DB challenge: Give Cuba's star to Alaska

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is keep Cuba outside the United States but make Alaska a part of it with a POD no earlier than 1850. You must do this without a successful Southern secession.

OOC: If you want to tell me that this is exactly what happened in OTL, read this and spare my nerves.

OOC again: And please, no "as we all know, water is sandy and the sky is orange in OTL." I hate it when people need to be so unsubtle.
 
That's tricky. There hasn't been a new state admitted since 1890, and I don't think Alaska had enough people to qualify for statehood at that time.
 
Well, why should Alaska accept statehood if it were offered it anyway? It's got a great deal going as is - all the benefits of being part of the US, without any federal taxes sucking away that oil and gold money.
 

loughery111

Banned
The only situation where I can think of Alaska becoming a state rather than remaining a territory would be one where an enemy of the US, or domestic public sentiment, is portraying territorial status in Alaska and the Pacific Islands (Samoa, Guam, etc.) as a form of imperialism, and the government wants to end that propaganda.

That was, after all, the reason that Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Panama were all admitted IOTL after WWII... because the Soviets were making propaganda hay by saying we were oppressing our own people. So we gave those areas statehood. Alaska just didn't have enough people for anyone to care one way or another. Maybe if we didn't have Cuba, Panama, or the Philippines to feed their propaganda machine, they would have focused on Alaska and Hawaii instead?
 
The only situation where I can think of Alaska becoming a state rather than remaining a territory would be one where an enemy of the US, or domestic public sentiment, is portraying territorial status in Alaska and the Pacific Islands (Samoa, Guam, etc.) as a form of imperialism, and the government wants to end that propaganda.

That was, after all, the reason that Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Panama were all admitted IOTL after WWII... because the Soviets were making propaganda hay by saying we were oppressing our own people. So we gave those areas statehood. Alaska just didn't have enough people for anyone to care one way or another. Maybe if we didn't have Cuba, Panama, or the Philippines to feed their propaganda machine, they would have focused on Alaska and Hawaii instead?

What's worse than someone who doesn't read the previous posts in a DBWI? :rolleyes:
 

Wolfpaw

Banned
I think I read somewhere that the Russians offered to sell it to us after the Civil War. IIRC, Seward wanted to take them up on it but Congress found it so laughable an idea that Seward lost almost all of his political street-cred. Perhaps if things had gone differently? Maybe if the CSA buys it (for god knows what reason) and then, when they lose, the Union snatches it up?

I dunno, that last scenario's pretty ASB, but so's the whole idea. I mean, Alaska and the US are completely separated by Canada, whereas Cuba's an island 90 miles off the coast of Florida. Needless to say one is far more desirable with regards to logistics.
 
Maybe insted of buying Puerto Rico and Cuba from Spain, we buy Alaska from Russia?

But why on earth would you? Alaska was sparsley populated and the US at that time didn't speak Russian. At least Spanish-speakers made up a large deomgraphic because of the Mexican Wars, etc.

A POD in the 19th Century isn't really my specialty. I'm thinking though, if the US got involved in WWI (OOC: Assuming the butterflies wouldn't be that big), then perhaps they take over Alaska to protect it from the Russian Civil War. I mean, whose more viable a protector here; the Dominion of Canada or the United States?

As much of a Britwanker as I am, I think this is realistic.

The only issue with that scenario is that the US still has Cuba. I'm not entirely sure why the US wouldn't accept Spain's offer to sell. In the long run it solved a lot of problems for Spain, and the US isn't going to let the Spanish sell it to a European power. Would they really want the RN floating around their backward swimming pool?
 

Shackel

Banned
Maybe have Alaska(and part of Siberia, maybe?) as a protected semi-puppet under the U.S. *going off of previous poster's idea*

Or is that too ASB?
 
To keep Cuba out of the U.S.'s hands:

Make the War of Secession go much more badly, perhaps with wide-spread destruction of both southern and northern infrastructure, making it so that the Federal government spends so much money on rebuilding the nation that they just don't have enough to spare to buy Cuba and Puerto Rico?
 
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