This is a guest post by Richard Devery, Collections Librarian in the Geography and Map Division.
Sometimes, a map comes across my desk depicting a historical topic, event, or place that makes me stop and ask “What on earth was going on here?” What usually follows is a trip down A Rabbit Hole Into Niche History. I recently had the good fortune of cataloging one such small assortment of maps that introduced me to a sliver of American history I was entirely ignorant of: the “McKinley Colony, Cuba, plat map collection, 1904-1911.”
The collection is a small one of 11 total items (7 maps, 2 bond certificates, 1 promotional brochure, and 1 letter) that together tell a rich story of their time, whose characters were entirely new to me. At the dawn of the 20th century, thousands of U.S. citizens began moving en masse to a small island off the southwest coast of Cuba, where they bought real estate to establish farms, schools, and social clubs; eventually, this outpost of Americans hoped to be annexed by the U.S. government.
The collection’s maps show one of the largest of these population centers. It was intended to be called the “McKinley Colony” in an unsubtle homage to the president of American expansionism of the time. Inland between two rivers, the colony would be centered around the towns of McKinley and West McKinley on what is today Isla de la Juventud, but at the time was called the Isle of Pines. On the maps are plats of land available to prospective buyers, and those already purchased with the names of their landholders.
For many centuries after Christopher Columbus encountered it in 1494, Isla de la Juventud (later Isle of Pines) was controlled by Spanish landowners and largely undeveloped. At different times in its history, the island was a congregating point for buccaneers, an exile for prisoners of the Spanish crown, a destination for well-to-do colonial Spanish summer vacationers, and a home for the Spanish military.
The 20th century brought a new era of geopolitical conflict to the Isle of Pines from the newest world power to its north: the United States. The Spanish-American War of 1898—during which the United States inserted itself into a Cuban war of independence from Spain—rid the Cubans of Spanish rule, but introduced a new struggle for sovereignty with the United States. In the negotiations over Cuban sovereignty, the Isle of Pines was not explicitly dealt with in the Platt Amendment (1901), which outlined the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Cuba and left its sovereignty an open question.
Sensing an opportunity that only real estate can provide, enterprising members of the U.S. business community immediately began buying land in Cuba in the immediate aftermath of the war. Land speculation companies bought up enormous plots of land on the Isle of Pines and subsequently subdivided them into pieces suitable to middle-class Americans; by 1925, U.S. citizens had purchased 90% of arable land on the island alone.
The result? Our maps. Made in the early stages of the proposed colony between 1906 and 1914, the maps show a vast expanse of land in the northwest quadrant of the Isle of Pines, divided neatly into plats of land that could have been yours for a limited time only. Need to escape the factory smoke-clogged air, polluted waters, and cold, crowded streets of industrial New England? An Edenic tropical island with pure air, blue ocean, and fragrant citrus trees awaits in the new colony of McKinley. Is your life as an office clerk in the petit bourgeois sapping you of your manly vitality? Reclaim it by moving your family to an island and embarking on a Rooseveltian adventure in the jungle.
As my colleague Tim detailed in his blog post “‘Scenery Unsurpassed’: Real Estate Promotion Through Maps,” maps are key components in the machine of identifying, surveying, delineating, and ultimately selling land for new communities. While much of its role in this process is practical, some cartography strays into the overtly hyperbolic and bombastic (read: dishonest) in its effort to sell a destination. These maps were surveyed by New York surveyors, but the geography of the Isle is of little import in the visual language of the content itself: more important is the ability to possess it. Consequently, these maps are also advertisements.
The maps are delineated in neat grids familiar to land survey maps, and show towns laid out in an American style hopefully recognizable to the restless citizens of the Midwest or cold New England.
By such methods as opening American schools and social clubs, patriotically naming the colony after the U.S. president who oversaw the Spanish-American War and 20th century U.S. expansionism (William McKinley), using the U.S. dollar, and fostering a somewhat antagonistic relationship with the local Cuban populace, the early colonists hoped to make a case for the Isle of Pines becoming U.S. territory. Ideally, it would be a place of tourism for wintering Americans and a modern export-oriented economy to meet the growing demand for citrus in the U.S. (with the bonus of this avoiding costly trade tariffs on foreign goods).
As many as 2,000 Americans lived in the colonies by the 1910s, and McKinley appears on many maps of Cuba and the Isle of Pines from this time period. However, in 1925 the Hay-Quesada Treaty settled the question of Isle of Pines’ sovereignty in favor of Cuba, and the McKinley colonies would never quite “take off” in the way the early boosters hoped.
The Isle of Pines was a difficult place to start a colony from scratch. The labor involved in clearing land in the territory proved to be more difficult than the pamphlets and maps suggested; farms and large-scale agriculture never quite produced what they had hoped; hurricanes frequently wrought havoc across the island; and finally, the political situation did not come up in favor of these out-of-town Americans.
The maps In this collection suggest boosters had huge ambitions for the McKinley Colonies. The plats were many, the dreams big. For a few years, at least, it seemed as though the Isle of Pines could be an American Gem in the Caribbean. This curious little experiment foundered for the mundane, but all too common reasons of man’s inescapable fight against nature, and a long, slow, march through the bureaucracy in Washington, D.C.
In 2025 on Google Maps’ satellite view, on today’s Isla de la Juventud one can see old roads that extend into empty fields being reclaimed by nature; patches of land cleared of forest bear the scars of former town grids, but not much more. The town of McKinley is gone, and is one more place memorialized only on century-old maps and in the memories of those who lived it.
Notes:
“By 1925, U.S. citizens had purchased 90%…” Michael E. Neagle, America’s Forgotten Colony: Cuba’s Isle of Pines (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 8.
“By such methods as opening American schools…” Neagle, America’s Forgotten Colony, 8.
“Ideally, it would be a place of tourism…” Neagle, America’s Forgotten Colony, 8.
“As many as 2,000 Americans lived in the colonies…” Neagle, America’s Forgotten Colony, 8-9.
“The labor involved in clearing land in the territory proved to be more difficult…” Neagle, America’s Forgotten Colony, 11.
Bibliography:
Columbia Gazetteer of the World Online, “Juventud, Isla de la,” accessed September 24, 2025. http://www.columbiagazetteer.org/main/ViewPlace/65941
Neagle, Michael E. America’s Forgotten Colony: Cuba’s Isle of Pines. Cambridge University Press, 2016.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Spanish-American War.” Encyclopedia Britannica, August 2, 2025. https://www.britannica.com/event/Spanish-American-War.