Mother Spain's twins

The Philippines and Cuba may be considered twins, sharing a colonial DNA: Spanish imperial rule, Catholic/Hispanic legacies, US takeover after 1898, plantation economies oriented to colonizers' markets and struggles over sovereignty.

- BOO CHANCO

Both were turned over by Spain to the US under the Treaty of Paris on Dec. 10, 1898. But unlike the Philippines, Cuba was not made a US colony but only put under a temporary US occupation. The US formally relinquished its occupation authority on May 20, 1902, when the Republic of Cuba led by Cubans took over internal governance.

So, the Cubans still speak Spanish, a language we traded for English. Many Filipinos and Cubans carry Spanish given and family names.

Under the galleon trade, Filipinos were taken to Cuba as altar boys, catechists, tobacco workers and domestic servants—particularly settling in Pinar del Rio, which was even called Nueva Filipinas in the 18th century.

Both countries were developed to serve Spanish market needs: Cuba for sugar and tobacco; Philippines for tobacco, hemp (abaca), sugar under the Haciendas system.

Spanish colonial rule laid important structural foundations for both Cuba's Communist Revolution and the Philippines' enduring communist insurgency. Land inequality, prominence of an elite landed class, extractive economics from Spanish rule combined with US neo-colonial rule, and post-colonial governance failures, set the stage for radical uprising in both countries.

Spanish rule created a brutal slavery-based plantation economy in Cuba with stark racial and class hierarchy and a deeply entrenched land ownership inequality. Then the communist government expropriated almost all commercial-scale farmland so that the state became the exclusive owner of most of the land, especially for agriculture and natural resources.

In the Philippines, Spain imposed a feudal-style land tenure system via the encomienda and later hacienda models.