Following the end of the Spanish American War, which was primarily a vehicle used by the Republican Administration and Republican majority Congress to divert public attention away from legislation that pandered to big business monopolists, and which both began and ended in 1898, the Cubans has the audacity to want to establish their own government free from colonization and foreign control. The United States was engaged in a policy of establishing American hegemony and an "auspicious environment" for American investment in the Caribbean region, however, and a completely free Cuba did not mesh with this policy. American capital required in the Caribbean countries "a docile working class, a passive peasantry, a compliant bourgeoisie, and a subservient political elite." The United States was embarked on the building of an American empire, and Cuba was a major building block in this design.
Therefore, rather that allow the Cubans to form their own free government, the United States occupied Cuba in the place of the formerly oppressive Spanish, forced the Cubans to cede territory for the establishment of an American naval station, forced the Cubans to accede to limitations of national sovereignty, and forced the Cuban to accept an agreement that authorized future American intervention in Cuban affairs. These conditions for Cuban independence were "appended directly into the (Cuban) Constitution of 1901, and negotiated later into the Permanent Treaty of 1903, loosely known as the Platt Amendment."
For three decades thereafter, the Platt Amendment served as the principal instrument of (American) hegemony" over Cuba. Through the Platt Amendment, "the United States exercised authority over Cuba not unlike sovereignty. The Platt Amendment was an organic document evolving and changing as circumstances dictated." In the end, "there was little in the exercise of hegemony that did not find sanction in the Platt Amendment." "Under the ...