Cuba: Payment Deferred

On August 13, 1762, the fortified city of Havana, and with it the island of Cuba, fell to a combined force of the British Army and the Royal Navy after a siege lasting two months. Havana had been the strongest Spanish base in the Caribbean/Gulf of Mexico; from its fine, protected harbor Spanish ships had commanded maritime communications between the motherland and her possessions on the North American mainland, and had exerted authority over her New World empire. When Havana fell, it marked the beginning of British and later American supremacy in the Caribbean. The battle for Havana was the last important American engagement of the French and Indian War, the outcome of which was the dissolution of the French Empire in North America, and the beginning of the end of the Spanish Empire.

The importance of Cuba lies now, as then, in its peculiar position. As Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan observed in a Harper’s article in June 1897, “Cuba has no possible rival in her command of the Yucatan Passage, just as she has no competition in point of natural strength and resources for control of the Florida Strait which connects the Gulf of Mexico with the Atlantic.” In The Interests of America in Seapower, Present and Future, his book of the same year, Mahan went on to define the intrinsic advantage that Cuba enjoys:

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Harold W. Rood

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On August 13, 1762, the fortified city of Havana, and with it the island of Cuba, fell to a combined force of the British Army and the Royal Navy after a siege lasting two months. Havana had been the strongest Spanish base in the Caribbean/Gulf of Mexico; from its fine, protected harbor Spanish ships had commanded maritime communications between the motherland and her possessions on the North American mainland, and had exerted authority over her New World empire. When Havana fell, it marked the beginning of British and later American supremacy in the Caribbean. The battle for Havana was the last important American engagement of the French and Indian War, the outcome of which was the dissolution of the French Empire in North America, and the beginning of the end of the Spanish Empire.

The importance of Cuba lies now, as then, in its peculiar position. As Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan observed in a Harper’s article in June 1897, “Cuba has no possible rival in her command of the Yucatan Passage, just as she has no competition in point of natural strength and resources for control of the Florida Strait which connects the Gulf of Mexico with the Atlantic.” In The Interests of America in Seapower, Present and Future, his book of the same year, Mahan went on to define the intrinsic advantage that Cuba enjoys: