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The US did not declare war on Cuba. Cuba was a colony of Spain, and the US declared war on Spain in 1898. The US press, newspapers owned by the Heart and Pulitzer chains, vied with each other in whipping up a public frenzy. For several years the press had been giving favorable treatment to Cuban rebels, trying to end Spanish colonial rule. The US was naturally sympathetic to these rebels, having gotten its own start in a colonial rebellion against Great Britain. Most of the rest of Central and South America had managed to win independence from Spain over the preceding eighty years, and Cuba was one of the last outposts of the rotten, decaying Spanish Empire, which Spain held with a death grip. Harsh treatment of captured Cuban rebels elicited great sympathy in America. In order to demonstrate its displeasure with Spanish colonial policies the US sent the battleship Maine to Havana Harbor, in Cuba. There, in February 1898, the battleship blew up one night. The newspapers screamed that the Spaniards had obviously done it, and clamored for war. Probably the battleship was sunk by the explosion of a bomb disguised as a lump of coal and slipped into the coal supply of the vessel by anarchists. But then, as now, the press knew best, without waiting to thoroughly investigate the facts. The continuous drumbeating for war got the public in the mood, but the Republican administration of McKinley was happy to swim with the tide of public opinion. Most of the fighting was in Cuba and the Philippine Islands, which were another Spanish colony at the time. Cuba was handy to the US, the site of the destruction of the USS Maine, and the majority of the Cuban people were for ridding themselves of Spanish colonialism. The US captured Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico in 1898. Cuba was almost immediately set up as an independent nation, and the US still has Puerto Rico today. The US kept the Philippines until 1947, before the Philippines were also set up as a new nation, but not before US possession of the Philippines provoked the Japanese to attack the US in Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, and drag the US into WWII.

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Q: Why did the United States declare war on Cuba?
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