Platt Amendment

Platt Amendment, an appendix to the Cuban constitution that granted the United States extensive influence in the country, essentially establishing it as a U.S. protectorate. At the conclusion of the Spanish-American War in 1898, the U.S. Army administered Cuba until its adoption of a self-governing constitution. Within the policy parameters that dated to the Monroe Doctrine in 1823, the United States desired to keep its influence on the island and secure it from future European advances. Toward that end, Secretary of War Elihu Root persuaded the U.S. Congress to approve a rider, named after the chairman of the Committee on Relations with Cuba, Senator Orville H. Platt, to the army appropriations bill of 1901. Subsequently, the Cubans reluctantly added the Platt Amendment to their constitution formed in that year and incorporated it in the 1903 treaty with the United States. The Platt Amendment secured U.S. interests but limited Cuba's independence. It restricted Cuba's foreign debt to levels acceptable to the United States and limited its ability to make treaties with foreign nations. It permitted the United States to intervene in order to maintain public order and gave that nation rights to naval stations eventually located at Guantánamo Bay. The United States intervened on several occasions after 1903 to supervise elections and provide for peaceful transfer of presidential administrations. The amendment was abrogated by treaty in 1934.

See alsoCuba, Constitutions; Monroe Doctrine.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Manual Márquez Sterling, Proceso histórico de la Enmienda Platt, 1897–1934 (1941).

Louis A. Pérez, Cuba Under the Platt Amendment, 1902–1934 (1986), and The United States and Cuba: Ties of Singular Intimacy (1990).

Additional Bibliography

Ibarra, Jorge. Cuba, 1898–1921: Partidos políticos y clases sociales. La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1992.

Whitney, Robert. State and Revolution in Cuba: Mass Mobilization and Political Change, 1920–1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

                                  Thomas M. Leonard