Welcome to McKinley: How the U.S. almost colonized a chunk of Cuba

"In an abandoned cemetery on Cuba's Isla de la Juventud stands the weathered headstone of Estefania Koenig. When she died in 1981, at the ripe old age of 95, she was the last American of what had once been called the McKinley Colonies. A century ago, it was a thriving citrus-growing community, American in everything except the letter of the law. Then came a couple of devastating hurricanes - and the closure of a geopolitical loophole."

"Under his watch, the U.S. snapped up Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba from Spain (with full sovereignty over the former three and only temporary control over the latter). McKinley matters today because the current occupant of the White House is a fan: Trump name-checked him in his second inaugural address, and his own musings about acquiring the Panama Canal, Canada, and Greenland suggest an urge to outdo McKinley's territorial haul."

"At 934 square miles (2,419 km 2), Isla de la Juventud is slightly smaller than Rhode Island, yet still the seventh-largest landmass in the Caribbean. It's twice the size of Martinique, but with just over 80,000 inhabitants, it has barely one-fifth of its population. It lies just 29 miles (47 km) off Cuba's southwest coast across the shallow Gulf of Batabanó - so shallow that a healthy cow could swim across at low tide, a rather unorthodox legal argument for Cuban ownership once claimed."

The McKinley Colonies were an Americanized citrus-growing community on Isla de la Juventud that operated outside clear legal sovereignty. William McKinley's era of expansion resulted in U.S. acquisitions across the Pacific and temporary control over Cuba, inspiring later territorial ambitions. The Isle is a large, sparsely populated Caribbean landmass lying close to Cuba's southwest coast across the shallow Gulf of Batabanó, a geographic feature that fed unusual claims about ownership. Devastating hurricanes and the end of a geopolitical loophole ended the American enclave, leaving Estefania Koenig, who died in 1981, as its last American resident.

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