Three quarters of a century before, when the revolt of the Spanish colonies had halted on the shores of the mainland, leaving the rich island of Cuba untouched, John Quincy Adams, on April 28, 1823, in a lengthy and long-considered dispatch to Mr.Nelson, the American Minister to Spain, asserted that the United States could not consent to the passing of Cuba from the flag of Spain to that of any other European power, that under existing conditions Cuba was considered safer in the hands of Spain than in those of the revolutionaries, and that the United States stood for the maintenance of the status quo, with the expectation that Cuba would ultimately become American territory.
By the late forties and the fifties, however, the times had changed, and American policy had changed with them.

It was becoming more and more evident that, although no real revolution had as yet broken out, the "Pearl of the Antilles" was bound to Spain by compulsion rather than by love.

In the United States there was a general feeling that the time had at last come to realize the vision of Jefferson and Adams and to annex Cuba.

But the complications of the slavery question prevented immediate annexation.

As a slave colony which might become a slave state, the South wanted Cuba, but the majority in the North did not.
After the Civil War in the United States was over, revolution at length flared forth in 1868, from end to end of the island.