Sixty years later, it is melancholy to recall all that optimism gone awry. The love fest faded quickly; within a year, the United States and Fidel Castro had become mortal enemies, and would remain so for decades.

But Cuban history goes in 60-year cycles, it seems, creating symmetries that a novelist could not invent. An even more symbolic anniversary to recall now is the New Year’s Day exactly six decades before: It was on Jan. 1, 1899, that the Stars and Strips were raised over Havana after the Spanish-American War. Almost forgotten today, it was the formal beginning of the military occupation of Cuba that would shape its fate, and complicate the two countries’ relations, to this day.

Six months earlier, the United States had intervened in the bitter Cuban war of independence that had been dragging on since 1895, plucking its hard-won victory (in Cubans’ eyes) at the last moment. Cubans soon found that they had traded one colonial master for another. During the campaign, American officers had treated the ragtag, mixed-race local forces with contempt, despite their long resistance. A huge amount of resentment was created when the Americans refused to let Cuban soldiers attend the Spanish Army’s surrender ceremony in Santiago. Even their commanding general was turned away at the gates.

By the time Cuba gained official independence from the United States, on May 20, 1902 , Cuba had been transformed into a vassal state, which many Americans hoped would one day be annexed into the Union. The occupiers had built some fine public works, fixing sewerage systems and paving roads — the Spanish had left the island a ruin — but they also gave American carpetbaggers free rein. Much of the best farmland in Cuba was soon owned by companies based in the United States, as were many of the railways, and nearly all the electrical and telephone systems . The Platt Amendment, added to a United States Army appropriation bill and incorporated in the Cuban Constitution in 1901, even gave Washington the right to intervene militarily in the island’s politics, which it did twice in following years, and gave the United States its permanent lease on the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.