Industrial Cuba: Being a Study of Present Commercial and Industrial Conditions, with Suggestions as to the Opportunities Presented in the Island for American Capital, Enterprise, and Labour

This is the document that helped shape American empire. Written in 1899 for President McKinley, economist Robert Porter traveled a devastated Cuba in the wake of the Spanish-American War to assess what American capital might harvest from the island's ruins. The result is a fascinating artifact: part optimistic business prospectus, part impassioned critique of Spanish colonialism, and part blueprint for economic intervention. Porter documents Cuba's sugarcane fields, tobacco plantations, and mineral wealth, while cataloging the systematic depletion left by centuries of Spanish rule. His argument is explicit: Cuba cannot recover alone, and American enterprise, guided by American oversight, represents the island's only path to prosperity. Reading it today feels like peering into the architects' minds at the precise moment they designed the machine that would shape Cuba's fate for the next century. For anyone seeking to understand the origins of US-Cuba relations, this raw, unapologetic pitch for economic imperialism remains essential.