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"Neagle, Michael"
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America's Forgotten Colony : Cuba's Isle of Pines
\"America's Forgotten Colony examines private US citizens' experiences on Cuba's Isle of Pines to show how American influence adapted and endured in republican-era Cuba (1902-58). This transnational study challenges the notion that US territorial ambitions waned after the nineteenth century. Many Americans, anxious about a 'closed' frontier in an industrialized, urbanized United States, migrated to the Isle and pushed for agrarian-oriented landed expansion well into the twentieth century. Their efforts were stymied by Cuban resistance and reluctant US policymakers. After decades of tension, however, a new generation of Americans collaborated with locals in commercial and institutional endeavors. Although they did not wield the same influence, Americans nevertheless maintained a significant footprint. The story of this cooperation upsets prevailing conceptions of US domination and perpetual conflict, revealing that US-Cuban relations at the grassroots were not nearly as adversarial as on the diplomatic level at the dawn of the Cuban Revolution\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
\That Magnificent Land of Sunshine, Health, and Wealth\: How U.S. Entrepreneurs Sold Cuba's Isle of Pines
At the start of the twentieth century, U.S. citizens began settling and investing on the Isle of Pines off the coast of Cuba. U.S. entrepreneurs who believed the Isle was or would become U.S. territory bought vast tracts from Spanish and Cuban landowners. They then subdivided the land and marketed it to farmers and middle-class Americans still in search of opportunity on a disappearing frontier. These landholding companies' promotions helped shape the assumptions and expectations of thousands of Americans who settled on the Isle over the next few decades. Companies portrayed the Isle as a tropical paradise safe for white settlement and ripe for development. They promised high returns-on-investment for those looking to engage in citrus production for export, as well as a healthful climate for those plagued by chronic illness. Some of these settlers publicly echoed landholding companies' portrayal and remained on the Isle for years. Others found the Isle's promise to be grossly exaggerated and returned to the United States feeling swindled by unscrupulous entrepreneurs. Although set in a foreign land, U.S. interest in the Isle reveals much about life in the United States, including the changing nature of expansion, the growing power of advertising, and middle-class discontent.
Journal Article
“That Magnificent Land of Sunshine, Health, and Wealth”: How U.S. Entrepreneurs Sold Cuba's Isle of Pines1
At the start of the twentieth century, U.S. citizens began settling and investing on the Isle of Pines off the coast of Cuba. U.S. entrepreneurs who believed the Isle was or would become U.S. territory bought vast tracts from Spanish and Cuban landowners. They then subdivided the land and marketed it to farmers and middle-class Americans still in search of opportunity on a disappearing frontier. These landholding companies' promotions helped shape the assumptions and expectations of thousands of Americans who settled on the Isle over the next few decades. Companies portrayed the Isle as a tropical paradise safe for white settlement and ripe for development. They promised high returns-on-investment for those looking to engage in citrus production for export, as well as a healthful climate for those plagued by chronic illness. Some of these settlers publicly echoed landholding companies' portrayal and remained on the Isle for years. Others found the Isle's promise to be grossly exaggerated and returned to the United States feeling swindled by unscrupulous entrepreneurs. Although set in a foreign land, U.S. interest in the Isle reveals much about life in the United States, including the changing nature of expansion, the growing power of advertising, and middle-class discontent.
Journal Article
Isle of Pines, U.S.A.: The Other Side of American Expansion in Cuba, 1898–1960
This dissertation examines the experiences of U.S. citizens on the Isle of Pines, a Rhode Island-sized island off the southwest coast of Cuba, during the years in which Americans maintained a significant presence. In assessing the settlements, commercial activities, and encounters between private Americans and native Cubans (pineros), this project considers issues of identity, race, class, and the diverse forms of U.S. expansion in the twentieth century. Spurred by fears of a \"closed\" frontier in the United States, a search for economic opportunity and social mobility, a desire to preserve an agrarian way of life, a quest for improved health, and a sense of adventure and patriotism, as many as 10,000 Americans bought property on the Isle. Roughly 2,000 established at least part-time residences at a time when the Isle only had about 4,000 people. Although these settlers sought opportunity – mostly by growing citrus fruit and vegetables for export – many met with bitter disappointment as a result of business failures, tropical storms, and limited support from the U.S. government. During the quarter-century that the Isle's sovereignty remained in question, settlers made their communities a cultural extension of the United States. They established English-language schools, newspapers, and social clubs. Nevertheless, after a generation of self-isolation and tension, settlers and pineros grew to collaborate in commercial and institutional endeavors. These cultural and economic intersections belie popular perceptions of U.S. domination and perpetual U.S.-Cuban conflict. Like other recent studies that consider history \"from the bottom up,\" this dissertation emphasizes the experiences of non-state actors, rather than diplomats, to gauge U.S.-Cuban relations at the grassroots level. It employs previously untapped – indeed hitherto undiscovered – archival sources from the United States and Cuba. Methodologically, this project closely examines discourse and images to ascertain the key assumptions and logic of historical actors. This approach includes close readings of landholding company records and advertisements in newspapers that sold property and products from the Isle, as well as analyses of the rhetoric used in private reports and correspondence.
Dissertation