HISTORICAL DICTIONARY A–Z - Spain and Portugal: A Reference Guide from the Renaissance to the Present - page 376

a long-sought military and naval base, is
still a virtual colony.
During the 20th century, as the United
States added insult to injury by activating
the implications of the Monroe Doctrine
into economic and political domination of
Spanish America, Spain remained impo-
tent. Many of its intellectuals hurled dia-
tribes against the United States, but its
leaders turned in upon domestic issues that
culminated in the S PANISH CIVIL WAR of
1936-39. Individual Americans directed
their support to the Loyalists or the Nation-
alists, but Washington espoused a policy of
nonintervention. The latter was replaced by
repudiation of F RANCISCO F RANCO when he
sided with Adolf Hitler during World War II
and cultivation of the Spanish dictator
when he shared U.S. hostility toward the
Soviet Union during the cold war.
Democratic Spain during the years after
1975 followed a generally pro-United States
policy by joining the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization and cooperating with the
transformation of Europe in the last years
of the 20th century. Spain's development of
an Iberian outreach in the Americas, includ-
ing even Puerto Rico, was, for the most
part, received benignly by Washington.
Since the year 2001, however, Spain and
the United States have passed through a
period of shifting perceptions and relation-
ships. The support given to U.S. policy in
Iraq by Prime Minister J OSÉ M ARÍA A ZNAR
was adroitly linked to his campaign against
Basque terrorism as part of America's war
against Islamic terrorism. In 2004 the situ-
ation changed as Spain experienced a major
terrorist event in its own capital that proved
to be Islamic terrorist punishment for its aid
to the United States. Aznar was superseded
by the Socialist leader J OSÉ L UIS R ODRÍGUEZ

Z APATERO , Spain's contingent in the coali-
tion forces sent to Iraq was withdrawn, and
relations between Madrid and Washington
cooled. Both at governmental and popular
levels Spain and the United States seemed
to have moved into a new pattern of rela-
tions that was somehow strangely reminis-
cent of their relations during the previous
two centuries.

Spanish-American War (1898)
This conflict was a product of late 19th-
century imperialism that saw the United
States pursue its destiny as an emerging
great power and Spain, in its period of
decline, fall victim to an expansionist spirit
in which it had in earlier times been a par-
ticipant. After several years of mounting
denunciation by the United States of harsh
Spanish policies in C UBA (a virtual offshore
island of the United States), the destruction
of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor on Feb-
ruary 15, 1898, precipitated a confronta-
tion between the two countries. Efforts to
avert war were undercut by those who
believed that American strategic and com-
mercial interests would be helped by its
domination of Cuba. Formal declaration of
hostilities took place in late April 1898.
Military and naval operations in Cuba
resulted in the victory of U.S. forces by late
July, while a separate expedition to P UERTO
R ICO led to the surrender of that island by
mid-August. As early as May 1898 U.S.
naval forces had destroyed a Spanish
squadron at Manila, with Spanish surren-
der in the P HILIPPINE I SLANDS and other
Pacific possessions completed by July. The
Treaty of Paris, concluded in December
1898, handed over Puerto Rico, Guam, and
the Philippines to the United States and