AMY GOODMAN: We're broadcasting from Chicago, where Stephen Kinzer is based, longtime foreign correspondent for the New York Times, author of a number of books, including All the Shah's Men, about Iran, Bitter Fruit, about Guatemala. His latest is Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. He just recently left the New York Times. You talk about 14 countries that the U.S. intervened in: Hawaii, Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Chile, Honduras, Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Panama. Let's talk about Cuba. What happened?

STEPHEN KINZER: The Cuban story is really a fascinating one, partly because it illustrates one of the main themes of my book, and that is how these interventions in the long run always produce reactions and ultimately lead to the emergence of regimes that are much more anti-American than the regimes we originally set out to overthrow. Here was the story in Cuba. Americans have had their eye on Cuba for a long time, ever since Thomas Jefferson was president. But it was in 1898 that this attachment to the cause of Cuba Libré really seized the hearts of many Americans.

Bear in mind that in 1898, the Cuban economy was totally dominated by Americans. It was a big sugar producer, and all the sugar plantations in Cuba were owned by Americans. Also, it was a very big market for American manufactured goods. About 85% of anything you could buy in Cuba had been made in the United States, so American business had very big interests there.

Now, Cuban patriots spent much of the late 19th century rebelling against Spanish colonial rule. In 1898 they seemed very close to succeeding. This was a little bit troubling to some of the American interests in Cuba, because the revolutionaries were also social reformers. They advocated land reform, which would have meant breaking up the big sugar plantations owned by Americans. They also supported a tariff wall around Cuba to allow the growth of domestic manufacturing, which would have made it more difficult for American companies to export their goods to Cuba.

AMY GOODMAN: And what year was this?

STEPHEN KINZER: These are in the late 1890s. So in 1898, the American press, in some ways excited by whisperings from American businessmen active in Cuba, began a campaign to portray Spanish colonial rule in Cuba as the most unspeakably brutal tyranny that could be imagined, and the American public was whipped up into a fervor about this. The fervor intensified when the U.S. battleship, Maine, was blown up in Havana harbor. “Our Warship Was Blown Up by an Enemy's Infernal Machine.” That was the headline in the New York Journal that I reproduce in my book. Actually, it wasn't until 75 years later that the Navy convened a board of inquiry, which turned up the fact that the Maine was actually blown up by an internal explosion. The Spanish had nothing to do with it, but we didn't know that then, and the press seized on this to intensify the anger in the U.S.

Now, the Americans then decided we would send troops to Cuba to help the patriots overthrow Spanish colonialism, but the Cuban revolutionaries were not so sure they liked this idea. They didn't know if they wanted thousands of American troops on their soil, because what would happen after the victory was won? In response to this concern, the U.S. government, the Congress, passed a law, the Teller Amendment, which said very explicitly, “We promise Cuba that the moment independence is won, all American troops will be withdrawn, and Cuba will be allowed to become fully independent.”

After that law was passed, the Cuban rebels agreed to accept American aid. American soldiers went to Cuba, including, famously, Teddy Roosevelt, who had his own uniform personally designed for him by Brooks Brothers in New York. In the space of essentially one day of fighting, the Spanish colonial rule was dealt its final death blow, Spain surrendered Cuba, and Cuba prepared for a huge celebration of its independence.

Just before that celebration was about to be held, the Americans announced that they changed their mind, that the Teller Amendment had been passed in a moment of irrational enthusiasm and that actually Cuban independence was not a very good idea, so the American troops were not withdrawn. We remained in Cuba for some decades, ruling it directly under U.S. military officers, and then, for a period after that, through local dictators.

Now, flash forward to 1959. That was when Fidel Castro's revolution succeeded. Castro came down from the hills and made his very first speech as leader of the revolution in Santiago, and in that speech, which I quote in my book, he does not talk about what kind of a regime he's going to impose, but he makes one promise. He says, “This time I promise you it will not be like 1898 again, when the Americans came in and made themselves masters of our country.”

Now, any Americans who might have read a report of that speech, I'm sure, would have been very puzzled. In the first place, they would have had no memory of what happened in 1898, but secondly, they would wonder, “What could an event 60 years ago possibly have to do with this revolution in Cuba today?” What they had failed to realize is that resentment over these interventions burns in the hearts and souls of people in foreign countries and later explodes violently.

It's quite reasonable to say today that had we not intervened in Cuba and prevented Cuba from becoming independent, had we carried out our explicit promise to the Cubans in 1898, we would never have had to face the entire phenomenon of Castro communism all these last 40 years. Now, of course, we would love to have back a moderate democratic regime like the one that was going to come to power in Cuba in 1898, but it's too late for that, and it's an example of how when we frustrate people's legitimate nationalist aspirations, we wind up not only casting those countries into instability, but severely undermining our own national security.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, something we see today, for example, in Iraq, is the critical role, not only of the U.S. government perhaps protecting U.S. corporations, but the role of the media in all of this. Going back to Cuba, what was the role of the media?

STEPHEN KINZER: The press played a really shameful role in the run-up to the Spanish-American War. The Americans had never been particularly fond of the Spanish rule in Cuba, but it wasn't until the press, actually in a circulation war, decided to seize on the brutality, as they called it, of Spanish colonial rule in the summer of 1898 that Americans really went crazy.

Now, there's one very interesting aspect of the Cuban press campaign that I think we see repeated periodically throughout American history, and that is, we never like to attack simply a regime. We like to have one individual. Americans love to have a demon, a certain person who is the symbol of all the evil and tyranny in the regime that we want to attack. We've had this with Khomeini, with Castro, with Qaddafi, various other figures over history.

Now, in the case of the Spanish-American War, we first thought we'd like to demonize the king of Spain, but there was no king of Spain. There was a queen, who was actually an Austrian princess, so she wouldn't work. The regent, her son, was actually just a 12-year-old kid, so he wouldn't work, either. So then, we decided to focus on the Spanish general, who was the commander of Spanish troops in Cuba, General Weyler, and for a time, Weyler was thought of as the epitome of all the carnal brutality that we attributed to Spanish colonialism.

We see this pattern again coming right up to the modern age, when we're always looking for some individual to point at. The idea behind this is that the natural state of all people in the world is to have U.S.-style democracy and to be friendly to the United States. If they're not, it must mean that there's only one person or one tiny clique that is preventing the people in this country from being the way they naturally would be, and if we could only just remove this one individual or this tiny clique, the people in that country would return to the normal state of all people, which is to wish to have the U.S. system of government and politics and economics and to embrace the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: William Randolph Hearst, was he a key figure then?

STEPHEN KINZER: Hearst was a crucial figure, who very cleverly realized that he could push the circulation of his newspaper dramatically higher if he hammered away on jingoistic issues by pointing at foreign nations as constantly seeking to undermine the United States. There's an undercurrent, which we're still seeing today, of seeing the world in this very Hobbesian way, that there are terrible dangers everywhere, and it's very important for the U.S. to go out and attack here and attack there before those dangers come to shore. Clausewitz, who I read a lot while I was researching my book, had a great phrase for this. He called it, “suicide for fear of death.” You are so afraid of what's happening to you in the world or what might happen to you that you go out and launch operations, which actually produce the result that you were afraid might happen if you didn't do these things.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about John Foster Dulles, who he was, his role in these interventions, Guatemala, and just before that, Iran?

STEPHEN KINZER: One of the things I do in my book that I haven't done in my previous books is focus a lot on Dulles. I really believe that Dulles was one of the key figures in shaping the second half of the 20th century, and I devote some time to try to analyze him and figure out why he played this role. First of all, Dulles spent almost all of his adult life as America's most successful and most highly paid corporate lawyer. He represented all of the giant multinational corporations in America, not just United Fruit, but International Nickel and all sorts of resource conglomerates all over the world. So the whole way he saw the world was economics. He thought that American policy in the world should be oriented towards protecting American corporations.