Tomás Estrada Palma

Tomás Estrada Palma (* 1835 in Manzanillo , Cuba ; † November 4, 1908 in Santiago de Cuba ) was a Cuban politician and the first President of the Republic of Cuba from 1902 to 1906.

Tomás Estrada Palma, first President of the Republic of Cuba

Life

During the first phase of the Cuban War of Independence against the Spanish colonial power ( Guerra Larga 1868–1878), Tomás Estrada Palma was for a short time (March 29, 1876 - October 19, 1877) President of the Cuban government in the underground (República en Armas) .

Estrada was captured by the Spanish colonial troops and deported to Spain . From there he traveled to the USA , became a US citizen and was a lobbyist for the Cuban independence movement. With the help of an American banker, he offered Spain, following the example of the purchase of Alaska from Russia, 150 million dollars for Cuba; however, the plan failed. After the death of José Martí in 1895, Estrada Palma was officially appointed representative of the Cuban independence movement in the USA.

After the occupation of Cuba by US troops in the Spanish-American War in 1898, the peculiar construct of a republic arose in Cuba in 1902, which lacked sovereignty. Because in a constitutional amendment ( Platt Amendment ), the constituent assembly had to grant the USA a permanent right of intervention under strong pressure. The presidential elections were so influenced by the USA that the opposition party under Bartolomé Masó was forced to withdraw the candidacy. The first President of Cuba after the end of the Spanish colonial era, desired by the USA, was elected on December 31, 1901 without a candidate: Tomás Estrada Palma. He took office on May 20, 1902.

Even when he was re-elected in 1905, he was unopposed, as the opposition Liberal Party had withdrawn its candidates in protest of the election conditions. On May 20, 1906, Estrada began his second term as president. When he realized that his government had nothing to counteract the protests organized by the opposition against his government, which had only 3,000 soldiers, he asked the US government for intervention and resigned from his office at the end of September 1906. The opposition also preferred a renewed US occupation to a continuation of the Estrada government. After the agreement brokered by the USA, all officials who had emerged from the contested elections of 1905 had to resign, and the opposition insurgents were disarmed and amnestied.

William Howard Taft , close friend and later successor to US President Theodore Roosevelt , took over the government of Cuba as acting US Secretary of War on October 1, 1906 with the support of two warships and 5,600 marines. The US intervention formally ended in January 1909 with the inauguration of the second elected president of the sovereign Republic of Cuba, José Miguel Gómez .

literature

• Rafael Martínez Ortiz: Cuba. Los primeres años de independencia . Le livre libre, Paris, 3rd edition 1929
  • Vol. 1: La intervención y el establecimiento del gobierno de Don Tomás Estrada Palma
  • Vol. 2: Gobierno de Don Tomás Estrada Palma. Elecciones presidenciales de 1905. La guerra civil, la segunda intervención y el restablecimiento de la República
• Margarita García: Antes de "Cuba libre". El surgimiento del primer presidente, Tomás Estrada Palma . Editorial Betania, Madrid 2015, ISBN 978-84-8017-359-9 .

Footnotes

1. ↑ Margarita García: Antes de "Cuba libre". El surgimiento del primer presidente, Tomás Estrada Palma . Editorial Betania, Madrid 2015, pp. 49–59.
2. ^ Jorge I. Domínguez: Cuba. Order and Revolution. Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London 1978, pp. 14-17.
3. ↑ Cuba en la mano. Enciclopédia popular ilustrada . La Habana 1940, p. 1197.