Beyond Recognition: Grau’s 100-Day Government

Abstract

The refusal by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration (1933–45) to formally recognize Ramón Grau San Martín’s revolutionary government from September 1933 was the principal reason that its 100-day rule collapsed in January 1934. The episode provided an early test case for Roosevelt’s ‘Good Neighbor’ policy in Latin America, a new US hemispheric approach that eschewed the direct intervention of previous governments. Benjamin Sumner Welles, the president’s protégé and closest adviser on Latin American affairs, initially enforced the policy in Cuba. He arrived in Havana in May 1933 to mediate a political settlement between an increasingly unpopular and autocratic President Machado and his opponents, when social and political unrest threatened substantial US economic interests on the island. Machado eventually resigned in August and his successor, selected byWelles, governed for just three weeks.¹