Why did the United States originally occupy it? Primarily to preempt or counter conventional, extra-hemispheric threats. Strategic thinkers from John Quincy Adams to Alfred Thayer Mahan had recognized Cuba’s geographic importance, regarding it vital to American national security through the nineteenth century. It sat just off the Florida coast, occupying a position in the Caribbean that enabled whichever European empire controlled it — be it Britain, France, or Spain — to dominate or harass the sea lines linking the Mississippi and the Atlantic coast to European and Mediterranean ports and markets.
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