taking Cuba, Guam, and the Philippines from Spain.
Under the terms of the 1899 peace treaty, America paid Spain twenty million dollar to renounce their claims, not exactly "taking."
The U.S. military had to occupy those countries and it claimed them as its territory. It took them.
Cuba was granted independence in 1902,
Under a puppet government that was independent in name only.
Philippines was granted independence in 1946.... The native peoples fared far better with the Americans, than under the Spanish colonial government.
Fascinating the way you're overlooking the
war the United States fought to keep the Philippines under its heel.
The Philippines
declared independence in 1898.
The United States only granted them independence after occupying them for decades and waging war against, in violation of the native independence movement that had its own
elected government and constitution. American
atrocities during the war included the deaths of 1.4 million Filipinos out of a population of only 9 million; the use of internment camps for civilians, supposedly to protect them from the fighting, that resulted in many dying from dysentery; the use of scorched earth tactics that resulted in the destruction of entire villages; the indiscriminate murder of civilians in occupied towns who defied American curfews; the destruction of entire villages and massacres of all of their inhabitants in revenge for the murders of individual American officers.
It was, in other words, a brutal, brutal occupation undertaken against the will of the Filipino people.
ETA: Now, you can probably argue reasonably that the occupation became far less brutal as time went on. That, as political stability returned to the country, the occupying U.S. forces stopped engaging in atrocities, that U.S. officers and locals forged relationships and friendships, that the Filipino government established under U.S. rule was given a certain amount of respect by the U.S. That's all reasonable. And certainly the Filipinos had no wish to see the U.S. military gone when they were under threat from the Empire of Japan.
But that doesn't make the initial choice to seize the Philippines rather than honor their sovereignty any better, nor does it justify actions taken during the war. It would have been quite just for the United States to liberate the Philippines and then withdraw, leaving the Filipino people to develop their own government in whatever manner they saw fit. It was inexcusable that the United States instead decided to simply exchange its heel for Spain's. End Edit.
Puerto Rico could likely obtain independence simply by formally requesting it.
Sure, in the modern era. That's not the point; the point is: The U.S. had no business taking it in the first place.
True oppression of the Filipinos occurred with the occupation of the islands by the Empire of Japan.
The fact that
other imperialists did bad things, too, doesn't make U.S. imperialism okay.
Americans started the Philippines down the road to political independence only 35 years after assuming control of the islands,
America should have instantly renounced its claim on the Philippines and respected Filipino sovereignty from the get-go. 35 years as a U.S. territory is 35 years too many.
And a casual purview of history would reveal that it was the
Filipino nationalists participating in the U.S.-imposed insular government who started the
U.S. down the road towards Filipino independence once McKinley and Roosevelt were gone. It was not the United States which started the Philippines down that road; it was the Philippines which started the U.S. down that road.
