'Cuba is already ours': the United States' struggle to buy Cuba, c. 1820-1898

Dr Carrie Gibson - This paper discusses the many attempts of the United States to buy Cuba from Spain throughout the nineteenth century. Although all the bids ended in failure, each one came at a particular moment of change or crisis, and was set in a much wider global context. The bids in 1853 and 1898 were particularly crucial, coming before and after the abolition of slavery in both places, and this paper will focus on those two in discussing how this period was critical in the development of the relationship between Cuba and the United States.

Dr Carrie Gibson received her PhD from Cambridge in 2011 where her thesis focussed on the impact of the Haitian Revolution on the Spanish Caribbean islands. She has been working as an independent historian, publishing Empire’s Crossroads: A History of the Caribbean from Columbus to the Present Day (Pan Macmillan) in 2014. She has just completed a manuscript on the ‘forgotten’ Hispanic past of the United States, which will be published by Grove Atlantic in 2018. She can be found at @carrieegibson