The First World War in the Caribbean: Research Perspectives

Abstract

On the eve of World War I, the countries of the Caribbean basin are absent from the international arena. In Cuba, the Platt amendment - inscribed in the constitutional statute of the Republic - deprives the island of all diplomatic independence. Dominican Republic and Haití construct their nationalistic discourses in relation to their historical oppositions for the dominion of the island. In Cuba, a large part of the members of the independence elite express sincere admiration for the “civilized” culture of their neighbor. They perceive the latter as a means of erasing the vestiges of a Spanish “barbarism” that should be definitively relegated to a distant past. The American intervention of 1906-1909, the invasion of Nicaragua and the Enrique Mazas case contributed to the birth of an anti-imperialist intellectual movement in the period immediately prior to the war whose first manifesto titled Contra el Yankee was published in 1913 by Cesar Gandarilla.