U.S. Troops Leave Cuba: Only Guantanamo Remains

United States troops withdrew from Cuba on January 28, 1909, ending a military occupation that had begun during the Spanish-American War of 1898 while retaining permanent control of Guantanamo Bay. The occupation had placed Cuba under direct American administration following Spain's defeat, and the subsequent Platt Amendment of 1901 gave the United States the legal right to intervene in Cuban affairs at its discretion and to maintain naval stations on the island. Cuban leaders accepted these conditions reluctantly, recognizing that independence on American terms was preferable to continued military rule. The withdrawal of 1909 was technically the second: American troops had first left in 1902 after establishing a Cuban constitutional government, then returned in 1906 when political instability led President Theodore Roosevelt to order a "provisional" reoccupation. The 1909 departure left Cuban sovereignty intact on paper but constrained in practice by the Platt Amendment's intervention clause, which hung over Cuban politics for the next quarter century. Guantanamo Bay remained under a perpetual lease agreement that Cuba's subsequent governments, including Fidel Castro's revolutionary government after 1959, repeatedly protested but could not unilaterally terminate. The base became globally infamous in 2002 when the George W. Bush administration began using it to detain suspected terrorists outside the jurisdiction of U.S. federal courts. The American military footprint that began in 1898 has never fully left the island.