The events following the war with Spain, and the prospective building of the Isthmian Canal, render it certain that we must take in the future a far greater interest than hitherto in what happens throughout the West Indies, Central America, and the adjacent coasts and waters.  We expect Cuba to treat us on an exceptional footing politically, and we should put her in the same exceptional position economically.  The proposed action is in line with the course we have pursued as regards all the islands with which we have been brought into relations of varying intimacy by the Spanish war.  Puerto Rico and Hawaii have been included within our tariff lines, to their great benefit as well as ours, and without any of the feared detriment to our own industries.  The Philippines, which stand in a different relation, have been granted substantial tariff concessions.

Cuba is an independent republic, but a republic which has assumed certain special obligations as regards her international position in compliance with our request.  I ask for her certain special economic concessions in return; these economic concessions to benefit us as well as her.  There are few brighter pages in American history than the page which tells of our dealings with Cuba during the past four years.  On her behalf we waged a war of which the mainspring was generous indignation against oppression; and we have kept faith absolutely.  It is earnestly to be hoped that we will complete in the same spirit the record so well begun, and show in our dealings with Cuba that steady continuity of policy which it is essential for our nation to establish in foreign affairs if we desire to play well our part as a world power.

We are a wealthy and powerful nation; Cuba is a young republic, still weak, who owes to us her birth, whose whole future, whose very life, must depend on our attitude toward her.  I ask that we help her as she struggles upward along the painful and difficult road of self-governing independence.  I ask this aid for her, because she is weak, because she needs it, because we have already aided her.  I ask that open-handed help, of a kind which a self-respecting people can accept, be given to Cuba, for the very reason that we have given her such help in the past.  Our soldiers fought to give her freedom; and for three years our representatives, civil and military, have toiled unceasingly, facing disease of a peculiarly sinister and fatal type, with patient and uncomplaining fortitude, to teach her how to use aright her new freedom.  Never in history has any alien country been thus administered, with such high integrity of purpose, such wise judgment, and such single-minded devotion to the country’s interests.  Now, I ask that the Cubans be given all possible chance to use to the best advantage the freedom of which Americans have such right to be proud, and for which so many American lives have been sacrificed.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT.

PROCLAMATIONS.