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The Cuba Company was the largest single foreign investment in Cuba during the first two decades of the twentieth century and remained one of the largest corporations. This article presents a detailed history of the commercial networks forged between political officials and North American and Cuban businessmen through the development of the company. These networks proved crucial to the success of the Cuba Company and subsequently shaped the development of the new Cuban Republic.
The year 1898 had been difficult for both the United States and Cuba. The U.S. entered the Cuban War of Independence, defeated the Spanish, and acquired territories stretching from the Caribbean to the Philippines. Cubans saw their costly thirty-year struggle for independence end in U.S. intervention. They faced an economy, society, and political system devastated by war, and a reconstruction conditioned by the United States. Central to the U.S.'s rebuilding policy, and part of America's growing empire and expanding overseas economy, was the Cuba Company.
On April 25, 1900, in Jersey City, New Jersey, the Cuba Company was incorporated in "order to develop Cuba" through the construction of a central railroad line traversing the island.1 The incorporators included some of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the United States: Sir William Cornelius Van Home, former president and chairman of the Canadian Pacific Railroad; ex-governor of New York Levi P. Morton, president of Morton Trust Company; General Greenville Dodge and E. H. Harriman, both of the Union Pacific Railroad; and the law firm Lord Day and Lord, of U.S. Secretary of State William R. Day.2 The company issued 160 common shares of stock at $50,000 each for an initial working capital of $8,000,000.3 Van Home offered the shares of the company only to investors with political and financial contacts and power. In addition, Van Horne incorporated the company in New Jersey because of the state's lenient corporate tax policies and antitrust laws.4 Within two years, the Cuba Company built a 350 mile central railroad extending from the end of the United Railways of Havana, at Santa Clara in central Cuba, to Santiago, the eastern port of Cuba. It instantly became the largest single foreign investment in Cuba and by the 1910s was the largest company in the country. The Cuba...