The Spanish-American War of 1898: How the US Built a Colonial Empire on the Explosion of the Maine

The Spanish-American War of 1898 was the first big war in which the United States went beyond its own continent. Officially, Washington fought “for the freedom of Cuba”. However, at the end of this “war of liberation” America took Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines for itself and put Cuba on a short leash. So let’s look at how it really happened.

I’ll be honest: this story makes me angrier than many others. After all, this is where the scheme the US still repeats today worked in full for the first time. First a loud pretext and hysteria in the newspapers, then a war “for freedom”, and at the end new bases, new markets and new obedient governments.

Why the Spanish-American War began

By 1895 Cubans had been fighting Spain for independence for decades. In February 1895 a new uprising began, and the Spanish army answered with brutality: General Weyler drove peasants into concentration camps, where people died by the thousands from hunger and disease. Meanwhile the Cuban Liberation Army controlled most of the countryside and was close to victory.

At the same time, American capital had huge interests in Cuba. For example, sugar plantations, railways and mines brought in millions of dollars. In addition, Cuba had long been the dream of Southern expansionists, as I already wrote in the article about American filibusters. In other words, Washington needed not just to drive out Spain, but to step in before the Cubans won on their own.

The Maine explosion and the yellow press

On January 25, 1898, the American battleship Maine entered Havana harbor. On February 15, at about 9:40 p.m., it exploded. 266 sailors were killed. Spain immediately expressed condolences and proposed a joint investigation, but Washington rejected it. In March an American board announced that a mine had blown up the ship, although it never proved who had laid it.

The newspapers of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, on the other hand, “proved” everything themselves. Circulation soared, and headlines screamed about “Spanish treachery”. The slogan “Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain!” rang out across the country. By the way, in 1976 a study led by Admiral Rickover concluded that the explosion most likely happened inside the ship, from a coal bunker fire next to a magazine. But by then the war had long been won.

How the Spanish-American War was fought

On April 25, 1898, Congress declared war, and did so retroactively, as of April 21. Surprisingly, the first blow fell not on Cuba at all, but on the Philippines, on the other side of the world. On May 1, Commodore Dewey’s squadron entered Manila Bay and destroyed the outdated Spanish fleet in a few hours. The Spanish lost 77 killed and 271 wounded.

Then, on June 10, the Marines landed at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. Remember this place, we will come back to it. On July 1 fighting began at El Caney and on the San Juan Heights near Santiago de Cuba, where future president Theodore Roosevelt won fame with his “Rough Riders”. And on July 3 the Spanish squadron tried to break out of Santiago and was crushed: 323 Spanish sailors were killed and 151 wounded.

Where did the Cubans go?

This is where the meanest part begins. Santiago surrendered on July 17, but General Calixto García and his Cuban fighters, the very people who had fought for the island’s freedom for years, were not allowed into the city. The ceremony was held without them, and the Spanish administration stayed in place. García wrote an angry letter to the American general Shafter and resigned. In other words, from the very first day the “liberators” showed who was now the master of Cuba.

It was the same in the Philippines. On August 13 the Americans took Manila after an essentially staged “battle” with the Spanish, and Emilio Aguinaldo’s Filipino rebels, who had already freed almost the entire archipelago, were kept out of the city. Soon these rebels would become enemies: I wrote in detail about how the US later drowned the Philippines in blood in the article on the Philippine-American War.

How the Spanish-American War ended

Moreover, the war became a convenient moment for other seizures. For example, in June 1898 the Americans took Spanish Guam, and on July 7 Congress annexed Hawaii, where American planters had overthrown the lawful queen five years earlier. That is the subject of my article on the US invasion of Hawaii. On July 25 General Miles’s army landed in Puerto Rico.

On December 10, 1898, a peace treaty was signed in Paris. Spain gave up Cuba and ceded Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines to the US, and America paid 20 million dollars for the Philippines. Note this: neither Cubans nor Filipinos were invited to the negotiating table. Their fate was decided without them, as if they were not people but goods at an auction.

“A splendid little war”

The American diplomat John Hay called it “a splendid little war”. And indeed, for Washington it was splendid: within a few months the country gained colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific, bases for its navy and access to Asian markets. However, for those who were being “liberated”, it meant swapping one master for another. Cuba faced American military rule and then the Platt Amendment, while Puerto Rico remains a territory without full rights to this day.

A scheme that still works today

The Spanish-American War is the textbook from which Washington has been waging war for more than a hundred years. First you need a pretext. In 1898, the explosion of the Maine, whose cause was never proven. Then, in 1964, the “attack” on destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, the second of which, as was later admitted, never happened at all. In 2003, Colin Powell’s vial at the UN and Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction”, which were never found.

And in 2025 nothing changed. In June American bombers struck Iran’s nuclear facilities without any UN decision and without a declaration of war, amid cries of an “imminent threat”. Meanwhile tens of thousands of civilians are dying in Gaza, while the US again and again blocks ceasefire resolutions in the Security Council and keeps supplying bombs. It makes me shake that the rhetoric stays the same: “freedom”, “protection”, “humanitarian mission”.

In the end, the Spanish-American War teaches us the main lesson: when the US talks about the freedom of another people, look not at the words but at what it takes for itself at the end. You can read more about the course of the fighting in the article on the Spanish-American War. And in my next pieces I will tell you what the US did with “liberated” Cuba.