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The British and Provincial Conquest of Cuba: English

This happened fourteen years before our Declaration of Independence, and perhaps the British idea was their American colonies possessed so much land there was no occasion for more. If it had been within English statesmanship to contemplate the grandeur of the Republic of the United States, their sense of propriety as the holders of the soil would surely have impressed them that Cuba should be identified in politics as in commerce with the bulk and potency of the continent.

After a struggle that was dangerous, and cost thousands of lives, Havana, with about one-fourth of Cuba, was surrendered to Lord Albemarle, and if it had been the will of the British government, the whole Island would have belonged to the crown. There was a diplomatic quirk, and Cuba was Spanish again, and when our original colonies became states and United States, we acquired Florida and Louisiana, and were careless about the land between the Mississippi and the Pacific, until we found the Mexicans in our way, and were at the expense of war to regain Texas and California. Froude, the British historian, delivers the judgment that it was well the British gave up Cuba, after her fair conquest, to Spain, because the Spaniards gave their own blood to the colonies, and built in Cuba, not light structures, but with ponderosity, as in the old peninsula, the most effective method of declaring themselves at home and resolute upon permanency. In many ways British sovereignty in the Island would have changed our fortunes. Almost positively, even after the American colonies had separated from the mother-country, and Rodney defeated the French finally in the West Indies, it would have been within the power and policy of Great Britain, had she continued to hold Cuba as a possession, to have captured New Orleans, and fenced us in on the west with the Mississippi as was done on the north with the St. Lawrence.