The family jewels were worth protecting. In 1954 the CIA had successfully used radio to spread fake news during a coup it helped stage to overthrow Guatemala’s democratically elected but left-leaning government. With its transmitter on Swan Island, it could run an even more secure and sophisticated operation, this time directed at Fidel Castro’s

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By 1960, the U.S. Empire had visibly diminished. The Philippines was independent, Hawai‘i and Alaska were states, and Puerto Rico had the nebulous status of “commonwealth.” The remaining colonies were small: Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa—total population 123,151—plus another 70,724 living in the United Nations’ “strategic trust

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Cubans, Filipinos, and (to a much lesser degree) Puerto Ricans had fought Spain for decades, draining its resources and exhausting its morale. Yet little of this registered in the United States. Right after landing in Cuba—the landing enabled by the Cuban defeat of Spanish troops at Daiquirí—Roosevelt eyed his Cuban allies and judged them to be

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The Second World War left the United States in an extraordinary position. It was rich, it was powerful, and, thanks to its chemists and engineers, it had the means to deal with foreign lands without colonizing them. But the war also conferred another advantage, harder to see and operating on a deeper level. It had to do with standards.

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Waving the Rhoads letter, Albizu led the Nationalist Party in the 1932 elections. He fared poorly, although the pro-independence Liberals did very well. It was Albizu’s first and only attempt at electoral politics. Later that year, he drafted a constitution for the Republic of Puerto Rico and created a Liberation Army. The “army” didn’t appear to

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What those waterlogged troops discovered that afternoon was an age-old truth, one that had governed history up to that point: moving things is hard. It’s a point easily forgotten today, when people, objects, and ideas glide easily across the planet’s surface. Now markets scamper across borders, planes land anywhere, and communications satellites

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Albizu had changed since the First World War. After failing to get to the Paris Peace Conference, he’d finished his law degree at Harvard. But his enthusiasm for the United States had flagged. The dream of Puerto Ricans in 1898 had been that the island could become a prosperous state, on an equal footing with those of the mainland. By 1930, that

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Pedro Albizu Campos’s faith in the United States was striking, but he had reason for it. Whatever empire fever had gripped the country in 1898 seemed to be subsiding. The scandals and sheer length of the Philippine War had wearied even the most ardent imperialists. In 1907 Theodore Roosevelt himself called the Philippines a “heel of Achilles” and

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The Cuban model resonated. When the Roosevelt administration sought a transoceanic canal to connect its Atlantic trade to its Pacific trade (larger now that the United States had Pacific territories), it eyed the Panama isthmus in Colombia. But it neither bought nor conquered it. Instead, Roosevelt’s government encouraged Panamanian nationalists to

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