Is America an Empire?

Smedley Butler's first overseas deployment is literally to Guantanamo Bay. By the time he gets to Guantanamo, the Marines had taken it a couple weeks earlier. The big battle, which is the battle of Cusco well, had already been fought and the Spanish had basically with the assistance of, not even the leadership of the Cuban Mambisas. And his description in that famous paragraph, which is usually the one thing of his book that gets quoted. "I help purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown brothers"