John Quincy Adams, who was President of the US, said at one time that Cuba was like an apple that would fall into the US hands' once it was ripe.
populated only by wandering and primitive Indians—"savages." But Jefferson would have probably been even more astonished to discover how little the United States had expanded to the south and to the north where European settlers—British, French, Spanish—had established themselves. Jefferson thought Cuba "the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of States" and told John C. Calhoun in 1820 that the United States "ought, at the first possible opportunity, to take Cuba." John Quincy Adams, James Monroe's secretary of state and his successor in the White House, considered the annexation of Cuba "indispensable to the continuance and integrity of the Union itself" and thought Cuba would inevitably fall to the United States by the law of political gravitation.
