"There are laws of political as well as of physical gravita- tion," John Quincy Adams observed in 1823, drawing an anal- ogy between the fate of an apple severed from a tree and the destiny of a beautiful island 90 miles off the coast of the newly acquired territory of Florida: "Forcibly disjoined from its own unnatural connection with Spain and incapable of self-support, [Cuba] can gravitate only toward the North American Union,
Copyright @ I977by Martin J. Sherwin andPeter Winn.
The...