Platt Amendment: Good Neighbor Policy

    Platt Amendment: Good Neighbor Policy

      The Platt Amendment wasn't exactly celebrated by Cubans. In fact, they probably hated it.

      However, it didn't stick around very long. In the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt decided that the U.S. needed to back off from Cuba and other Latin American countries and be more of a "good neighbor."

      And thus the name. The Good Neighbor Policy was FDR's official foreign policy toward all countries south of the U.S., from Mexico to Chile. America had been a bit imperialistic in Latin America, either taking islands as territories (Puerto Rico), imposing their will in certain areas (Panama Canal), or bullying countries for their own economic gain (Colombia).

      FDR hoped that this new policy would ease tensions and open up new opportunities for trade and business in North and South America. (He was right, in the end.) Most importantly for Cubans, this policy scrapped the Platt Amendment's rules. Done and gone, just like that.

      Thirty or so years of American control and oversight, and now Cuba was really and truly independent. What a long road it had been.