U.S. Occupation of Cuba

On September 14, 1906 President Theodore Roosevelt informed the Cuban foreign minister that he did not think they were capable of governing themselves and so invoking the Platt Amendment he was sending William Howard Taft to clean things up. It's quite an insulting message, as you would expect, though of course couched in terms of how much he wants the country to be independent.

"For there is just one way in which Cuban independence can be jeoparded, and that is for the Cuban people to show their inability to continue in their path of peaceful and orderly progress."

Replace "Cuba" with Chile, Guatemala, Panama you name it, and it's almost like a motto of U.S. foreign policy.

Here it is from FRUS:

I will be including this collection of digitized FRUS pages on Cuba for the "further sources" part of my U.S. and Latin American Relations 2nd edition textbook chapter that covers the first third of the 20th century. The University of Wisconsin has a lot of stuff digitized that is not on the State Department's own website.