This entire situation turned José Martí’s substitute as delegate of the Cuban Revolutionary Party into one of the favorite candidates among the popular sectors of the Cuban population, notwithstanding political affiliation. The lack of unity that all ready existed, increase when the Estrada Palma-Masó political candidacy -that Máximo Gómez had promoted- failed.
	Tomás Estrada Palma (1835-1908). First president of the neo-colonial republic. His decision of re-elected himself provoked deep unrest between his political opponents and different popular sectors. Facing the imminence of his defeat, he asked and got a new military intervention of the United States in Cuba.

The first Cuban government would have among its tasks one unpleasant and unrewarding: the formalization of a relationship that would tie the dependence towards the United States. To this effect, a set of treatises were voted, passed and signed. These included the Treaty for Commercial Reciprocity, which ensured the control of the Cuban market by the United States and consolidated the structure of an economy based on one product. And the Permanent Treaty, which granted a lawful, juridical form to the Platt Amendment, and another one designed to define the establishment and final location of the US naval stations.

Estrada Palma’s peculiar austerity granted him in history the halo of a well-founded honesty, much more well founded because of the blatant dishonesty of his successors. However, the elder president could not resist his political ambitions and managed a rigged reelection that inaugurated an invariable republican tradition.

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