Cuba had been a Spanish colony since the early 16th century. By the 19th century, Spain was no longer the dominant global power it had once been. After losing most of its mainland American empire in the 1820s, Cuba became the shrinking empire’s most valuable remaining colony, and it held on tightly with authoritarian repression. Two revolutions were suppressed in the latter half of the century, and slavery itself was not abolished until 1886.
In 1895, Cuban revolutionaries led by José Martí and others launched another war for independence. Martí, who had spent years in exile in the United States building support among Cuban expatriates and appealing to American audiences, was killed only months into the conflict. The war devolved into guerrilla fighting, sabotage, and escalating reprisals.
Spain responded with brutal repression under Governor-General Valeriano Weyler. His policies included summary executions, forced relocations, and most infamously, reconcentración: the herding of hundreds of thousands of rural civilians into guarded camps. The term “concentration camp” itself derives from this policy. Between 200,000 and 400,000 civilians are estimated to have died from starvation and disease.
Meanwhile, American economic interests were becoming deeply entangled with the island. After Cuba’s Ten Years’ War, U.S. capital poured into its struggling sugar economy. By 1894, roughly 90 percent of Cuba’s exports went to the United States.
Simultaneously, many Americans were horrified by reports of Spanish atrocities. A war with Spain, to American imperialists, would be strategically important, with humanitarian justification. After Martí’s death, more conservative and U.S.-friendly figures became the public face of Cuban independence in American eyes, and covert American financial aid and weapons shipments to the rebels increased.
If you’re interested, I explore how these converging pressures helped set the stage for the February 15th sinking of the USS Maine here and the outbreak of the Spanish-American War: https://open.substack.com/pub/aid2000/p/hare-brained-history-volume-67-the?r=4mmzre&utm\\\_medium=ios
by aid2000iscool
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Spain put Cubans in concentration camps first and then the Cuban Regime of Fidel Castro and the Cuban Communist Party did the same to the LGBTQ+ Cuban community some decades later just a few years after taking power while targeting gay people, dissidents, people who listened to rock music or had the “wrong” hair cut or clothing style, etc.
People will say this is not true and that it was an alternative to military service, but that is absolutely false. It was devised as a punishment for the LGBTQ+ community, and they were told “work will make you men.” This was basically a very horrific LGBTQ+ conversion therapy built around daily arduous labor, machismo, and terror. People were supposed to come out of these concentration camps as a “New Man” as theorized by Che Guevara.
People often chalk this up to something along the lines of “well, everyone hated gays back then…” However, you would think a Revolutionary movement would have done better than this. Alas, it did not.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Units_to_Aid_Production](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Units_to_Aid_Production)
[https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/social-sciences-and-humanities/revolutionary-cuba-imprisons-gays](https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/social-sciences-and-humanities/revolutionary-cuba-imprisons-gays)
[https://www.proquest.com/docview/1785500925?sourcetype=Scholarly%20Journals](https://www.proquest.com/docview/1785500925?sourcetype=Scholarly%20Journals)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Cuban_man](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Cuban_man)