongering vs. dissident Cubans or foreign countries; no firing squads or concentration camps for suspected opponents; no official homophobic policy; and no mass emigration, au contraire, thousands of immigrants arrived who assisted in the national rebuilding efforts.
The historical facts of TEP’s legacy, which the Cuban tyranny’s propaganda machine and its fervent foreign apologists in intellectual circles (but who live comfortably abroad) have disparaged, remind me of Orwell’s dictum: “who controls the present…controls the past.” But we owe it to ourselves to debunk all kinds of dictatorships’ false, propagandistic discourse vis-à-vis patriotic historical figures. In the end, on balance, history is absolving Tomas Estrada-Palma, but not the Castros, who turned Cuba into a sad, colossal failed state.
*Roland Armando Alum is an external Senior Research Associate in Socio-Cultural Anthropology (Ethnology) with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Latin-American Studies (of which he is a graduate) and vice-chair of the New Jersey State Certified Psychoanalysts Committee <[email protected]>.