A country traded without a vote

No Puerto Rican was in the room. The treaty that decided the island's next half century was negotiated entirely between Madrid and Washington. It was signed on December 10, 1898, and the U.S. Senate ratified it less than two months later, on February 6, 1899.

Formally titled the Treaty of Peace Between the United States and the Kingdom of Spain, it is usually called simply the Treaty of Paris of 1898. Under its terms, Spain renounced all claim of sovereignty over Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean, over Guam in the Marianas, and over the Philippines in the Pacific.

The terms were not uniform. For the Philippines, the United States paid Spain 20 million dollars, a sum equal to about 770 million dollars of 2025. Puerto Rico and Guam carried no payment at all; Spain ceded them outright, without compensation for either.

The treaty formally closed the Spanish-American War, the same conflict that had begun that year and had already brought the U.S. Navy to Puerto Rico's coast before General Miles landed at Guánica.

For the people living on the island, the citizenship question was deliberately left unresolved at that moment. It fell to the Foraker Act of 1900 to clarify who counted as what: Spanish subjects who chose to remain in Puerto Rico by April 11, 1899, and their children, were designated citizens of Puerto Rico, entitled to the protection of the U.S. but not to full U.S. citizenship. That distinction held for another eighteen years, until the Jones-Shafroth Act finally closed the gap in 1917.

It is worth pausing on how procedurally ordinary all of this was. A treaty is just a document that two governments sign. But for the roughly one million people living in Puerto Rico in 1898, that document rerouted their entire political future, and none of them had cast a vote on it.

Sources: Tratado de París (1898); Historia de Puerto Rico. Freeze 2026-08-22.