The so-called Spanish-American War saw fake news stories that would be recycled later.
The two chief media outlets of the day competed with wild stories to whip up US support for war and occupation. It was "doubtful...that the war would have developed without the agency of the most vicious and cynical behavior of a part of the American press that our nation had yet seen" (p. 53). This same media conduct was repeated a hundred years later to garner support for the war on Iraq.
Spain was blamed without any evidence for the US Navy ship Maine explosion. Vice President Theodore Roosevelt then repeated the unsubstantiated claim the next day, providing the excuse to launch an invasion. Similarly, this storyline was later repackaged with the fabricated North Vietnamese attack on a US destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin.
The corporate press erased the whole 1895-98 independence struggle of the Cuban people against Spain by claiming the US invasion won the war and freed Cuba from Spain.
Even the US name for the war, the Spanish-American War, was a propaganda ploy, removing the agency of Cubans, concealing it being a US war on the Cuban independence struggle. Similarly, the corporate media sold us the US War on Korea as the "Korean War" and the US War on Vietnam as the "Vietnam War."
Cubans were painted as irresponsible, lazy, ignorant, unfit for self-government - racist stereotypes the corporate media repeatedly applied to many other Third World peoples and countries, including native Americans and Blacks. "The Cuban is lacking chiefly in the qualities that are conspicuous in American men - virility, initiative, will power, tenacity, reverences for women and conscience." "They are helpless, idle, of defective morals and unfitted by nature and experience for discharging the obligations of citizenship in a great and free republic. Their lack of manly force and self-respect-- and so on with this precursor of Nazi-style propaganda.
"To clothe such men with the responsibilities of directing self-government would be to summon them to the performance of functions for which they have not the smallest capacity" (quoted on pp.55-56). The New York Times at the time declared, "We are guardians, self-appointed, to the Cuban people" (p.61). and warned of "an irresponsible government of half-breeds" (p.62).
That Third World peoples still need the American white man's firm hand and parenting remains a central element of US foreign policy propaganda, not only against Cuba, but the world.
Brazen Yankee arrogance displays itself in one clause of the quintessential neo-colonial Platt Amendment the US imposed on Cuba: Cuba was prohibited from negotiating treaties with any country other than the US "which will impair... the independence of Cuba" or "permit any foreign power or powers to obtain"or control over any portion" of Cuba. All precisely US conduct with the Platt Amendment.
The occupation completed, the US then made available prime Cuban lands to US citizens, following historic US policy with conquered native American peoples' lands.
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