Cuban Revolutionaries Analysis

However, these dreams of peace were shattered when the senate rejected the treaty, and a little more than a year later, war broke out between the U.S. and Spain. The arbitration debate arose because of the Venezuela crisis, prompted by a boundary dispute between Venezuela and British Guiana. The Jingoes, a patriotic political faction that favored aggressive and warlike foreign policies in the name of patriotism, believing they were defending the nation’s honor, cited the Monroe Doctrine and threatened that if Britain intervened in Venezuela, the U.S. would go to war. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, an ardent imperialist, declared that “the Monroe Doctrine has no bearing on the extension of the United States, but simply holds that no European power shall establish itself in the Americas …show more content…
However, American’s sympathy for the Cubans was unlikely to have been solely due to humanitarian impulses because whites invoked racial beliefs to justify denying self-government to people of color. Moreover, impoverished and disenfranchised people in the U.S. itself did not have much of a political voice. Positive masculine portrayals of the Cuban Revolutionaries as chivalrous knights deflected attention from these negative racial stereotypes. Press accounts portrayed the Cubans as chivalric knights, like the protagonists of one of the adventure-filled romance novels that were very popular at the time. Sympathizers looked to the Cuban insurgents as models of chivalry because they feared that chivalric standards were endangered in the U.S. because of women agitating for political rights. Chivalric men and anti-feminist women turned to Cuban women as models of femininity. In contrast to activist American women, Cuban women were depicted as romantic heroines and displayed feminine