Before the Marines came the lawyers. Before the bananas came the sugar.

In 1898, the United States joined Cuba's war for independence, and never quite left. What followed was four years of military occupation, a constitution written with American conditions baked in, and a 99-year naval lease on a bay called Guantanamo. Cuba became a republic with an asterisk: sovereign in name, managed in practice.

In this first episode from Farms and Frontlines, Max Terzano and Jessica Rudo trace how that arrangement worked, politically, through the Platt Amendment, economically through the sugar industry that U.S. corporations came to dominate. By the 1920s, American firms owned more than 60% of Cuban sugar production. When the boom collapsed, U.S. banks absorbed the wreckage. Cubans were left to draw their own conclusions.

This is Part 1 of a six-episode series on the Banana Wars — the occupations, interventions, and corporate entanglements that defined American power in the Caribbean Basin from 1898 through the early 1930s. Cuba is where it began.

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