U.S. President Calvin Coolidge, second from left, and his wife, first lady Grace Coolidge, third from left, are shown with the President of Cuba General Gerardo Machado y Morales, right, and his wife, Elvira Machado, left, on the estate of President Machado in Havana, Cuba, Jan. 19, 1928. (AP Photo).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n“Cal himself, of course, was the cynosure of the drama,” Smith wrote. “As the tray approached from his left, he wheeled artfully to the right, seeming to admire a portrait on the wall. The tray came closer. Mr. Coolidge wheeled right another 90 degrees, pointing out to Machado the beauties of the tropical verdure. By the time he completed his 360-degree turn, the incriminating tray had passed safely beyond him. Apparently he had never seen it. His maneuver was a masterpiece of evasive action.”<\/p>\n
Machado invited Coolidge not simply as a gesture of goodwill, but for the singularly important task of delivering the opening address to the 6th International Conference of American States, also known as the Pan-American Conference. The Pan-American Conference was essentially a precursor to the group we know today as the OAS, the Organization of American States, which is essentially a collaborative organization for all of the countries in the Western Hemisphere. The great majority of those countries, then as now, were Latin American.<\/p>\n
President Coolidge opened the Pan-American Conference with a keynote speech that urged the nations of the Western Hemisphere to embrace peace and the principles of freedom and democracy. The time had come to \u201cbeat our swords into plowshares,\u201d the president said. He also emphasized the equality that existed between the independent republics of the Americas. \u201cThe smallest and the weakest speak here with the same authority as the largest and the most powerful,\u201d he remarked. \u201cYou are continuing to strike a new note in international gatherings by maintaining a forum in which not the selfish interests of a few but the general welfare of all will be considered.\u201d<\/p>\n
With respect to Cuba, Coolidge said \u201cThirty years ago Cuba ranked as a foreign possession\u2026. Today Cuba is her own sovereign. Her people are independent, free, prosperous and peaceful, enjoying the advantages of self-government\u2026. What Cuba has done, others have done and are doing\u2026. Among our republics\u2026 people have taken charge of their own affairs\u2026 an attitude of peace and goodwill prevails among our nations.\u201d<\/p>\n
Commenting on the visit in his press conference the following day, President Coolidge summarized his impressions, \u201cThere is nothing I can say about the Pan American Conference that occurs to me, that has not already been said. Naturally our Government is pleased with my reception at Havana. One of the most pleasant opportunities that I had there was going out to the country place of the President, which gave me an opportunity to drive through quite a number of miles of Cuban territory where I had a chance to observe the people and see something of the progress they are making. As I left there it seemed to me that the conference was in a position to do very much excellent work\u201d \u2014 January 20, 1928 (The Talkative President, Quint and Ferrell, p.251).<\/p>\n
Coolidge\u2019s speech should be considered a marker for shift in relations with our Latin American brethren. For the preceding century the countries of Latin America had been treated not exactly as inferior states, but certainly as subjects to the supreme interests of the United States. America did not always respect the equal dignity those countries deserved in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Coolidge decided that this arrangement had to change, in the interest of fostering peace and concord throughout the Hemisphere.<\/p>\n
After giving his speech Coolidge returned to the United States and left the delegates at the conference to do their work. Instead of taking the USS Texas, Coolidge embarked on his return voyage via the USS Memphis, a faster cruiser. On the trip back Coolidge was plagued by seasickness. He was happy to reach American soil the next day, and he rode through the streets of Key West in a car so that the people could get a good glimpse of him. On his way back to D.C. he met with the Florida Governor John W. Martin up in Jacksonville. When he got back to the nation\u2019s capital he heard that the City Council of Havana voted to name 17th Street in the city \u201cPresident Coolidge Street.\u201d I\u2019d be interested to see if it still remains as President Coolidge Street!<\/p>\n
The day after Coolidge\u2019s speech former Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, who had served during the Harding administration and in the first two years of the Coolidge administration and was serving as America\u2019s envoy to the Pan-American conference, gave a tremendously well-received speech that turned the conference against approving an anti-U.S. resolution.<\/p>\n
Frank Kellogg later had Undersecretary of State J. Reuben Clark (for whom the BYU Law School is named) draft a white paper, known as the Clark Memorandum, which made the case against U.S. military involvement in Central and South America, modifying the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.<\/p>\n
Brief word about the Roosevelt Corollary: In the early 1900s Roosevelt grew concerned that a crisis between Venezuela and its creditors could spark an invasion of that nation by European powers. The Roosevelt Corollary of December 1904 stated that the United States would intervene as a last resort to ensure that other nations in the Western Hemisphere fulfilled their obligations to international creditors, and did not violate the rights of the United States or invite \u201cforeign aggression to the detriment of the entire body of American nations.\u201d As the corollary worked out in practice, the United States increasingly used military force to restore internal stability to nations in the region. Roosevelt declared that the United States might \u201cexercise international police power in \u2018flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence.\u2019\u201d Over the long term the corollary had little to do with relations between the Western Hemisphere and Europe, but it did serve as justification for U.S. intervention in Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.<\/p>\n
This posture was very much in concert with Coolidge\u2019s other foreign policy initiatives, such as the Kellogg-Briand pact, which outlawed war as a means of resolving international disputes. This was indeed a lofty aim, but signaled the fact that it was the foreign policy aim of the United States Government to sue for peace whenever possible. The experience of the First World War, and the evidence it provided that modern warfare meant bloodier, more efficient, more brutal, more total warfare, convinced not only Coolidge, but many other world leaders, that \u201cbeating our swords into plowshares\u201d was the best way to go in trying to settle our differences. Frank Kellogg earned the Nobel Peace Prize in 1929 for his work on the Peace Pact.<\/p>\n
These efforts, of course, would not prove entirely successful given the terrible Second World War, but in the discrete area of Latin America policy Coolidge\u2019s posture would be emulated by future presidents as well, and culminate in 1933 with Franklin Roosevelt\u2019s \u201cGood Neighbor\u201d Policy, which stated that \u201cNo state has the right to intervene in the internal or external affairs of another,\u201d a huge departure from our earlier policy. In 1934 Roosevelt abandoned the 1903 Treaty with Cuba that ratified the Platt Amendment.<\/p>\n
So why does Coolidge’s trip to Cuba matter? Well, it shows the broader context of America in an age of imperialism. We wanted to build our own empire, but we quickly realized all the problems that entails. However, America still has a military empire, and the overall benefits for the global order of this reality are manifest in a variety of ways. Coolidge’s trip demonstrates the importance of sovereign nations respecting each other as equals. It also shows how a policy of rapprochement often leads to positive outcomes. It was the first major shift toward re-imagining our relationship with Latin America, which culminated in Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy, and it might hopefully provide a blueprint for future U.S.-Cuba Relations, as the United States shifts to a policy of using soft influence to change the current state of affairs on the island.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On February 18, 2016 it was announced that President Barack Obama will visit Cuba. This trip will make him the first sitting U.S. president to visit the island since President Calvin Coolidge went in January 1928. This lecture about Coolidge’s Cuba excursion was given by Coolidge Foundation program associate Rushad Thomas on Presidents’ Day Weekend 2015.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34965,"featured_media":4714,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coolidgefoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4713"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coolidgefoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coolidgefoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coolidgefoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34965"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coolidgefoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4713"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/coolidgefoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4713\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coolidgefoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coolidgefoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coolidgefoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coolidgefoundation.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}