"...economic fallout from the war in adjacent states. While the war years were excellent for Canadian agriculture and manufacturing, the period between September 1913 and the end of 1915 were economically ruinous for Caribbean countries that had eagerly looked forward to the opening of the Nicaragua Canal as forever changing their economies and placing them square on the path of the newest global trade route, only to see trade via the Canal crawl to about a fifth of its expected volume thanks to the outbreak of war just two months after its inauguration. This stretched from European colonial outposts in the Lesser Antilles having to buff up their military presence to defend themselves out of fear of attack to the Haiti of Cincinnatus Leconte, targeted explicitly by Confederate wolfpacks due to her relationship with the United States and contributing to a siege mentality in Haiti that solidified an esprit de corps across the country and ended any threat to Leconte's Presidency - though ample German investments, and his descent from the Dessalines dynasty, certainly did not hurt. [1]
Particularly hard hit, however, was Cuba and the other Spanish "insular provinces" of Santo Domingo and Puerto Rico. Spain's national economy was oriented towards protecting its domestic industries and despite the dominance of the National Liberal Party it had shifted in a more statist, economically nationalist direction that aimed to keep labor and capital in the metropole alike happy. While Insulares were represented in the Cortes, they were politically diffuse (many Cubans elected their own regionalist party, particularly in the island's east) and moderate home rule provisions under the Law of Communities did not solve the biggest issue affecting the three of them - that their trade needs were diametrically different than Madrid's. The evaporation of regional trade at a time when Cuban and Puerto Rican sugar would have been highly valuable thus crushed the islands' economies and plunged all three into a deep depression. While the lion's share of the blame was directed at the Confederate Wolfpacks that made shipping in the region a dangerous proposition (even if they rarely attacked neutral vessels, American ships were responsible for much of non-internal trade with Spain for the three insular provinces), Madrid's increased protectionism and continued - and quite understandable, to be fair to the European Spanish perspective - insistence on remaining solely responsible for a common foreign policy of all Spanish lands became a thing of anger and angst on the western side of the Atlantic.
It was thus the case that the Confederacy - the bete noire of Spain in the Americas - rapidly losing its ability to threaten the Spanish Caribbean coincided with a return of sentiments against the continuing arrangement with Spain, though of a very different nature. The revolutionary mania of the late 1860s and early 1870s had coincided with the Gloriosa in Spain in 1868 and been driven by genuinely radical republican sentiments outraged at the colonial relationship between the islands and Madrid. By the time of Hilton Head, however, the House of Hohenzollern had rebuilt is prestige in the Americas and codified itself as the defender of local interests, particularly the abolition of slavery, against Confederate and perhaps Brazilian designs upon the islands. The decline of the Confederacy's power projection capabilities after the Great American War would seem to suggest that the Spanish approach had borne out, but the sense of alienation was still very real. The vagaries of the sugar market and other cash crops were warped by Spain's frequent tinkering with trade policy; the hacienda system of agriculture, despite the abolition of slavery, was as strong as ever, and particularly in Puerto Rico inequality was steep and poverty high, even as thousands of immigrants flocked to the islands every year.
A divide within and changing of the guard and approach to the revolutionary generations in the Caribbean occurred thus in 1915. To an outsider, it appeared that such sentiments were in decline. The Revolutionary Committees, which had always been in exile in New York City but had also often been dependent on Confederate sympathies, were almost broke with their main benefactors parting ways and going to blows. Jose Marti, the Cuban revolutionary mainstay, passed away on May 30, 1915 in Manhattan, leaving a massive power vacuum at the center of Cuban nationalism. The rest of the exilo class of leadership - Jose Maldonado Roman and Juan Rivera from Puerto Rico, Jose Miguel Gomez from Cuba, Juan Isidoro Jimenez for Santo Domingo - collaborated and continued their push for independent republics in the Caribbean, but they would have been as surprised as any to learn from their meagre outpost in New York that events back in the islands were starting to change under their feet.
The economic depression of the war years had, finally, led even monarchist conservatives to begin asking themselves why Madrid, which had entirely different priorities and ambitions than Cubans, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans themselves, were denying them their place in the community of American states. The breach finally came when Mario Garcia Menocal - a member of the Conservative Party! - himself in the Cortes gave a speech which he soon expounded upon in a pamphlet back in Cuba called "A Different Relationship," where he suggested that internal home rule, while certainly fine for Catalonia, was not enough for a place like Cuba with entirely different needs, history and experiences from the rest of Spain. This flew remarkably close to the language of men like Marti or his protege Gomez, but for the fact that Garcia Menocal was a committed monarchist. A different relationship did not mean a full revolutionary break - a different relationship, perhaps, meant exactly what it said it meant..." [2]
- Total Mobilization: The Economics of the Great American War
[1] There was going to be more on Haiti, but I found the dynamic in the Spanish provinces more interesting to write about.
[2] Tipping my hand that I've come around on the provincial method for Cuba, PR and SD probably not working long term and that some kind of Dominion status a la Canada or a junior branch of the Hohenzollerns spinning off their own crown for the area are likely the direction I'll wind up going