Security· Banana Wars
Sugar Intervention
The long protective deployment to eastern Cuba to guard the sugar economy during wartime.
When a Liberal uprising against the reelected Conservative government broke out in 1917, the United States, anxious to protect the sugar that the Allied war effort depended on, landed Marines in Oriente province and kept a force in the eastern Cuban sugar districts. The Marines guarded the plantations, mills, and railroads against the disorder of the revolt and the banditry that followed, a protective and constabulary duty rather than a campaign of battle, and it produced no significant combat casualties despite occasional incidents. The deployment, sometimes called the Sugar Intervention, ran on through the First World War and into the early 1920s before the Marines were withdrawn. It was a quiet, drawn-out occupation in defense of an economic interest, the kind of open-ended protective presence that recurred across the Caribbean in these years.
Podcast episodes on Banana Wars
Record no. 14