Cuba declares war on Austria-Hungary

On 16 December 1917 the President of Cuba, Mario García Menocal, proclaimed that a state of war existed between the Republic of Cuba and the Imperial and Royal Government of Austria-Hungary. Cuba, which eight months earlier, a day after the United States, had declared war on Germany, once again followed Washington. Nine days had passed since the American decision, and six since Panama’s similar step.

Congress in Havana

When on 4 December President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Austria-Hungary, there was no doubt in Havana about what to do. At the beginning of December Menocal sent a message to the Cuban Congress asking for a joint resolution declaring war on the Habsburg monarchy. In April both houses had voted for war with Germany in a single afternoon. This time they needed several days. According to the Cuban chronicler of those years, León Primelles, the House of Representatives adopted the resolution on 12 December and the Senate on 14 December, and it was proclaimed on 16 December. On 21 December the Cuban chargé d’affaires in Washington, J. R. Torralbas, informed Secretary of State Robert Lansing that Congress, in joint session on 16 December, had declared war and the president had proclaimed a state of war.

The debate had one curious moment. Deputy Generoso Campos Marquetti proposed that Cuba should also declare war on the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria, with which the United States was not at war. This was meant to prove that Havana was not merely an echo of Washington. The motion was not adopted. The Liberal opposition, part of which had taken up arms against Menocal in February, this time voted for war. Speaking on its behalf in the House on 12 December was Horacio Díaz Pardo, deputy for the province of Matanzas, and his speech was later published together with an English translation. On 15 December the former Austro-Hungarian consul was detained in Santiago de Cuba, and in the following days several Germans and German sympathisers.

Sugar and ships

Cuba sent no troops to the front. Its contribution was above all sugar, one of the goods the Allies could not do without since the war had cut Britain off from beet sugar from Central Europe. By late summer 1917 it had become clear that the United States and Britain wanted to buy the whole Cuban crop for the Allies at a fixed price. As early as August trading in sugar futures was banned in New York. Negotiations went on all autumn. The Cuban planters and Menocal demanded at least 4.75 cents a pound, while the inter-Allied sugar committee, on which sat representatives of the US Food Administration and the British, offered 4.60. On 24 November the US Food Administrator, Herbert Hoover, appealed directly to Wilson, and the same day the president instructed Lansing to back his position. The Cubans gave way, and on 24 December, a week after the declaration of war, a contract was signed for the sale to the United States and Britain of 75 per cent of the 1918 crop at 4.60 cents a pound, with an option on the rest at the same price. In 1918 Cuba produced nearly 3.5 million tons of sugar, about a fifth of world production.

The second matter was ships. In August the government decided to hand over to the United States for the duration of the war four German steamers, interned in Cuban ports since 1914 and seized in April. The formalities, however, dragged on for months. On 14 December, the day of the Senate vote, Lansing passed on to Havana a proposal from the US Shipping Board: Cuba was to register the ships under its own flag and charter them to the Americans, for a fee or free of charge, in return for the cost of repairs being covered. The war also drew Cuba closer to the United States in other ways. At the end of November, at Washington’s request, censorship of military news and of information on ship sailings was introduced, the Cuban navy operated practically under American command, and in November a hundred Cuban soldiers went to Florida for training in coastal defence.

Conscription

Menocal wanted more. As early as June 1917 he asked Congress to introduce compulsory military service, but the Liberals were against it and the matter stalled. The law on universal conscription was passed only in the summer of 1918 and promulgated on 3 August. It introduced two years’ service from the age of 21 and was to lapse a year after the end of the war. Contrary to a widespread belief, the Americans did not support it at all. The State Department considered a strong Cuban army contrary to the interests of the United States, and what was needed from Cuba was above all sugar. Menocal took this with resentment. In September 1918 the government in Havana offered to send a contingent to Europe, but Washington declined, explaining that war equipment had been allocated many months ahead and that the Cuban army would be more useful defending the island. Some studies write of tens of thousands of soldiers ready to leave at the time of the Armistice, but no Cuban unit reached the front. In Europe only volunteers fought, among others in the Foreign Legion and the French air service, and the Cuban Red Cross raised money for hospital aid for the wounded.

Significance

The declaration of war on Austria-Hungary did not change the position of Cuba, which was already a belligerent and a delegate to the great inter-Allied conference in Paris. It was, however, a further confirmation that in foreign policy the island, bound to the United States by the Platt Amendment, followed Washington step by step. Even the motion meant to challenge this failed in Congress. In 1917, apart from the United States, only four states declared war on Austria-Hungary: Siam, China, Panama and Cuba.

Thanks to this, Cuba took its place among the victors. It signed the Treaty of Versailles and, in September 1919, the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye with Austria, and became one of the founding members of the League of Nations. It gained most from sugar. Wartime prices, and their steep rise after the war, gave the island in 1919–1920 a brief period of dizzying wealth, called the “Dance of the Millions”, which ended in a crash at the end of 1920.