The Work of U.S. Colonial Warfare and Administration and Counterinsurgency in Cuba and the Philippines, 1898–1902

This paper explores the U.S. army’s use of Cuban and Filipino civilians to carry out tasks for military operations in the Spanish and Philippine-American Wars between 1898 and 1902 through the lens of labor history. The U.S. army’s successes and failures in fighting Spanish forces and nationalist insurgents in the Philippines, and administering these two territories through military governments, often rested on how the army exploited Cubans and Filipinos for a variety of military activities. Analyzing how American army personnel mobilized and managed Filipinos and Cubans as interpreters and guides, this paper demonstrates that Americans attempted to appropriate not only colonial labor but colonial subjects’ indigenous linguistic, geographical, and cultural knowledge in order to conquer and govern these two island spaces. Recruiting colonial labor through voluntary and involuntary means, the U.S. army’s utilization of Cubans and Filipinos for military operations often produced information and mobility that allowed the American military distinct advantages in struggles with Spanish and Filipino forces. Yet the army’s dependence on Cubans and Filipinos for linguistic expertise, intelligence regarding local geographical and political landscapes, and brute labor granted Cubans and Filipinos a degree of power over U.S. military action and its results. Ultimately, American army officers’ resort to violently expropriating and disciplining colonial subjects and their labor for military operations opened a colonial and imperial space of exception in American civil and military law in which U.S. army personnel treated such auxiliary labor far more harshly than the army had treated Native American auxiliaries during the Indian Wars in the American West. This made the work of warfare and administration both beneficial and dangerous for U.S. army personnel and the Cuban and Philippine intermediaries on whom they relied for their labor.