THE REVOLUTION IN CUBA.
ISSUED BY THE
CUBAN COMMITTEE IN LONDON.INTRODUCTION.
kl
The deep and wide-spread sympathy lately displayed by the English Nation on behalf of suffering Armenia, and the increasing interest being taken in the present struggle in Cuba, has induced the writers to republish the accompanying treatise from the pen of Dr. Y de Rochez, published in the “ Revue Contemporaine,” during the Revolution of 1868, and a series of Articles published recently in Bogota Republic of Colombia, by Mr. Rafael Merchan. Although a Cuban, Mr. Merehan’s writings are above any suspicion of partiality : they are based on statements of the leading Spanish politicians, in many cases embodied in speeches delivered in. the Spanish Congress of Madrid.
The perusal of these documents, will, it is hoped, convince the reader, that politically, socially and economically, Cuba has been deeply wronged in the past, and that its only hope of good government and real prosperity is in its deliverance from Spanish rule.
At the beginning of the present century, Cuba was one of the Spanish provinces, and its Deputies were seated at the Spanish Congress. At that period, all the inhabitants, both Cubans and Spaniards, were faithful to the mother country, a proof of it being the loyal assistance given in 1762 by all parties during the attack on Havana by the English army and navy. Soon, however, after the independence of South America, Spain, instead of following the example of England with regard to her Colonies after the independence4
of the United States, established in Cuba a despotic and most arbitrary government, promoted the divisions between the Spaniards and Cubans, and induced the enlargement of the slave trade.
On 28th May, 1825, the following decree was issued:—
“ His Majesty, the King our Lord, desiring to obviate the inconvenience which might result, in extraordinary cases, from a division of command and from the interferences of powers and prerogatives of the respective officers; for the important end of preserving in that precious island (Cuba) his legitimate sovereign authority and the public tranquility, through proper means, has resolved, in accordance with the opinion of his council of Ministers, to give to your Excellency the fullest authority, by bestowing upon you all the powers which by the royal ordinances are granted to the governors of besieged cities. In consequence of this, His Majesty gives to your Excellency the most amply and unbounded power, not only to send away from the island any persons in office, xchatever be their occupation, rank, class, or condition, whose continuance therein your Excellency may deem injurious, or whose conduct, public or private, may alarm you, replacing them with persons faithful to His Majesty; and deserving of all the confidence of your Excellency; but also the execution of any order whatsoever, or any general provision made concerning any branch of the administration, as your Excellency may think most suitable to the royal service.”
In 1886, although the Cuban Deputies to Congress were duly elected, they were not allowed to take their seats.
In 1837 an Article was introduced into the Spanish Constitution stating that Cuba and Porto Rico would be ruled by special laws. The same provision was made in the reformed Constitution of 1845, but up to the present no special laws have been framed, and the royal decree of 1825 is still in force.
In 1867, Special Commissioners from Cuba and Porto Rico were sent to Spain to ask for social, political and economic Concessions, but these were refused, and a Military Court Martial established as a Court of Justice (although the country5
was in peace), and taxation was increased. The report of these Commissioners contain an amount of important and accurate information, deserving to be read by those who may not have realised the cruel injustice and mockery of which Cubans have been the victims for nearly a century.
During the stay in Spain of these Deputies, Marshal Serrano, Regent at the time, and who was for over three years supreme political and military Commander in Cuba, was asked to give his opinion on matters of reform, and in a very ably-written report, dated Madrid, 10th May, 1867, after warmly advocating the granting of certain concessions demanded, said:—
“ I cannot but say to the Government of Her Majesty, influenced by the loyalty of my character and the most sincere conviction, that the grievances of the Cubans are just, that their aspirations are lawful, that there is no reason why, Spaniards like ourselves, they should not have a free press, nor a proper representation in government, and all those constitutional guarantees to which the Spaniards of the Peninsula have a right; that there is no reason why a military and absolute Government from the highest to the lowest grades in the scale, should be the only regime for the Antilles; and that the moment has now precisely arrived, let not the government forget it to take advantage of the internal and external circumstances which favor political reform, urgently demanded by the Spaniards of the Antilles, and which it is just and prudent to grant without delay.
General Dulce, whose opinion was also asked, and who also was for some years the supreme political and military authority in Cuba, expressed the same ideas.
In spite of all Señor Cánovas del Castillo, the then Minister for the Colonies (the present Premier), closed the investigation by leaving untouched the social question (slavery); by proposing a consultative council as the panacea for the political problem, and advancing the amount of taxation as the solution for the then unbearable economic difficulties.All this was enough to show the Cubans that they could never expect justice from the mother country. The end of the investigation was, as a matter of course, the beginning of the revolution which broke out on October 10th, 1868.
Notwithstanding, so anxious were the Cubans to avoid the war, that when on September 18th of 1868, the Republic was proclaimed in Spain, they appealed to the Captain-General of the Island (General Lersundi), and on October 24th (fourteen days after the revolution started in Yara), a meeting was held at the Captain-General’s Palace.
Señor J. M. Mestre, a distinguished Cuban lawyer, said his individuality was of little account, and that he should rather be the last than the first to speak, but that the remarks of Señor Rato forced him to precede gentlemen with better right to take part in the conference; he would speak in perfect frankness, because there are moments when all should be frankly told; he had conversed with Señor Rato and others, to the purpose that it was expedient to authorise or tolerate meetings for the discussion of public matters interesting to all, and therefore he thought it incumbent on him to make certain explanations. He added, the serious events happening in Spain had produced excitement and trouble easy to understand; that the Government in power having proclaimed the most advanced political creed. Every Spaniard, no matter in what part of the world he found himself, should feel he was entitled to the enjoyment of the acknowledged rights of the revolution, therefore the inhabitants of Cuba could but believe they would be extended to this province as an integral part of the nation; he would ask what should be done ? We should doubtless adopt an open and decidedly liberal course in harmony with the established and legal regime of the Peninsula, &c., &c.
Señor Modet, a Spanish gentleman, supported Señor7
Mestre’s views. Then Captain-General Lersundi suspended the meeting, stating that he had understood that some residents desired to offer him their support, but he found on the contrary that they had come to show mistrust, to censure his acts and address to him charges to which he would briefly refer.
He said that the remarks of Señor Mestre were analogous to those made by the insurgents in arms in Yara, &c., concluding by stating that the Government counted on means adequate to suppress and punish the rebels and agitators, and that was the proper answer to be given to Señores Mestre and Modet, declaring the conference to be at an end.
Señor Modet asked permission to speak again and was refused; Señor Lersundi insisting on the impropriety of the meeting asked for, saying it would be more useful if the newspaper El Pais should pointedly and energetically condemn the movement of the insurgents. He added that his experience taught him that no convictions were ever gained by debating; that sometimes timely severity produced the best results, and the sacrifice of a few lives at a proper moment will save greater and more painful losses.
The severity of the Spanish Officers in Cuba, approved by the authorities in Madrid, during the revolution of 1868, stands without parallel. A few instances are given, copied from the Book of Blood, published in New York, and these will seem to shew how strong must be the sense of wrong and oppression felt by the Cubans, and that the present struggle has a far deeper origin than a question of races, as has been most unjustly asserted by Spain.
To begin with may be produced the Decree of the Conde de Valmaceda, issued in Bayano, 4th April, 1869:—
. “ Inhabitants of the Country! The reinforcements of troops that8
I have been waiting for have arrived; with them I shall give protection to the good, and punish promptly those that still remain in rebellion against the government of the metropolis.
“You know that I have pardoned those that have fought us with arms ; that your wives, mothers and sisters have found in me the unexpected protection that you have refused them. You know, also, that many of those I have pardoned have turned against us again.”
“ In view of such ingratitude, such villainy, it is not possible for me to be the same man as I have been; there is no longer a place for a false neutrality; he that is not with me is against me, and to provide my soldiers the means to deal with them, I have given to them the following instructions:
“ 1st. Every man from the age of fifteen years and upward, found out of his house who cannot give a good reason for it will be shot.
“2nd. Every unoccupied house will be burned by the troops.
“ 3rd. Every house without a white flag, which is the signal that its inhabitants desire peace, will be reduced to ashes.
“ Women that are not living at their own homes, or at the house of their relatives, will be gathered either in the town of Jiguain or in that of Bayamo, where food will be provided to them. Those who do not present themselves will be brought by force.
“ The foregoing regulations will begin to be in force on the 14th instant.”
To show the feeling excited in other countries by this decree, on May 10th, Mr. Fish, the Secretary of State in Washington, addressed a note to Mr. Lopez Roberts, Spanish Minister before the American Government, as follows:
“ In the interest of Christian civilization and common humanity, I hope that this document (Valmaceda decree) is a forgery. If it be indeed genuine, the President instructed me, in the most forcible manner, to protest against such mode of warfare.”
This protest, was, however, of no avail. On the 9th of August, 1869, say four months after, the Estado Catalan of Barcelona published the following news:
“ General Staff of the Captain-Generalship of the Island of Cuba: The Court Martial, sitting at this place on this day, with9
the object of examining and passing an opinion about the process against the civilian, Jose Yalder Nodarse, who uttered seditious words, has condemned him to six years hard labor and with irons, and His Excellency, in sharing the opinion of auditor, has approved the judgment, but not without remarking his great mildness, because it is not in accord with regulations, codes and existing laws, and for that reason he has ordered that the President and members of the Military Court be sent to a castle for two months as a punishment for it.
“ Published by order of his Excellency.”
After copying the above paragraph, the Barcelona paper added:
“ Blushing from shame, and with hearts dripping blood, we do confess, in view of what is now happening, that foreigners are right: Africa commences in the Pyrenees, and not the Africa of the Marochians, but the Africa of the Kaffirs.”
Moreover, on September 23rd, 1869, from Villaclara, Senor Domingo Graino, Captain of Volunteers, wrote:
“ More than three hundred spies and conspirators are shot monthly in this jurisdiction. Myself alone, with my company, have already killed nine, and I will never be weary of killing.”
On September 4th of same year another Captain of Volunteers, Jesus Rivacoba, wrote as follows:
“We have captured seventeen, thirteen of whom were shot outright ; on dying, they shouted hurrah for free Cuba, hurrah for independence. A mulatto said hurrah for Cespedes. On the following day we killed a Cuban officer and another man. Among the thirteen we shot the first day were found three sons and their fathers; the fathers witnessed the execution of their sons without even changing color, and when their turn came they said they died for the independence of their country. On coming back we brought along with us three carts filled with women and children, the families of those we had shot; and they asked us to kill them also, because they would rather die than to live among Spaniards."
Another letter of September 22nd, 1869, from Pedro Pardon, officer of Volunteers, to Rosendo Rivas:
“ Not a single Cuban will remain in this Island, because we10
shoot all those we find on the fields, on their farms, and in every hovel.”
Another letter from Pedro Fardon to his father, September 22nd, 1869 :
“ We do not leave a creature alive where we pass, be it man or animal. If we find cows, we kill them ; if horses, ditto ; if hogs, ditto ; men, women or children, ditto ; as to the houses, we burn them ; so every one receives what he deserves ; the men with bullets, the animals with the bayonet. The Island will remain a desert.”
Many, more acts of devastation and cruelty could be quoted and proved, but enough to say that according to the same book, in the 27 months from October, 1868, to December, 1870, the Spaniards killed 2,658 men, women and children, or what in a fair proportion of the nine years and six months that the revolution was in existence, would be 11,222 Cubans, outside of those killed fighting or from wounds, and no less sent in irons to Ceuta, and in order to prove to our readers that the brutalities exercised by the Spaniards in the conduct of the war are no different to-day that in the previous Revolution, we give a quotation from the Panama Star and Herald, of 16th September, 1895 :—
“ Spanish Brutality.—The Insurgent Cuban leader, Jose Maceo, has sent out a letter from his headquarters, in the province of Santiago de Cuba, in which he protests against alleged barbarous acts on the part of Spanish commanders. He says, in part :—‘ In the name of the civilized world we protest against the repeated acts of barbarous character committed within the jurisdiction of Guantanamo, under the orders of Lieutenant Colonel Segura and in the name of Spain, by Major Garrido, chief of the local government guerrillas. At Santa Rita recently he killed Señora Manuela Vera, an unprotected woman, fifty years of age, and assassinated her little daughter, a child of six summers. At El Retiro, he seized and shackled M. Armand Lamit, a French citizen and wealthy coffee planter, threatening to have him shot as a political suspect, and then gave him twenty-four hours to abandon his estates. Such is the class of meil the Spanish government allows to disgrace it in the eyes of the world.’ ”11
No man of honor can say, after reading this narration, that the Cubans ought to submit themselves to Spain and live happily under the mother country, provided she grant to the colony self-government However, once more Spain deceived the colony, in 1878. The revolution was stopped on account of the treaty of Zanjon, and after seventeen years have elapsed, the Cubans have risen in arms for the same purpose as before.
In 1878, as stated, the Kevolution came to an end, not because the rebellion was crushed, but in consequence of Spain agreeing to the Treaty of Zanjon, whereby various concessions and agreements of good government were promised to Cuba, but although for seventeen years every effort has been made by leading Cubans and some Spaniards to induce Spain to fulfil the conditions of the Treaty, their efforts have only resulted in contempt and mockery. The condition of government to-day is as bad if not worse than before, and has forced the Cuban to once more rise, not to obtain a fulfilment of the treaty, but to obtain a separation for ever from Spain, or to die fighting for it.
The article of Dr. Roche’s, although written 26 years ago, gives such a perfect idea of the despotism and ill administration of Cuba by Spain that we could not help from publishing it here, being our object to bring before the reader an impartial exposition of facts, to convey conviction that to share the Spanish domination in Cuba and Porto Rico simply means to support the system of enslaving the whites, after the slavery of blacks has failed.
With regard to the amount of corruption in the economical administration of Cuba, the following paragraph from the Pall Mall Gazette of October 5th is very instructive. It reads as follows:—
“The revenue of the city goes to pay the officials, from the CivilGovernor downwards. They themselves, poor fellows, had originally to pay a high price for obtaining their post to the officials in Madrid. They come out here, they must live, and perhaps even send a yearly sum to some Ministerial officer in Madrid for continuing in their position, and they want to make a profit themselves.” Further on the Pall Mall Gazette correspondent, on the matter of smuggling, refers to what his guide explained to him, as follows:—'* What was his trade (of a certain Count) ? Oh, he was a professional smuggler . . . he was a well-known and recognized agent between the merchants and the custom officials. The custom officials, like the rest of them, buy their posts, just in the same way as a policeman buys his post in New York. A director’s place costs so much to the Governor, and so much to the Madrid officials, and so on downwards. Well, these men want to make their pile; they therefore do it through the beneficent interposition of the said count, who is quite a benefactor, not only to the officials themselves, but also to the merchants. For instance, the tariff is exorbitantly high : a merchant wants to clear a cargo on which the duty would be. say three thousand dollars. He employs an honest (sic) broker, who will act as intermediary between the merchant and the customs official; the broker will promise the customs official five hundred dollars for his goodwill, the himself obtains five hundred dollars for his trouble, and a declaration is then filed by the merchant that his goods are a certain value, liable to custom dues of one thousand instead of three thousand dollars. He saves the merchant a thousand dollars, he puts five hundred dollars in the pocket of the customs official, and gets a well deserved reward of five hundred dollars for his benevolent interposition.”
The articles by Mr. Merchan, from pages 17 to 62, will convince the reader of the extraordinary corruption existing at the present time in the Administration of Cuba, and it will be curious to know if those who blame the revolutionary party in Cuba, and express fear that Cuba became a second Haiti after the separation from Spain, can show anything equal in Haiti.
It is desirable to deal, in conclusion, with the assertion constantly made by Spain, that Cuba is not fit for self-government. Cuba is a country of about 50,000 square miles, with18
only one-tenth under cultivation, with a population of 1,631,687, of which 1,102,689 are whites. This population is, of course, out of all proportion to its size, there being room for twelve or fifteen million inhabitants. With an island so fertile, so rich in minerals, there is not a shadow of doubt but that with the withdrawal of Spanish restrictions, there will be attracted immigrants of the first class, and the development of the country will steadily increase. Up to the present Spain has done everything possible to prevent the increase of the white population, as an instance of which may be noted the decree that no foreigners may live in Cuba more than three months without making their domicile and declaring themselves Roman Catholics; but, nevertheless, while the white population is increasing the black is decreasing, and this is only one-fourth of the total population of the country. In Haiti nine-tenths are blacks and the rest mulattoes.
At a short distance from Cuba lie the United States of America, where the Cubans have learned to love freedom, how to love good, strong and liberal institutions.
Cuba will come into the family of nations without debt, and with ample means to be devoted to its development, and by so doing and by opening its doors to a good immigration, it will be enough to avoid disturbances and to strengthen its government. The consolidation of Mexico since she followed that system is the best instance we can quote.
What is called the Cuban debt, amounting to £37,200,000, is really a Spanish debt incurred for the expeditions against Mexico, Peru and Chili, the war with San Domingo, the Carlist War, &c. Cuba pays on account of interest on that debt yearly $12,574,485, equal to a tax on every inhabitant of $7.70, or £1 10s. 9d., as compared with 13/- in England. This contribution of $12,574,485 is independent of $5,904,084 for the Ministry of War, and $4,015,034 for the Minister of14
the Interior. From 1878 to 1891, Cuba has paid on account of the debt $115,336,304, and yet instead of decreasing, it has constantly increased, and in addition, it is calculated that every year, through fraudulent exactions, the country pays $20,000,000. All this is completely clear in Mr. Merchan’s articles, and also he shews to what extent Cuban products have been taxed by Spain, sugar and tobacco specially, while it will be observed, that whereas Spanish products can enter Cuba almost free, Cuban products, when imported into Spain, are heavily taxed.
The fact that in spite of all the injustices of Spain towards Cuba, the Cubans have patiently waited so long before going to the extreme recourse of arms, and before doing so have begged for the most indispensable reforms, is a proof that the Cubans constitutionally are not revolutionary ; the fact that wherever the Cuban exiles have gone they have devoted themselves to work commanding the respect and esteem of society, of which North America, Mexico, Jamaica and all Central and South American Republics are instances ; and finally, the fact that Cuba had a railway before Spain had any, and that the 1,000 miles of railway she has, all of them built with private capital, are proofs of her love for progress and advanced condition of civilization.
It is a well-known fact that Spain has no love for justice, and no wonder, then, that she always has been deceiving the Cubans with promises never fulfilled, but the main reason for her obstinacy lays in the economic question. Spain cannot allow Cubans to manage their own affairs without being compelled to declare herself in bankruptcy, because the drainage on Cuba would be stopped, and about 45 °Jo of the Spanish nation living now upon Cuba would be in the same position.
Under a great pressure the last Congress granted what
HR9PHHIH
MVPis known as the Abarzuza law with regard to Cuba, which law was as follows :—A House of Representatives in Cuba of 30 members, of which 15 to be appointed by election and 15 by the Government. The Captain-General as chairman with a decisive vote, right of veto, and authorised to dismiss any as far as 10 of the members, and the House to continue, nevertheless, as it would if complete. As a matter of course, the 15 members appointed by the Government would be men ready to do anything ordered by the Captain-General, and, as besides, he could dismiss as far as 10 at any time, it does not require much perception to understand that the introduction of the said House would have rendered the condition of Cubans more desperate even, if possible. And so it would have been had the revolution not broken out, because already a secret transaction was on the way from the Spanish Government to raise a loan of ¿£50,000,000, guaranteed by the Cuban Custom Houses, and approved by the said House of Representatives. On account of the revolution the transaction fell through, otherwise Cuba would have been burdened with a very heavy responsibility.
In conclusion, the writers sincerely regret to have been bound to condemn Spain so much, but their object and duty is to bring before the world the just grievances of Cuba, to command the sympathy due to every just cause. It was unavoidable, therefore, mentioning one by one the wrongs done by Spain. Cubans do not fight because they hate Spain, they fight because there is no other way to conquer their rights. Should Spain be wiser than she has hitherto proved to be, she would be convinced that she can no longer control Cuba, that the will of the Cubans, and of the Spaniards who have properties in the island, and who are not in the employment of the Spanish Government, is to be free from the Spanish exactions, and that better than expending men and money and destroying properties, would be to acknowledge16
the Cuban independence, and arrange a friendly treaty profitable to both countries.
The Cuban task is very difficult, because except the climate everything else is against them; all facilities afforded by the steam navigation, the electric cable, the new repeating rifles, the treaties of peace, are in favour of Spain, hut the will of a people wronged for nearly a century, and of a people well aware of their rights and duties, will prove superior to all the elements against them, or they will succumb, leaving to a new generation the duty to continue the struggle. Spain herself fought the Romans for two centuries, and the Moors for seven, and succeeded. How, then, can the Cubans, the sons of the Spaniards, the people who have a more perfect idea than Spain of freedom, fail ?
THE CUBAN COMMITTEE IN LONDON.
Wjm'17
[Translated from “ El Correo Nacional.11 ]
• “ El Correo Nacional
THE CUBAN QUESTION.
The movement in the Spanish American Colonies, in so iar as it regards! the search after their independence, is not yet over, as Cuba, almost the last remnant preserved by Spain out of the hemisphere bestowed oh her by Columbus, is now struggling boldly and tenaciously to acquire it and to achieve her sovereignty.
The eyes of the Press all over the world are fixed on this duel which is being fought between one of the most gloriously historic nations in the old world, and the last remnant left to her from her old heroic conquests.
A son of Cuba, who has struggled here in the conflicts of thought, writes us the letter which we publish below together with our reply, and we have no doubt that in defence of his brethren who are there fighting, he will throw some light on the debate now going on between us, and will place it in that arena in which those problems, whose solution is of so much interest, not only to isolated individuals, but to veritable legions, should be elucidated.
To the Editor. of " Correo National.”
Dear Sir,—“ El Telegrama ” in to-day’s number publishes an article against the Cubans, so unjust and so full of errors and contradictions that I am compelled to trouble you by asking you whether you are still disposed to give space in. the columns of your valuable journal to some articles of mine oh my native country. Two months ago you were kind enough to invite me;to write them ; Dr. Miguel Samper also urged me to do it in “ El Heraldo ” ; the same suggestion has been made to me by numerous other persons who are in sympathy with the Cuban cause and who belong to one or other of the various Colombian political parties. I have privately made known the reasons which have animated me in not treating the matter in extenso; I have restricted myself to furnishing certain data when I have been asked for- them ; I have written very little, very much less than was necessary, and then only when I have been asked to do so. Were it necessary to publish these reasons I would publish them, as they_ would serve as a further demonstration that my patriotism never makes me forgetful of that circumspection which is imposed upon me here as a foreigner.18
But I am now in the position- in which any Colombian would find himself who, when living in another nation, sees his compatriots wrongly judged by some journal published in the country in which he resides; such a Colombian would stand up to. defend Colombia, and by so doing would comply with a duty. This duty is incumbent on everyone who loves his native soil, and no one will be surprised that I should comply with it now that the occasion has arisen.
While the “ El Telegrama ” restricted itself to reproducing from Spanish papers or from papers which support the Spanish rule in Cuba, I have been amused because it frequently happened that their endeavours produced a contrary result to that which they had in view; for instance : one day it copied the report that the revolutionists were getting a large quantity of French gold from France ; this showed that the revolution is not made up of unfortunate negroes, of people of no standing; another day it extracted a report according to which the yellow fever had not appeared here in Cuba; as at the time General Martinez Campos was asking for reinforcements from the Peninsula, the question naturally arose what had become of the 20,000 men with whom he inaugurated his campaign. And so on with other information copied from other sources.
“ El Telegrama ” is like any other journal or any other person, free to embrace any opinion it chooses during the Cuban struggle, in the same way as it would on any other matter; so far there is nothing calling for remark ; one day, the second of March, 1894, referring to the independence of Colombia this paper set forth in its columns the view that “ it was an absolute error ” on the part of “ our fathers to break with the mother country,” and you yourself then reminded the Editor “ that that had also been the opinion of Samano, Monteverde, El Conde de Castilla, El Virrey Lazerna, Fernando VII. and Boves, but that on the other hand Bolivar and Sucre, O’Higgins, San Martin, Narino, Hidalgo and the generality of illustrious Americans had thought otherwise.”
Yet even if it has the right to think as it pleases, it would seem that it ought not to be entitled to deal with questions which it has not studied; Note that in to-day’s article it describes the autonomists as revolutionists who are basing their hopes on the yellow fever, and who are organising in the mountains; and in the issue of the 15th of April they said that the autonomist party “authoritatively condemned, and even excommunicated those who took up arms.” Corollary: they do not know what autonomists are. Now on the 25th they repeat in terms more specific than on the 13th that the yellow fever has not appeared in the island ; and barely two days ago, in their number of the 23rd, they inserted a dispatch from Santiago, dated February 13th, in which it states that the North American cruiser “Atlanta” is cut off from1(1
19
communication with the land owing to the existence of yellow fever there ; corollary : the Editors of “ El Telegrama ” do not read their own paper.
There are few Cubans in Bogotá, but in the rest of Colombia there is, comparatively speaking, a considerable number ; Cubans who live by honest labour, who respect and comply with the laws of the country, and who abstain from mixing themselves up in politics. Such conduct would seem to exact reciprocity; one would think it would entitle us to be respected for our patriotism by certain journals as the National Government openly respects us ; to have the circumspection which we adopt with reference to Colombian policy accepted as our policy ; and not to have the soldiers of our revolution described by offensive epithets. Let us therefore be permitted to defend ourselves. Allow us to state matters correctly. In my articles I do not proposé exactly to raise a discussion with “ El Telegrama,” neither is it my object to offer offence to Spain, a thing which I have never done, since I am the descendant of Spaniards, and am honoured with the friendship of many ; my criticism will be directed towards the Administration which has been, and is, bad, as I think I shall be able to show.
Yours very faithfully,
(Sd.) RAFAEL M. MERCHAN.
S. C., 25th July, 1895.
“ El Correo National29th July, 1895.
CUBA.—No. I.
Administrative Corruption.
Before the commencement of the present war, we Cubans who understand patriotism in our own way, might have preferred a legal struggle to an armed warfare ; the author of these lines, when five years ago he thought the revolution an impossibility, or that it did not possess the element of victory, tried to demonstrate the desirability of candidly asking for autonomy, as Spain, notwithstanding her reluctance to grant it would be compelled to accede in deference to the force of circumstances. But those who had a narrow view of the state of affairs in the island and who were supporting her yoke, were the judges to decide the limits of patience and long suffering; they rose on the 24th February last, and we, who cannot help being interested in the fate of our country, have only this alternative: to support our compatriots or else those who are killing our compatriots. To put the problem thus, and there is no other way of putting it, is to solve it.

ü
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What I have to do therefore in these articles is to show the justice which is assisting those who have gone into the field to achieve the independence of their country at the sacrifice of their lives.
Even the very autonomists have not denied the justice of this: their point of view is that war is not desirable, but as for affirming that there are no reasons for undertaking it, the time will come for demonstrating, by their own writings, that they have never gone so far.
I will commence with Administrative Corruption and I will not refer to those times when, in the words of Lord Palmerston, Cuba was a “ centre of abomination,” but to the present time.
So serious is what I have to say in this respect that I dare not express it in my own words, those who are unaware of my scrupulousness is not affirming anything which I cannot prove would imagine that I was inventing or exaggerating. I therefore use the words of the highest authorities of the Spanish Government: General Salamanca, who was Captain-General of the Island of Cuba; Romero Robledo, who was the Minister of Ultramar ; Señor Moret, who was the Prime Minister of State; the Marquis de la Vega de Armijo, who was also recently entrusted with the portfolio.
I will also add the views of “ Epoca ” of Madrid and of newspapers in Havana, who can, in no way, be suspected of separatist ideas or even of autonomy.
The extracts which I am about to copy from the four authorities referred to, appear in the " Diario de las sesiones de Cortes ” of Madrid, dated the 28th of June, 1890, as I can prove by ocular demonstration.
The following are the words of Señor Romero Robledo used in the Congreso de Diputados, in reference to Cuba :—
“ In our days bandits and thieves need no longer run the risks of life in the highways: why expose themselves to meeting the Civil Guard when they can extract six millions and a half from the Treasury which was under triple lock, and even now the only man arrested is a porter who was absent when the robbery was committed 1 Why go into the highway to encounter the Civil Guard when, as Vice-President of a Provincial Deputation, a man can assassinate his own wife, keep such an atrocious crime shielded from justice, and later on contract the sacred bonds (infamous sacrilege), with the servant who lived in the house of the murdered woman, yet the criminal is not yet discovered and the Press has more than once stated that he was invested with the functions of a Public Official ? ”
During the same session Señor Romero Robledo read a report sent from Havana to the Minister of Ultramar by General Salamanca in January of the same year 1890, and from it I take the following paragraphs. The General, who was an honourable man, was anxious to reform the Administration, but21
he came to grief in struggling with the traditional corruption and with the influence which the bribers and the bribed in Cuba possessed in Madrid. His short illness and his unexpected death were probably due to what he morally suffered on this account. In this letter he is speaking of the defalcations in revenue committed by Spanish employes, and he adds :—
“ Nothing more scandalous can be imagined, and in reality the state of this matter is inconceivable : even if we can quite understand that fraud exists when we see organised impunity, yet we cannot conceive it with the existence of a “ Tribunal de Cuentas ” to which a copy of the proceedings are sent, and of the Ministerial Department, in regard to which the same procedure is adopted ; and if anyone were to demonstrate this to the country, the spectacle would be a horrible one, and enough to cause a cataclysm. The inquiry in the case of false payments from the provincial Treasuries was commenced in 1881; when blame was cast on the Tribunals who arrested the supposed criminals, and the famous Royal Order prescribing that the Tribunals should not act until the administrative proceedings were completed, put a stop to the criminal proceedings, leaving the prisoners at liberty ; and the strange part of it is that at the very time, and without any assigned reason, the official inquiry also ceased, and from that time, nine years ago, there has been no fiscal, and this is permitted by the Tribunal, by the Superintendents, and by everyone, and one of the prisoners who bound himself to the Court to furnish an explanation now occupies an elevated position in the island.”
“ War Accounts from 1879 to 1880.—You have there on your shelf the seven documents which my assistant Roquet handed to you, and you know the importance of this discovery, which, like the other inquiries, is sleeping the sleep of the just, and that this was the reason why my friend Señor Balaguer suppressed by telegram the “ Tribunal de Cuentas ” in the island when it was on the track, the matter being afterwards thrown into a bottomless pit. The serious part of this matter consists, as you are aware, in the fact that the unvouched-for entries, in spite of their immense importance, belong, in a great measure, to fictitious transports and provisions, and that the responsibility for this attaches to certain respectable firms, amongst whom there is one about whom a good deal was said on a previous occasion.”
Señor Romero Robledo added:—
“ I do not intend to read the whole of the report, but I must put the Congress in the possession of one fact. To what do these defalcations committed amount? They amount to the following sum: twenty-two million, eight hundred and eleven thousand, five hundred and sixteen pesos ($22,811,516). Did not the Government know this? What has been done?”
What I am going to quote from Señores Vega de Armijo and Moret was22
not stated by them on that occasion, but three or four years before, because the history of corruption is of old date ; but Señor Romero Robledo referred to it during the same session of which I have been speaking.
The Marquis said in 1887 :—
“The favourite theme in every conversation is the administrative immorality in Cuba ; very well, gentlemen, to this, let us add, that it is not only in Cuba where corruption exists, since even here we feel its pernicious effects.”
Señor Moret :—
“ In order to cure this leprosy of administrative corruption and which sometimes shrouds itself in another form which is termed caciquism, in order to destroy that unhealthy and repulsive graft which exists in making appointments, in selecting Corporations, and subsequently political representatives, in putting forward public men, the influence of the latter with the Government, the support of the former, the court for the preparation and completion of cases ; in order to do away with all this we want an energetic Government, and we want a country in that phase of existence in which it is not absolutely necessary to count on all and every one of the men who are about to raise the cry and receive the chastisement to which they may have made themselves liable.”
Now see what the “ Epota ” of Madrid, of the 23rd of August, also in 1890, stated :—
“ For the last three years we have been hearing in the Chambers and reading in the newspapers that the last case of fraud on the Public Debt appears to be sleeping the sleep of the just ; that slander says and repeats that the famous ex-Secretary of the Junta of the said Debt committed his thefts in concurrence with the high officials of the Ministry of Ultramar, who enjoyed a portion of his rapine ; that if the said Secretary were bound to speak, his revelations would compromise many.
Another scandalous fraud discovered in 1887, and the supposed authors of which, as is publicly stated, are living at their ease, triumphant and enjoying themselves over there as though there were no Government, no tribunals or anything to interfere with them, whereas other honest officials are living on small incomes and bewailing the bitterness of enforced resignations caused, probably, to make room for these favored adventurers.
The “Comercio ” and the Diario de la Marina” of Havana, attributed this repetition to the impunity which such offences enjoyed, and these ingenious and loyal employés are described in their columns as “ thieves by Royal Order.”
I assume that the honorable Colombian reader, scandalised by such panamism, will sue for grace with uplifted hands. I do not wish to insist, and23
I grant it, subject however to exposing one of these days some worse matters than those referred to. And let it not be forgotten that all these thefts committed by the upper employés of the Spanish Adminstration in the Island, proteges of others of higher standing still, were out of money which the overtaxed people of Cuba wore compelled to pay by way of taxes and contributions.
R. M. MERCHAN.
Bogota, 27th July, 1895.

“ El Correo Nacional,” 30th July, 1895.
CUBA.—No I.
A dmi nistrative Corruption.—(Continuation).
I repeat that it is not exactly my purpose to force a discussion with “El Telegrama,” but an important incident now induces me to mention it.
Many persons erroneously imagine that the hostility of the “Telegrama” to the Cubans and the Cuban revolution is owing to influences exercised from the. Palacio. I approached His Excellency the Vice-President who is entrusted with the Executive Power, and after apologising for the liberty I was about to take, I asked him, if he had no objection, to be good enough to tell me whether that view had any foundation. He replied no; that the only Government organ was the “ Diaro Oficial ”; that among others published in Bogotá some are adherents to the Government policy, for which the Government is grateful, but that none is either directly or indirectly a Government organ. That he very rarely sends to these papers who support the Government policy any notice or information, as was done in the case of two of them for the purpose of announcing that there would be no official reception on the 20th July. I asked Señor Caro’s permission to state this in the Press when it suited me, and he consented.
I assume that the “ Telegrama ” will even thank me for silencing reports which are detrimental to its character and which attenuates its exclusive responsibility, and I pass on to give irrefutable Spanish testimony on the puban policy.
General Pando, who has resided many years in Cuba and who took part in the campaign 1868-78, made some very serious charges against the Government for administrative demoralisation in the session of the Congress of Deputies of the 2nd of March, 1890. His speech would be too long to reproduce in extenso. I will copy the extract given by the “ Epoca ” of Madrid on the day after the speech.
“ A general and public man, endowed with great energy, application to



24
business, and aptitude for detail, General Salamanca, after sustaining a hard fight in the Senate against Cuban corruption* was, for that very reason, elected and appointed to the chief command of the Grande An tilla by Señor Becerra. In view of such antecedents it was to be presumed that the new Governor-General would be provided with all the possible assistance and powers, besides those which the Legislation confers on him for the purpose of struggling with the hydra of a hundred heads, if not with greater energy and more good-will than many of his predecessors, at any rate with better success.
And yet, the Government of General Salamanca was most unfortunate; corrupt practices assumed greater proportions and were more scandalous than ever, and the General succumbed in the struggle, a victim to his own temperament and to the sustained warfare, and who knows whether to other causes also?
The problem which this General tried to solve is still an open one, more threatening than before, and the recent thefts discovered in the Junta of the Havana Debt, and the application for the extradition of the Secretary Oteiza, have invested it with an unaccustomed gravity.
Hence the questions of General Pando in yesterday’s sitting.
From these and from the particulars which are stated at the same time, it appears that there is no breach of Public Administration in Cuba which is not affected by the epidemic of corruption. In the Exchequer we are met at once with the frauds to which Oteiza has lent his name, and the considerable defalcations in the funds at Matanzas recently discovered. In the Department of Justice we see the dismissal of one magistrate, the transfer of another, and another pensioned off on account of his share in an incident involving personal interest in a case. As to the War Department, General Pando yesterday asked the Minister for Ultramar whether he was aware of the decision taken in regard to the proceedings on account of defalcations in the army supplies, fictitious military transports, accounts for that branch in 1879-80, and other similar ones.
In the matter of Custom-houses, a favorite and constant subject of fraud, the same deputy inquired whether it was not a fact that in the Havana Customhouse Treasury there was not a large quantity of what is termed “ wet paper,” such as bills for duties incurred, bearing fictitious or suspicious signatures, adding the fact that the quantity of such paper existing at that Custom-house amounts to the sum of $4,854,376.
In the opinion of that deputy the statement of goods under distraint**
*- That is to say the corruption of the Spanish rule in the Cuban colony ;■ because Cubans are not at the head of the Administration.—R.M.M.
** The goods which were distrained on by the Government at the time of the previous revolution belonging to anyone who appeared to sympathise with it.25
(wo suppose without including the famous Mora claim), amounts to fourteen million dollars, and the defalcations which have occurred in the Debt Department exceed twelve million dollars without including therein the recent defalcation by Señor Oteiza. Recapitulating, or rather adding up these homo" geneous quantities, since they all mean thefts, frauds or misappropriations, Señor Pando gave the alarming figure of FORTY MILLIONS of DOLLARS, far in excess of the general estimate of the Revenue for one year in the Island of Cuba.
What answer was the Minister of Ultramar to make to such an overwhelming statement? That he was ready to continue the campaign of reform in Cuba ; that he would submit to the Congress any petitions required, and that he relied on the co-operation of honorable men for the purpose of carrying out such a difficult undertaking.
There was a second part to this Debate, by no means less interesting than the first. General Pando in making a correction, after referring to the rumours of the poisoning of General Salamanca, in whose body, on being exhumed by his son, no intestines were found, and after stating that, in his opinion, the poison which killed the General was the lack of support from the very Government who appointed him, in the struggle which he had undertaken against corruption, he launched against the said Government the specific charge of abandoning the superior authorities of the Department of Ultramar as soon as local resistance had any influence on the policy.
Señor Castaneda, a Spaniard from the crown of his head to the sole of his feet, in the session of the Congress of Deputies of the 24th June, 1891, said :—
“ How can anyone doubt that corruption exists in the island of Cuba ? General Prendergast has furnished Your Excellency or the Secretary of His Department with a list of 350 persons employed in the Custom-house and in the Administration, against whom proceedings have been taken for fraud, and not one of them has been punished. General Prendergast has informed me of this and has authorised me to repeat it here. So that no one doubts but that corruption is a shameful fact existing there. The theft from the Customhouse, because things must be called by their right names, causes an increase in the deficits of the Budget ; and who are to pay the deficits ? The country ? How is it possible this can be remedied when an employé who has defrauded the Revenue of Cuba has received further promotion ? ”
In a speech delivered by the Minister of Ultramar, Señor Romero Robledo, in the Congress of Deputies on the 7th and 8th June, 1892, he stated that he had had an estimate made of the assets in the provincial administrations of Cuba. The result of six of them was that there ought to be a balance of $19,332,865, and he added:—
u Well then : these nineteen and odd million dollars do not represent in26
available cash a half a million of dollars. What securities are they ? Documents for completion. What kind of documents are there to complete ? Many. They represent a half a sheet of paper signed by someone who receives 18,000, 20,000, 25,000 dollars, and which these will be proved later on; in another place the funds available are put down at a large sum, $18,000, with reference to which the cashier, who has left, states that he did not take them, but that they are not there, and nevertheless they are put down as available. There are some administrations like the one at Santa Clara, in which there is a small packet wrapped in parchment, sealed and stamped, which those who hold the keys state they received in that condition, and that they were told it contained documents for completion. Consequently, this is a mysterious packet which no one has yet opened. As to old drafts of National property or Custom-house property, I understand that these amount to $5,000,000 in the Cuban Custom-house Department. The settlement of these National property bills can be realised when the property sold remains in the capacity of mortgaged property, but the fact is, that in the bills in question the property charged or the estate sold is not specified ; so the debit under this head continues, and the estates continue free and the bills are never realised. From what date does this commence 1 Well, there are documents for completion and bills running, I go back to the earliest date, ever since the year 1865.
“ Gentlemen, is it worth while that that country and this should be sacrificed by such deplorable administration ?
‘‘There are no archives or registers of the business transacted in any provincial Government Department. In some, the papers referring to the redemption of taxes and of revenue on State property, are lying in paper baskets. In order to ascertain whether a certain tax has been redeemed or whether such or such an estate has been sold, we must find the officials who have been employed there and ask them whether they remember that such a tax was redeemed or that such a property was sold, and if they remember it we get the information, if not we are ignorant of what has occurred.
In 1834 the State had purchased a building for the uses of the Administración de Hacienda in a certain province for $40,000 gold. A few years ago, very few in fact, a minute was issued showing that the building was in a ruinous condition, and it was sold for 2,000 dollars paper,^ and the offices of the Hacienda were at once established there or rather they continued there, because no change ever took place in this ruinous building, and the State is paying four onzas a month for rent of the house which it sold as ruinous for 2,000 dollars paper, and which it bought a few years ago for 40,000 dollars gold.
•About 800 dollars gold, because paper is quoted at the rate of 249 paper for 100
gold.—R.M.M.27
The minute was issued by the Administrator of Hacienda. The purchaser was another Administrator of Hacienda, and the bidder was a porter in the office.
But this is not all. In a certain province there is an inquiry going on respecting certain facts which are now attempted to be cleared up, and ■which is called the 32 league inquiry. It refers to a sale of 32 leagues of land to a private person. This was some years ago, and up to this date not a single farthing has been received on accoimt of the price of these 32 leagues of land.
But what more do we require, gentlemen ? Do you think that there are such things as assessments in Cuba? Well, there are not; there are certain pay-lists in which names are inserted with pencil and removed. Everything is conducted after this fashion. There is no register, there are no archives, there is no proper form, no service has absolutely any proper foundation; there are 50,000,000 dollars in the provincial treasuries of the various Financial Department of the Central Treasury; transactions similar to those of the building to which I have just referred are conducted, and notices are served in the way I have just shown.”
R. M. MERCHAN.
Bogota, 29th July, 1895.
“ El Correo National” 3rd August, 1895.
CUBA.—No. I.
Administrative Corruption.—(Continued).
Now the Queen Regent will speak.
In a Royal Order inserted in the Gaceta of Madrid on the 24th November, 1892, it was stated that from official information there were grounds for believing that large thefts were being committed in the branch of “La Ciases Pasivas,” that is to say in the payment of the pensions, on military crosses conferred on soldiers who had gone through the 1868-78 campaign in Cuba. Subsequent investigations confirmed the suspicions as to these peculations which the “ Epoca ” of the above-named city, in the issue of the 25th of the same month and year, described as “the most audacious fraud that could be imagined.” Let us observe the bitter irony adopted by the highest authority of the Spanish monarchy:—
“It is deserving of attention. 1st: That twelve years after the termination of the war which afflicted that country a large number of applications for pensions should be presented in the name of the soldiers who served under those sad circumstances, and who appeared to have waived their rights judging by the silence which they maintained during the years which immediately28
followed the celebration of peace. 2nd : That in proportion as the date of the conclusion of the war becomes further removed, so increases the number of persons soliciting the right to the pension and the settlement for the same during the last five years, the limit which the law permits to those who have for any longer period waived their rights. Thus in the Province of Santiago de Cuba, where in 1887 there were 450 pensioners, in 1891 they amounted to 959, and there are about 100 claims under consideration. And thirdly, contrary to the actuarial calculations as to the probability of life which are used as a basis for the annual reduction in the branch of pensions, and in spite of the considerable number of pensions on the list only one reduction occurred by death in the year 1889-90, there were two for the same reason in 1890-91, and none in 1891-92, that is to say that pensioners apparently acquire immortality together with the right to enjoy their pensions.”
Acquire Immortality with the Pension !—What a pity it is that the peculators above referred to, when they lost all ideas of integrity in their dishonourable traffic, should have been unable to imderstand this caustic euphemism.
The Royal Order adds that as soon as the Governor of the eastern district of the province gave orders that the pensioners who were going to Santiago to receive their money should present themselves to him, that 366 out of the 959 who had been receiving the pension monthly failed to present themselves.
And let it not be assumed that these robberies do not affect the people of Cuba because the victims thereof belong to the Spanish army, because as will be seen when the occasion arises to study the estimates, the large items which are devoted to the payment of this money come out of the taxes paid in the island.
All these anathemas from journals, deputies, generals, ministers, and even from the ruling Monarch, against administrative corruption, show that the wound is wide and deep, and that the public authorities do not possess the means of healing it. To secure punishment, as in the case of Oteiza, it wanted the integrity of a Salamanca, and we have seen how dearly it cost him. Oteiza was an employé in the Debt Department, he was the Secretary ; between him and others one hundred thousand pesos in gold were stolen, and then he fled to the United States, and the United States Government handed him over when the Government of Havana applied for his extradition. The sentence pronounced in Havana was published in “El Pais ” of that city on the 16th of December, 1891, and from it I copy the following paragraph :—
“Luis Oteiza y Cortes is condemned for a crime of the first degree (falsification of official documents as a means of committing the offence of misappropriation), 18 years, 2 months, and 21 days’ imprisonment, which he is to undergo in any of the places destined for this purpose, exclusive of this island29
and Porto Rico, as also to a fine of 12,530 pese tos,, and also to be deprived of civil rights during the term of imprisonment ; also to absolute and perpetual disqualification, and to be subject to the supervision of the authorities for the rest of his life ; to the payment of one-eighth of the costs of the preliminary proceedings, and one-sixth of those occasioned during the period of the hearing, and to the restitution to the State of 100,000 pesos.”
Warnings like these are rare. The fiscal himself in the trial of Oteiza stated this in his impeachment, as will be seen in the extract which was published by the same newspaper on the second of December of that year :—
“ The Fiscal commenced by a terrible exordium in which, after recognising the importance of the trial undertaken in one of those dark periods which occur in the lives of peoples, enshrouding their moral existence in thick clouds, he animadverted powerfully against those public functionaries who have been scandalising the world with their depredations. The number of trials being conducted is, in his view, the best demonstration of the existence of this state of things, and the requirements of justice demand that there shall be no longer one law for the poor and another for the powerful. One unscrupulous man is enough to cast a blemish on all, and here are covetous functionaries who have been a scandal by their rapacity. There are functionaries, he added, who commit forgeries and misappropriations which have given rise to this trial, and afterwards they place themselves beyond the reach of authority.
“ Alas for justice, for morality and for society,” he said, “ if such a state of things is to prevail ! Under its shadow, functionaries who ought to be in penal servitude may still continue in the discharge of their offices.”
And the fact is that this state of things prevails, notwithstanding these trials which are proceeding, and the result of which oft-times remains under a cloud or the guilty receive a scandalous acquittal.
In the session of the Congress of Deputies on the 10th of June, 1887, the Minister of Ultramar, Señor Balaguer, in reply to some questions from the autonomist deputy, Señor Fernandez de Castro, stated
“With reference to the inquiry commenced in 1877 respecting frauds committed by means of payments which were supposed to be false and on account of fictitious payments to employés in the ‘Sala de Indias * of the Tribunal of Accounts, I can inform you that this matter is still pending in the Tribunal of Accounts of the Kingdom, as there is still in Cuba a question respecting the responsibility of those who took part in it.
“As to the inquiry initiated in 1878, also into a question of fraud, presumably by means of fictitious payments between the general Paymaster’s Department in Havana and other dependencies of the State, I can inform you that this was sent on at the time to the Tribunals of Justice, and as regards the
30
administrative portion, the matter is still pending in the Tribunal of Accounts with the object of reimbursement.”
I	Why were thèse proceedings still pending nine and ten years after they
had been commenced without anyone knowing when the sentences would be pronounced 1 The aforesaid “ Pais,” the organ of the autonomists, who, in the present struggle, are supporting the Spanish Government, explains this in the issue of the 5th of July in that very year in which the poet minister, Senor Balaguer, made such sad admissions :—
“ If that corruption is the cancer which stains and prostitutes the Administration, and those who have charge of it, is it likely that those functionaries can carry on this criminal trade alone, and unaided by accomplices 1 Certainly not ; and if we ought to exercise severity against them we should exercise quite as much or more in regard to their active or passive accomplices, to those confederates who are in league with the employés who bribe them or are associated with them for the purpose of depriving the Treasury of its legitimate rights; who assist and divide the plunder with the real culprits, who enjoy with impunity the profits, and who still enjoy a reputation amongst honest men and amongst the representatives of power ; on the other hand it is by no means rare to see them fêted, exalted, and commended to the esteem of their victims, the simple and honest workers, whose taxes arc increased in proportion to the robberies from the Exchequer committed by others.
And those who appoint these functionaries and placed them in positions of the greatest confidence and emolument and who reappoint them when caprice or the need of satisfying public opinion compels their immediate chiefs to dismiss them by megns of a defective and private inquiry, or by a tardy judicial sentence, are they not also accomplices in the scandalous deeds of their proteges, accomplices with knowledge of it or without it, possibly owing to carelessness or idlepess, or because they are the victims of false ideas, of influence, of pandering, or of parties %
And those who protect and recommend and defend when chance brings them before a Tribunal, and those who put obstacles in the way of their impeachment and denunciation, and intervene to save them from the chastisement they have incurred, and keep them at their posts or place them in positions or advance them in their career, should they not also be chastised by public opinion as participators in their robberies and evil deeds 1
And unfortunately, to aggravate the evil it happens that all or the greater portion of these functionaries, and of all who are directly or indiiectly their accomplices, belong to the family of our brethren in the metropolis of those who come from the Peninsula, or who there carry on this criminal trade in partnership with their protégés ; so that, according to appearances, corruption is an imported article, an article introduced in the coasting trade to enrich those31
whose trade is to plunder in the colony, and to allow it all to be carried on there, or as a political instrument to maintain the degradation of a people and to perpetuate the rule.
Administiative corruption is the most opprobrious form of rule. It vilifies those who rule and those who obey, the oppressor and the oppressed; the former lose honour, the latter become degraded, and the punishment must fall both on the criminals as well as on those who are ruled and outraged by them.”
Space fails me for all I have yet to say, but I will not lay aside my pen without adding to my work of to-day another sad touch. In 1879 a committee of the Congress appointed to suggest reforms for the Department of Ultramar, expressed themselves as follows :—
“ But whatever may be done in reforming the taxation and other branches it will be incomplete or contrary to the proposals of the Government, as far as its results are concerned, if it does not intercept a portion of the country and of the public functionaries on the road to ruin which they have undertaken.' The corruption in the Administration daily assumes more alarming proportions, not only by reason of its extent, but also by the organisation which it adopts and the means which it employs. The honourable portion of the country which, as everywhere, constitutes the majority sees with regret the trouble this is causing to the Public Treasury, and even still more to the national honour.”
R. M. MERCIAN.
CUBA.—No. I.
Administrative Corruption.—(Conclusion.)
I have sufficient documents on this repulsive subject to fill a large volume; the reader may judge of their importance by what I have already published which, in my opinion, is sufficient to excuse me from the task of continuing to reap in such disastrously prolific soil. I will, therefore, now close this chapter,' but not without mentioning two or three other disgraceful circumstances, because hitherto my investigation has not gone beyond the year 1893, but there is no satisfaction in proving that in 1894 and 1895 there was no improvement.
But in order not to deprive the crime of its extradition I must read a little further back for some of its manifestations, which it must not be imagined were original ones.
In 1887 a speech delivered by Señor D. Rafael Fernandez de Castro in the Autonomist Club in the capital of Cuba, on the 18th of February of the same year, was denounced, and an action was brought.against the author,32
notwithstanding that he was a deputy at the Cortes. In that speech we find the following paragraph :—
“ The custom-houses are open ; the State revenues which ought to go to the Public Treasury in order to meet public requirements, are kept separately amongst a few employés and certain journals ; the public Debt is increasing by the defalcations committed precisely by those who are called upon to settle it, and to decrease it. These men have regarded that decrease in a peculiar manner, as many other things are regarded here—by decreasing the public funds and the debts of some private individuals, but increasing the debt of the country. The auditing of accounts is a myth, conscience is an insupportable burden, shame is a costly nuisance, office is a means for making one’s fortune in the shortest possible time, a post in a Public Department is an opportunity, for exercising with impunity the profession of a bandit.”
This language is energetic, but it does not contain a single word which is not true. The author of these words subsequently repeated these charges mentioning many cases of fraud, in the Session of Congress of Deputies on the 1st Of July of the same year, 1887, and General Pando stated that Señor Fernandez de Castro had not said everything. The reply of the Minister of Ultramar, Señor Balaguer, did not satisfy anyone if we are to judge by the issue of the “ Epoca ” of the 2nd of July.
The action to which I have referred was an evident sign that the Administration was offended, because many of their proud employés had been described as unscrupulous in dealing with other people’s property.
Well, six months to the very day after the speech was delivered there was tremendous and unaccustomed excitement in Havana because the intrepid Governor-General D. Luis Alonso Marin took military possession of the Custom House, dismissed all the officials and went into the office to personally investigate the causes of the fall in the revenue, he being aware that operations were then being conducted which were not altogether spotless. “ A newspaper of that period states that 40 cavalry soldiers were distributed all along the docks, and soldiers of the Public Order were placed on guard in the railway stations of this capital.” A few days ' afterwards notices were profusely circulated containing the following words :—
HONOURED SPANIARDS !
Take tour Banners to To-day’s Demonstration.
WITH THE WORDS :
“AWAY WITH THE THIEVES! WELCOME SALAMANCA!”
There were, in fact, many demonstrations, and the Madrid Government became so alarmed that they were on the point of convening the Cortes to an Extraordinary Session.
I will not delay here to refer to all the details of that noisy event ; I will33
restrict myself, to saying that, although no other punishment was inflicted than the removal of employés, nevertheless it became evident as was stated by “ El Pais ” in its issue of the 14th of September that “ merchandise was generally and almost without exception incorrectly declared,” and from the day when the Custom House was besieged (18th of August) the revenue from that department commenced to increase in a remarkable manner.
Unfortunately when frauds are discovered in Cuba it cannot be said of them, as was said of Becquer’s swallows: “They will never return.” The “ Diario de la Familia,” of Havana, in its issue of the 16th August, 1894, showed by figures that during the financial year ending on the 30th of June of the same year 1894, other frauds had been committed on the said revenue, which, under two heads alone, amounted to one million pesos in gold. Their calculation, which I condense in order not to be too prolix, is this : One million two hundred thousand tons of sugar has been exported ; the export dut}7 at the rate of one peso per ton ought to give an equal amount in pesos, but only $498,000 had been calculated ; there remains, therefore, a difference of $702,000 in round figures, for the disappearance of which we are unable to account
“ To this is to be added, the “ El Diario ” goes on to say, the sum of over four hundred thousand pesos discovered missing in the tobacco exports, this will give more than one million this year, and the amounts defrauded in previous years should be calculated at the same quantity, .	.	. , This is
apart from what is happening in the import branch, as everyone knows what is passing there.”
Señor D. Raimundo Cabrera, in his magnificent book entitled “Cuba y sus Jueces ” (Cuba and its Judges), which in a very few years ran through seven editions, says :—
“ Is it therefore strange that we are constantly meeting with repetitions of these scandals such as the falsification of the payments by the Junta of the Public Debt ; that one fine spring morning the iron bars of the dépôt where the Government stamped paper and stamps are stored should be found cut through with files from the inside and a large quantity of these stamps stolen ? That we should find that two lottery tickets in the National Lottery sold, both bearing the same number and of the same series and drawing, each with a prize of 200,000 dollars, and that the magistrates should be overwhelmed every day with the depositions respecting these offences, thefts of stamps, matrices of banknotes which ought to have been destroyed, and respecting defalcations, thefts, and so many other inconceivable scandals occurring in our offices, and which in the jargon of the initiated is graphically described by the ingenious : chocolate, manzanilla, and filtrations ! ”
I have quoted this paragraph which appears at page 126 of the third34
edition published in 1889, and in all the others of the said book, so that it may be seen that the scandal which took place in the Lottery of the 1st of February of the present year, 1895, twenty-three days before the Revolution broke but, is not the only one which that besieged portion of the Revenue has been the victim of. As regards the present year I refer to a Bogotá newspaper dated the 27th of June last, and which was reproduced in a Havana newspaper.
Here I might complete my task. In order to justify the present war of independence it is not indispensable to remember the corruption of the first half of this century which is partly described in a report of the 21st of December, 1850, written by Captain-General D. José de la Concha, or what is being now perpétrâted in the colony of the Antilles in matters connected with the Public Debt, estimates, comínercial legislátion, elections, education department, and various other branches of the Administration. Nevertheless, I will refer to these matters in my nèxt articles in order to satisfy the curiosity with which everything is now read concerning Cuba, as also the kind attention which has been bestowed on these articles. The vindication of Cubans who are struggling to realise Bolivar’s ideal, will thus appear more striking.
That Spaniards should struggle and make sacrifices in order to maintain a colonial spirit in the last remnants of their oversea empire (although not all do, for there are many who support Us and who have even entered our ranks) ; that Spaniards should thus understand their duty is easily understood, either on account of a sincere, although mistaken patriotism, or on account of the natural desire to perpetuate interests which the separatist movement is dwindling away. And even if it were not so, the time for peaceful discussions between the colony and the metropolis has passed. Any soldier of the Cuban revolution who may be told that to have taken up arms is madness, may reply : If our cause is unjust, justice will be on the side of an Administration whose very leaders, from the Monarch downwaids, have described it as corrupt, while at the same time they have confessed their powerlessness to purify it ; if our ideal is an abomination then the one which is worthy of reverence will be the one sought after by the arch-piiests of fraud. If we come to repent it and to submit, it will be t>ecause our conscience has been in error in rising against a rule which, in spite of the good desires and the honesty of some of its worthy leaders, has yet been without honour in history, and is still without it, and has no guarantee to offer that it will possess it in the future.
R. M. MERCHAN.
“El Correo National” 9th August, 1895 CUBA.—No. II.
Debt.
The Cuban Debt or rather Cuba’s Spanish Debt is over $170,000,000.35
" El Economista Français,” in its issue of the 19th January last, stated that the amount was $930,000,000 ; had they said pesetas it would have been nearer the truth.
In 1890 the Spanish Government was ignorant of the amount of that Debt ; Señor Fabie, the Minister of Ultramar, admitted this in the Senate on the 28th May of that year, and he explained his ignorance by saying that “ bonds had been issued which were not genuine, which were not legitimate, and which they had succeeded in converting.” That was the period when Oteiza was conducting operations which qualified him for penal servitude as the reader has seen.
In the middle of 1892, Señor Romero Robledo, the Minister of Ultramar, stated that the Debt amounted to $173,262,200 which gives a proportion of more than $106 per head, as the population of the island, according to the census of 1887, is 1,631,687. The redemption and interest cast on the estimates an additional burden which last year amounted to $10,435,183 gold, or at the rate of $6.39 per head. With the exception of France, I know of no other country on which the Public Debt imposes such an enormous sacrifice. In the Argentine the proportion is $5.56, in Holland $5.20, in Italy $4.51, in Belgium $3.62, in Great Britain $3.52, in the Spanish Peninsula $3.23, and in France and Cuba $6.39.*
But besides being excessively burthensome, the debt is in its very origin unjustifiable.
The first item goes back as far as 1841. By a convention signed on the 17th February, 1834, in Madrid, Spain undertook to recognise in favour of the United States on account of matters quite extraneous to the progress of Cuba, a perpetual debt subject to interest at 5 per cent, per annum ; she was unable to carry out her engagement, and by Royal Order of the 2nd April, 1841, it was provided that the Treasury of the island should in future collect the said interest, which on a principal of $570,000 gold amounts to $28,500.
In 1850 the estimates for the island did not reach $14,000,000, and until 1855 they were under 17,000,000.
“After 1855 the Mexican expedition and the occupation and war of Santo Domingo increased the expenses to such an extent as to double the estimates for 1850 ; and as though this were not enough, the Debt was for the first time created, and it has continued to burthen the Treasury of Cuba ever since ”
This is stated at pages 29 to 31 of a pamphlet entitled “ Cuba and her
* These figures and others which we will give further on have been taken from a statement drawn up in Havana in 1891, and revised in 1894 by D. Manuel Valdes Rodriguez, and in part corrected by me from more recent data. The sources from which it was taken were the “ Annuaire de VEconomic Politique et de la Statistique,” by M. Maurice Block ; the “Statesman’s Year” Book,” and the “ American Almanac.”wm
36
Budget of Expenses,” printed in Madrid in 1883, the author of which was Señor D. Mariano Cancio Villa-Amil, a Spaniard who has discharged in Cuba the high office of Superintendent of the Exchequer. Yet he did not mention the expenses of the war in Peru; but this omission was filled in by another Spaniard, also an opponent of the separatists and of the Cuban autonomists, Señor Perez Castañeda, who very accurately expressed himself in the Senate on the 24th June, 1891, as follows :—
“The debt of Cuba was created in 1864 by a simple issue of $3,000,000 and it now amounts to the fabulous sum of $175,000,000. What originated the Cuban debt 1 The wars of Santo Domingo, of Peru, and of Mexico. But are not these matters for the Peninsula 1 Certainly they are matters for the whole of Spain. Why must Cuba pay that debt ? But this is not all; if it be understood (and Spain in her generosity has never been able to understand it in this way) that the debt of Cuba, maintained exclusively on that country, was a chastisement for the insurrection, how is it that the same measures are not adopted with regard to the provinces in the Peninsula, who have placed themselves on the same footing ? does the debt which originated with the earliest war in the provinces of the North of Spain, and on account of the insurrection in Cartagena weigh exclusively on those provinces ? Therefore, it would be only just that the debt of Cuba should weigh on the whole nation; it would he a great political measure to effect the unification of all the debts of the nation and of the provinces on both sides of the ocean.”
Señor Perez Castañeda, in his turn, forgot another item; that portion of the Cuban debt which originated on account of “ the advances made to the Treasury of the Peninsula during the last earliest wars,”—see “ El Pais de la Habana,” 3rd July, 1892.
The debt has gone on increasing, although from 1878 up to the 30th of June, 1891, $115,336,304 have been paid for interest and redemption as stated in “El Globo” of Madrid, 27th of October, 1891. As all the estimates wind up with a deficit which fluctuates between eight and ten million pesos a year, it will not be hazarding much to assume that under this head alone there has been a charge of about 30,000,000 dollars during the four years ended on the 30th of June of the present year 1895. Señor Perez Castañeda, whom I have already quoted, showed that the conversion of a portion of the debt effected in 1890 or 1891 has imposed on the Cuban Treasury, owing to the inaptitude of the minister,Señor Fabie, a burthen of $50,232,500, in which appear the interest $20,400,000, a portion of a loan negotiated in order to call in the depreciated note of the Spanish Bank of Havana, and which, instead of being at once applied to its proper purpose, was granted by way of loan, for several months to the Bank of Spain in Madrid in order to save it from a great crisis.
When the Yara revolution broke out in 1868, the debts arising from the


■Ml37
conflicts with Santo Domingo, Mexico, and Peru, had not yet been paid ; the budget for 1850 was multiplied fourfold; in 1874—75 the revenue was 52J millions, and the expenditure nearly 40J millions ; “ meantime (Señor Cancio Villa-Amil goes on to say, on page 32), the productive departments such as those of a civil character, remain stationary, and in the course of thirty years scarcely one step is made in the island on the road of civilization and progress.”
In reference to this matter I will speak later on when dealing with the budgets; at present I will restrict myself to matters connected with the debt.
Spain had to incur heavy expenditure by reason of the re-incorporation of Santo Domingo, and the expedition led by General Prim to Mexico, and the wars between Peru and Chili, all this from 1861 to 1865. If the object of these expeditions had been to favour the prosperity of Cuba it would be reasonable that she should bear the pecuniary responsibility, as was the case in Canada, whose debt was caused by the cost of roads, railways, canals, and other works intended for the colonization of Manitoba; but their object was to aggrandize the power of the Spanish nation; for instance, assuming that the two republics of the Pacific had been reconquered, and that from that time they had again formed part of the Monarchy, the glory would have redounded to the Monarchy; therefore, it was the State who ought to have met these expenses, and Cuba, as an integral part, should have furnished her quota ; but as to the whole, why ? If the will of Cubans had been consulted, an immense majority of us would have answered that in those three conflicts our sympathies were with the Dominicans, who were opposing the annexion, with the Mexicans, the Peruvians, and the Chilians; the Government did well in not asking us to sanction its arbitrary action; but they had reason for knowing that when charging these wars to the island, that they could not reckon on the approval of our population. Therefore there was no reason to justify the creation of that insular debt; the expeditions were not started for the purpose of developing Cuban interests, they were contrary to our wishes, they were under takings stimulated by pride, glory, aggrandisement, or whatever you like, but they were national undertakings.
As to the debt occasioned by the Civil War of 1868-78, the arguments of Señor Perez Castaneda admit of no reply, and it is a matter for congratulation that it was a Spaniard who pronounced them, although long before him other peninsular subjects and many Cubans had adduced them. It is useless to reply that the Peninsula contributed with the blood of her sons, because a portion of the Spanish population in the island fought against the insurrection, and if arms were not given to everyone who was not here, it was not out of a charitable desire to avoid the shedding of Cuban blood, but from a suspicion or rather from the conviction that loyalty to the Spanish cause in that direction was not to be relied on.38
Now if the'endeavour was to chastise the colony, the blow was a mistaken one because it wounded everyone, both those who defended the national integrity as well as those who attacked it. And the resentment arising from being thus treated is precisely what has stimulated in some rich peninsular subject long established in the island and who are afraid of independence, sentiments which are incompatible with the sovereignty of Spain.
The defenders of the order of things which prevails in the great Antilles reply to this with sophistry, as the allegation that Cuba does not contribute to the charges of the National Debt is nothing else. I now give the words used on the 22nd of January, 1880, in the Senate, by Señor D. Antonio Cano vas, the “ administrator of Spanish decadences,” as he has been called by Señor Leon y Castillo:—
“ Justice will compel Señor Jorrin to ascertain whether that immense public Debt (now weighing on the National Estimates) and representing as far as we are are concerned, our history from the time of the discovery of America until now, and which all the resources of the Peninsula would be inadequate to meet, is a Cuban Debt which the Peninsula ought to pay, or whether it is the National Debt; my opinion is that it ought to be paid both by the inhabitants of the Antilles and the inhabitants of the Peninsula.
Señor Jorrin ought to know that in that debt there is a portion which comes down to us from the Catholic kings; there is also a portion from Carlos V and Felipe II. There is a considerable portion (because more was spent at that time, notwithstanding the frequent cutting down of the accounts), from the time of Carlos III and Carlos IV, when the necessity for watching the American dependencies and the Antilles themselves, compelled us to maintain troops out of proportion to our strength ; and although it is certain that much of this was spent on the American continent, which sent us none of their resources in return, Señor Jorrin cannot fail to recognise, in his impartiality, that the continent was lost to Cubans and to the Peninsula.”
All this is very easy to answer, but for want of space I will restrict myself to two observations.
First.—The Spanish debt is $1,211,453,696 ; interest and amortisation put an annual charge on the budget of the
Peninsula of...	................ .................... $56,752,355
The debt of Cuba puts a charge on the budget of the island of $10,435,183
Total .............. ............ ............ $67,187,538
The population of Spain in Europe is ...	...	...	17,545,160
The population of Cuba ................................. 1,631,687
Total ...	...	............... ...	19,176,847
Let us say nineteen millions in round numbers, and note that I do notcalculate the population of Puerto Rico nor of the Phillippines. The 67 odd millions who absorb the expense of the two debts give a proportion of $3.53 per head, which would be very little more than half of what Cuba is now paying ($6.39), and which does not differ much from what the Peninsula is ($3.23). Señor Canovas has often been head of the Spanish Cabinet ; he has had at his disposal the power and the means to unify the debt ; he has not done so because he did not wish ; why, therefore, should he say that Cubans do not feel the weight of the National Debt ? Do they perchance rule in Madrid ? Is it their fault or his ?
The other reply is that the Metropolis has taken out of the colony immense sums, as is shown by official data ; it matters very little to us that they were not devoted expressly to the service of the Peninsula debt ; the fact is that the money has gone from Cuba to Spain (without calculating the large items made up by private manipulations of a far from blameless character). In the Session of the Congress of Deputies of Madrid on the 9th day of May, 1887, Señor D. José del Perojo stated :—
“We have obtained more material results from our colonies than any other nation, for in the period which has elapsed since the discovery of America, barely four centuries, the Spanish Treasury has received 980 odd millions of pesos under the head of tithes and fifths, and the island of Cuba alone has, out of that sum, contributed $137,000,000.
And I now return to the origin of the debt, as it is essential to make clear what is the nature of the extortion to which the insurgents refuse to continue subject.
The “Relator,” of Bogotá, in its issue of the 24th of May, 1890, publishes the following :—
“ The history of the Cuban debt which absorbs more than 8J millions in interest and amortisation is as follows : All the expenses of the Santo Domingo war, of the invasion into Mexico, and of the insurrection and of all the Spanish-American Consulates, are exclusively charged to the Cuban debt. At the time of the insurrection the Treasury adopted the system of furnishing the captains with cash for the expenses of the troops in camp, taking their receipts as vouchers for the settlement of the current accounts at certain periods. This was never done, and the receipts are now accumulated in the Treasury to an amount of over $80,000,000 and these are an active element in the Cuban debt. Although the fraud here is manifest, these papers have been (apparently for the purpose of assisting credit) accepted and paid in cash or in bonds which are well quoted on the market. These bonds after being paid a second time return to the market and are paid a third time. These notorious facts do not scandalise anyone ; it is the custom. The Treasury of the Island is also responsible for the lottery fraud.40
I had intended not to refer to the question of administrative corruption, but not a single one of the Government doors in the Island can be touched without noticing the fetid character of that ulcer hospital.
In the Session of the Congress of Deputies on the 23rd of July, 1886, Señor D. Miguel Figueroa stated the following
“ I will tell Señor Rodríguez San Pedro what a portion of that debt is. Amongst other things it represents the emoluments of a few individuals, of a handful of private persons ; for he cannot be unaware that criminal actions have been taken in Cuba against certain contractors, and he is also aware that as a general rule, all those who have had contracts with the Government (and I am glad to see that a person holding the position of Señor Daban is making signs of approbation), some honorably, some dishonorably, have made enormous profits out of the war. (General Daban nodded his head in token of absent). This is a fact, that system of exploitation, that system of privileges has only favoured certain individuals.
I will be very careful, because I am not carried away by my feelings, not to hold Spain responsible for what is simply the work of personal avarice, and of the blameworthy conduct of certain Governors. But the truth is that whilst the war lasted that system was a perfect frenzy. There was an instance, and this I say without fear of contradiction, in which a train laden with provisions intended for the army, left the station; that train stopped at the Las Minas station at a distance of barely nine miles from Havana, it returned laden with the same cargo, went out again, and without going beyond the station referred to, again returned. And everyone of those journeys was the subject of an illegal payment which the Government had to make on account of the country. I have the proofs in my possession, and I am ready to submit them. Now then, that is a portion of the debt which Cuba is now asked to pay.
8th August, 1895.	R. M. MERCHAN.
“El Correo National,” 13th August, 1895.
CUBA.—No III.
Negroes and Foreigners.
I shall be compelled, as I am to-day, to interrupt, from time to time, the plan which I intended to follow in this work, as events occur which require explanation or correction, and there is no advantage in deferring them until the opportunity has gone by.
I therefore postpone for a few days the examination of the monstrous estimates in Cuba, and I will devote this article,, and possibly one or two others, to comments on recent events.41
* A newspaper of this city reproduced on Thursday, the 8th, a dispatch from Paris according to which Señor Cánovas del Castillo told a correspondent of the “ Gaulois ”: “ that the white people in the Island were not taking any part in the insurrection.”
We who read the newspapers who support the Spanish Government, and which are published in Cuba and in the American Union, find in them statements which do not agree with the allegations of Señor Cánovas. I will copy a few of them.
I commence by the “ Novedades ” of New York, which derives a large portion of its information from the publications in the Island:—
June 6th, page 3, column 4.—“ Twelve bodies, all white men, were found at Dos Rios, where Marti died, and amongst them was the body of a North American.”
June 20, page 1, column 1.—“Santiago de Cuba, June 12th.—Hundreds of Cubans have joined Gomez at Puerto Principe. The Marquis of Santa Liicia has again taken up arms, and with him are various deputies and young men belonging to good families.”
Ditto, column 3.—“Havana, 19th June.—Colonel Enrique Mola, one of the most prominent men at Puerto Principe, has joined the revolutionists. Colonel Mola is a member of one of the best families in the province, and the Cubans regard his co-operation of great importance, because they think he will carry with him many partisans. He took a very active part in the last revolution, and was chief of the staff of General Máximo Gomez, who placed him at the head of the troops in Puerto Principe. He has been engaged in business since the last war.”
Ditto, page 2, column 3.—Copied from “ El Orden,” of Caibarien, is the -notice of the rising of a body of fifty-three men in Remedios. “ Out of these eight or nine are white men from Remedios belonging to good families, the others are from the country, and SOME are coloured men.”
June 27th, page 6, column 3.—In a copy of a letter from Manzanillo, dated the 11th, it is stated: “The most eminent are presenting themselves, such as Vilalta, Plana, Cabrera and three other young men from Campechuela, others from this city, several students from Cienfuegos and Havana, and those of any note from other parts. All those who have joined are white men.”
These last words are in italics in “Las Novedades,” probably calling attention to the circumstance that there are no whites among the insurgents. Doubtless those who joined the ranks changed colour when passing from the revolutionary ranks to Manzanillo; and the whites who remain amongst the insurgents black themselves every day until they present themselves or die. So long as they live and fight they will not be guilty of the abuse of colouring their skin.4 2
July 4th, page 6, columns 3 and 4.—This is a copy of a general order from the Spanish General, Señor Luque, in accordance with which the Volunteer commander of the Camajuani regiment, which officer also discharged the duties of Mayor of the district, in which district the arms were deposited, has gone over to the insurgent ranks with 17 volunteers.
“ El Pais,” of Havana, in its afternoon issue of the 1st of July, stated that it had been said that the Insurgent Volunteers numbered 400, but that tliere were only 27. There must have been some more because the lieutenant-colonel of the regiment, Señor D. José Linero, committed suicide when he heard of the rising, and it is scarcely to be assumed that he would have taken such desperately extreme measures for the mere secession of 17 or even 27 men.
‘‘El Pais,” in its issue of the 25th June, page 2, column 2, copies from “ El Pueblo,” of Puerto Principe, an article in which it is admitted that “ a body of very respectable men and worthy of the greatest consideration and highest esteem, had joined the ranks in that district.”
To this evidence, why should we not add the following, which the “ Star and Herald,” of Panama, reproduced from an American newspaper, in their issue of the 11th April (published daily) :
“Tampa (Fda.), 22nd May, 1895. The telegraphic dispatches from Nassau (N.P.), to the H* New York Herald,” stating that the Cuban negroes are endeavouring to make a racial question of the present revolution, have been much commented on here.
Cubans in general, and the “La Nueva Era” (a journal published in Havana, the editor of which is a negro named Morua Delgado),. deny this vehemently, and affirm that the revolution is a movement of the whites and blacks against the Spanish Government.
Colonel Figuerado was this day interviewed on the subject, and he stated : “It is merely a rumour set about by the Spanish Government, in order to discredit the revolution. There are many negroes under arms, but the whites are undoubtedly in the majority.
In order to show that there is no line between the races in this struggle, newspapers and letters from Havana inform us that a prominent lawyer, a white man, named Portuendo, of Santiago de Cuba, set out with 30 or 40 young men belonging to the best white families of the district, to join the forces under Guillermo Moneada, who is a black man. The said General has many white .men under him.” i
About the month of May, a newspaper of Trinidad (a Cuban city on the southern coast), stated that Don Eduardo Yero, a distinguished journalist, had been compelled to disassociate himself from the revolution because Moneada hail said to him, “ You are not wanted here : we don’t want white men.” And it is a fact that Yero left Cuba and went to Santo Domingo ; but I have just road■

43
in a newspaper that he organised' an expedition, and that he returned with it to the Island.
“ El Porvenir,” of New York, on the 17th of June last, published a letter on the insurrection, in which it is stated that the district of Holguin placed 4,000 white men at the disposal of Maceo.
Of course there are black men amongst the revolutionists. But this would never justify to the world the impossible phenomenon of the revolution being conducted by white men alone, to whom the negroes are indebted for the great movement which resulted in the abolition of slavery. Cuba is the mother country of the negroes, as it is the mother country of the white men: and both the one and the other are bound to unite and do unite their efforts to redeem it. As “ El Porvenir,” of New York, aptly reminds its readers on the 26th March, “ Ignacio Agramonte, the white commander, was as much respected and loved as Antonio Maceo, the mulatto commander in the last revolution.”
The most remarkable feature is that the Spanish Government also organised negro militiamen, and that they made Eusebio Puello, also a member of the negro race, commander-in-chief of the valiant district of Puerto Principe.
Marti, the patriot who has neyer. been sufficiently appreciated, and who was the heart and soul of this second revolution, would never have undertaken the enterprise for the purpose of handing over the lot of Cuba to one race to the detriment of the other. Those who, by means of his writings, have familiarised ourselves with his great soul know well that such bastard propositions could have had no place in it.
On the other hand, those who fear that the slaughter of the Island of Santo Domingo may be renewed in Cuba, and that the great Antilles may be lost to the white man, have not taken the trouble to compare the enormous dissimilarity in the circumstances.
In the Dominican Island 660,000 negroes attacked 40,000 white men who were there, and slaughtered almost all of them; the proportion of the population was one white man to sixteen negroes. I have copied this information from pages 19 and 20 of the book entitled “ Necesidades de Cuba,” published in Madrid in the year 1866 by D. Jacobo de la Pezuela.
The black population in Cuba is decreasing according to the figures contained in the last census; at present there are 69 white men to 31 colored men, which gives over two white men to every negro.
Let the results of the last two censuses be compared :
	1877.	1887.
Whites	985,325	1,102,689
Colored Men	492,249	485,187
Asiatics and Yucatacans	43,811	43,811
	1,521,385	1,631,68744
I have assumed that the number of Asiatics and Yucatacans was the same in 1887 and 1877. In the census for the second ten years no particular account was taken of that class of the population owing to discrepancies which arose amongst those instructed to prepare the statistics, but in 1862 there were 34,793, and in 1877 43,811, and I could at the very lowest estimate assume that from 1877 to 1887 the figures did not increase, although from 1852 to 1877 they would increase.
It is a fact that during recent years there have not been wanting in Cuba, here and there, men who have incited the blacks against the whites, but the attempt has proved faultless; the tempted race has not listened to the tempters.
In the telegram to which I refer it adds that, according to Señor Canovas himself, the revolution is the work of foreign adventurers. I am not aware of any war, whether a war of independence or a civil or international war, in which individuals belonging to nations outside the conflict have not taken part ; modern Greece is proud of the support of Byron and of the purer glory of the illustrious poet in liis consecration to Greece.
Maximo Gomez, the general in chief of the Cuban forces, is no stranger to us ; he is a native of Santo Domingo. He went through the ten years’ campaign during the first revolution, and distinguished himself for his military skill, his modesty, his discipline, and his honour. No one, not even the slanderer, has ever dared to say a word against his reputation. “ Las Nove-des ” has not hesitated to call him a “ thorough soldier ” (see the issue of the 18th of June, page 8, column 1). Until recently he was engaged in his native island in practical agricultural enterprises, but after the peace of Zanjón he offered to place his sword at any time at the disposal of Cuba for the purpose of achieving her independence, and he has now gone there to keep his word. It is well known to us that he loves our unfortunate country better than the defrauders of the Public Revenue, whom neither Señor Canovas nor Sagasta have, with very few exceptions, been able to send into penal servitude.
No Cuban that I know of has ever described the Count de Casa-More as a foreign adventurer ; he was a Colombian, born in Santa Marta in 1810; he was a workman, for he came to Cuba a poor man, and when he died on the 9th of October, 1890, he left a fortune of about seven million pesos. He took an interest in the progress of the island, although defending the absurd system of Spanish centralization ; I do not think that anyone ever asked the reactionist party in the Constitutional Union whether there were any natives among the Spaniards who could guide them, nor whether it was essential to appoint Don José Eugenio More as their chief, as was eventually done.
The personal assistance which Cubans have been accustomed to require has mainly been that of military commanders. Beyond those, they welcome as45
brothers all who go to share with them the penalties of the struggle, but in the hour of danger they know how to succumb, nobly as Marti did, and they can exclaim, like one of Byron’s heroes, “ I have lived too long not to know how to die.”
R. M. MERCHAN.
12th August, 1895.
From the “ Patria11 of New York. CUBA.—IV.
On the occasion of the 9th birthday of Alfonso XIII. the solemn reception usual on these anniversaries was held in the Royal Palace of Madrid on the 18th of May last. Señor Montero Rios, President of a Committee of the Senate, read a discourse in which he referred to “ parricide hands trying to tear open the sacred breast of the mother country beyond the Western seas.” The Marquis of la Vega de Armijo, President of the Committee of the Congress of Deputies limited himself, in regard to Cuba, to expressing a wish for prompt pacification. Out of the replies from the Throne I will only cite the leading passage which is contained in the one addressed to the Senate. The author of both documents must have been the President of the Council of Ministers or one of his colleagues :
“ A sure victory on Cuban soil will not be sweet, because it must be obtained there over the ungrateful children to whom Spain has granted as many liberties as are enjoyed by the most advanced countries, administrative and financial reforms, peace, and abundant elements of prosperity, and in exchange has received unjustifiable war cries.”
The charges of ingratitude and parricide date from 1810, and pass by like clouds leaving no trace in the soul of Spanish America, because all the legions of exalted men in the continent owe their immortality and their greatness precisely to having faced these charges. Sooner or later, after the triumph of the separatists, there will be no reason why a treaty of friendship and commerce should not be celebrated between the two people now fighting against one another, and on the 24th of February there will never be wanting Spanish ministers willing to go in gorgeous uniforms to felicitate the President of Cuba on the emancipation they have achieved, and to wish us, in the name of the ex-mother country, as happens in these ex-parricide countries, all sorts of blessings. So there is no reason to be aggravated ; we are assisting at a tragedy which was commenced 80 years ago, and we know that the vehemence of this or that actor during the early representations is being rectified in the denouement with which we are familiar.But this is no reason why we should reject the accusation. The sons of the continent defended themselves when their time came. Our time is now ; we will speak.
And it is all the more necessary to speak, inasmuch as an old minister of Ultramar, Señor Moret, has published in “ La España Moderna.” in the issue for the month of June, some pages in which he figures as ignorant of the very just reasons for the Cuban rising ; pages written with the fire of Spanish patriotism, which I respect, but in which we cannot help pitying both the pain they reveal and the ignorance which the author displays regarding other pains, of a more legitimate kind since they are unmistakeable, deeper because they are older, and more ingenuous because they are those of the victims.
No one has said that the Government regime now preváiling in our native land is that frightful despotism which General Tacoii inaugurated, and which constitutes integrally the history of the Antilles up to within the last few years; What we maintain is, that without the revolution of Yara, certain victories of right against might would never have been realised had not the infamous slavery of the Africans been abolished ; which wè affirm is, that amongst the liberties established in Cuba there are wanting two, so essential, that without them no people could, strictly speaking, be called either' free or worthy of respect ; we are deprived of the liberty of managing the public affairs of the Island, and we are, above all, deprived of the liberty of honor.
Without counting the: army the number of Peninsula subjects who live in Cuba does not amount to 150,000 ; Cubans represent at least 1,200,000, and there would be considerably more if many others (there are 40,000 in the United States alone) of us had not preferred absolute expatriation to submitting ourselves again to the arbitrary rule of colonism. How can it be explained that with these figures the Peninsula subjects always gain the advantage in the elections ? How can it be explained that out of 37 Ayuntamientos comprised the province of Havaiia the Unionists get a majority of 31, and that in the city of the same name with over 200,000 population, the capital of the island, the greatest centre of culture and richness in the colony, and which some years ago was the seventh commercial port in the world, how, I repeat, can it be explained that in the Ayuntamiento there consisting of 32 members, there are not more than two or three sons of the Island ? Are all those from the Peninsula rich, and are all Cubans poor, that the former should overthrow thè latter fairly without any other weapon than the electoral tax which, if I am not mistaken, is five dollars? And then, the Cortes composed of more than 700 members, the benches in which are almost empty when Cuban questions are discussed because they are annoying, and because the members do not wish to study them ; and in which the majorities ranged as though they were marching to a garrison, vote, sometimes unwillingly, and as the Cabinet instructs, in favour to47
certain Cuban estimates, prepared exclusively by the Spanish bureaucrats of the Island and out of whose incomes, amounting to 25 or 26 million dollars, not 800,000 dollars are devoted to the work of progress.
Does gratitude consist in maintaining and applauding such iniquity? Docs loyalty consist in flocking under a standard under the cloak of which, petty politicians (sent from the Peninsula to Cuba by patronage and by favouritism of every description or in order that they may not make a noise in the Metropolis, and whose misconduct is condemned by the authorities while they are powerless to prevent or suppress it), pillage with impunity ?
That the press is free; that until recently it was allowed to publish separatist journals : that the right of public meeting is still in force .	.	.	.
signifies, in a word, that the rights of Cubans to complain have been recognised ! This is something, for previous to the other revolution even tears were illegal; but should an Oteiza, or any other of his kidney, officially attack a peaceful traveller on the highroad and ask for his money or his life, is it not a mockery for him to add: I have no objection to your crying, but give me your money ? Therefore all the liberties in Cuba can be summed up in a single sentence, the right to complain ; but the foundation, the cause of the complaint, still exists as it did before the war of Yara, as it has done from the time of Tacon down to Lersundi.
The reform which was voted by the Cortes this year is not autonomy, for autonomy, as it exists in the English Colonies, leaves to the colonists the free management of their own interests, and the Council appointed to act in Cuba is only elected as regards one-half of its members, the other half being appointed by the Crown, and even in the elected portion there is a vicious element which continues to place the sufferage in the hands of the enemies of Cuban liberty. Therefore, the perpetuation of the same dishonest rule which has existed hitherto would, to all appearance, have a’ decentralising effect, was it and precisely because the farce was understood that Marti gave the signal for the rising which is described as the work of ungrateful sons.
•Ungrateful!
• And four-fifths of the immensely fertile soil of Cuba is uncultivated, and immigration is unassisted, lest the children of immigrants should be the ■insurrectionists of the future!
Yet the railways in the Island have been constructed with the private funds of the Cuban population without the help, of the Government.
Yet our trade is sacrificed to the trade of the Peninsula, and our sugar, depressed already by the fall in prices, is burthened with taxes in a thousand shapes, even with export and dock duties, whereas in many nations this article js favoured by Government subventions, and this is done even in Spain in regard ■to sugar manufactured there, so that those who ought to assist us actually handicap us in the competition, and the net revenue from the plantations is ruinously falling year after year.48
And our tobacco, which is unrivalled in the world, is becoming more excluded every day from foreign markets; even in Spain the Government monopoly only half opens the door to it, our factories are stopping work, and our operatives are carrying their skill away to other countries, and in spite of all this the Government is surcharging the already over-weighted plant with export duties, and when treaties of commerce are entered into, for example with the Argentine Republic, which exports large cargoes of preserved meat to Cuba, what is asked is, not a reduction in the customs duty on our product, but on Spanish wines.
And public education is abandoned; schoolmasters are left with their salaries unpaid ; the botanical gardens have run to waste, and the University is now bereft of Museums, laboratories, and tools, to such an extent that the professors, as I will prove on another occasion, have to take money out of their own pockets to buy sponges, and the rector has to meet, out of his own private means, the office and cleaning expenses, and finally the gas company has cut off the gas because the government thinks it is not necessary.
And the sons of Cuba either live in the land of their birth as children of a different caste, objects of the mistrust of those in power, for whom neither nature nor society has charms, souvenirs, joy, tenderness, or in fine, anything that is inherent to one’s natal soil; or they wander like an accursed race in foreign lands, expending their energies in other countries where not infrequently they are rewarded with honours which would never have been conferred on them by what Señor Moret describes as their “ sacred mother Spain! ”
We are told that we are not grateful for the benefits which Spain has conferred on us by giving us her blood, her language, her faith, and her civilisation, and even more, we are told that we are rebelling to go back to barbarism.
Are we perchance the descendants of the vanquished sibonese, do we suffer from the reversion mania, are we hankering after the leafy garments of the Indians?
No, we are descendants of the conquerors, or of those who came after the conquest. The present inhabitants of the Peninsula, or at least a large majority of them, are the offspring of those who stayed at home in Spain. The civilisation which was introduced by our forefathers is therefore ours, since we have inherited it as their children, and far from wishing to destroy it, we are en~ deavouring to increase it as is proved by the fact that we have been making railways in Cuba ever since 1837, before any existed in Spain, where they were not built until 1848; this is proved also by the fact that all the improvements of modern civilisation, from the great inventions for the manufacture of sugar down to the bacteriological institutions modelled on the ideas of M. Pasteur, and all these instances of progress are supported by Cubans. The sole difference between our rulers and us is, that they said, and not always in thename of justice, they obey, but they do not comply; and we, in the name of justice, exclaim: they neither obey nor comply.
Nor are we rebelling against the language; we have no desire to speak the language of the Caribbee.	The American continent, since it has been in-
dependent, has given to the beautiful language of Castilla, the finest grammarian (Bello), and the best lexicographer (Cuervo), which the language has ever had, as was observed in a recent work by Don Enrique Pineyro.
The revolution is in no way religious in its character. Much might be said as to those who have been most disrespectful to the Church in the Island, but let it suffice to place on record that Captain-General Don Francisco Lersundi insisted on the Church bells being rung whenever he entered into a town, and the Bishop of Havana, Fray Jacinto Martinez, who objected to this, had to flee from his diocese, and was repulsed when he tried to return, and had to take refuge in the United States. In other respects much also could be said, but I abstain from considerations of prudence. Judging by what has happened elsewhere it is to be presumed that religion will be more respected in Cuba when it is independent than now, when there no longer exists imported bad example, when believers do not get their patriotic sentiments offended by the ministers of the altar, and when Peninsula clergymen do not ask officers going out on service to bring them back so many dozens of insurgents’ ears (this is an historic fact). But it would be impossible for me to condense into one article the statement of all our grievances. This is the one object of the series which I am writing, and although I shall not exhaust matter which is so inexhaustible, yet, when I have finished, it will be seen whether Cuban patriots are right or not in endeavouring to break the yoke of the Government. Many have told me that the revolution is overwhelmingly justified by what I have already published. Yet what I have already published is barely a preface, it is like the few wavelets which bear against the shore, while beyond roll the mighty waves of the abyss. Yet we are called ungrateful. In order to get gratitude from a people it is not sufficient to ask it in anger, it must be merited by sweetness.
R. M. MERCHAN.
“ El Correo National” 20th August, 1895.
CUBA.—No. V.
Sugar.
The main source of Cuba’s wealth is sugar. Her recent harvests have exceeded a million tons, whereas under the old slave system they scarcely reached half of that figure \ and this gives the lie to those who foretold that50
by its abolition our chief industry would disappear, because the negroes would give themselves over to idleness. Instead of this happening, the manufacturing • portion has dissociated itself from the agricultural portion, so that now-a-days those who manufacture the sugar do not cultivate it, but they purchase it and' and pay for it either in cash or in sugar. The President of the Royal Financial Society of Havana, José Silverio Jorrin, stated, on the 10th of October, 1894, to the President of the Provincial Board of Agriculture, Industry and Commerce, the following words :—
“ Since our landed proprietors gave up cultivating sugar cane, and have devoted themselves exclusively to the manufacture of the juice in the magnificent central factories, almost all the available labour in our rural districts has been enthusiastically devoted to the cultivation of the plant, and they have abandoned the occasional work of rearing pigs and fowls, the cultivation of Bananas, provisions, maize, and other produce known under the name of 1 cultivos menores \”
Therefore the ruin of the sugar industry would be the ruin of the country.
This article has, since 1884, been passing through a crisis which has: become daily more and more formidable. An expert on the subject, M. B. Dureau, writesit^-!; ,
“ In 1880, white sugar No. 3, which figured in the quotations of 1883, and which since then is used as a basis of comparison,, was worth at the rate of 66.98 francs per 100 kilos ; in 1884, it went down to 45.65 ; in 1867, to 35.15 ; it afterwards rose to 42.62 in 1893, and in 1894, it went down to the disastrous price of 27.75, at which it still stands.”
The Spanish Government is not to blame for the crisis, but the charge made against the Government that, instead of combating the crisis, it has assisted in keeping it alive, is not without foundation.
The cause of this state of things has been the excessive development in the production, thanks to the premiums paid by many Governments. According to the “ Review of the Sugar Trade,” 8,100,000 tons (of beet root and cane sugar), have recently been manufactured, whereas the consumption has not éxceedfed 6,810,000. The manufacture of beet sugar, which in 1853 did not amount to 200,000 tons, rose in 1893-94 to over 4,000,000 tons, whereas the manufacture of cane sugar in the same two years was respectively, 1,200,000 and 3,110,000, so that the latter has increased rather more than two-and-a-half times in the four decades, whéreas the former has increased over 20 times ; in 1894-95 it rose to 4,730,000.
Not very long ago Cuba was the greatest sugar producing country, now it is the third or fourth, in spite of its numerical progress of its harvests. This explains how she has lost all the European markets for this product, which from, being consumers, have turned producers ; it may be said that she only51
retains the United States market; in 1893 she only sent to the Peninsula
21.000	tons, 1894, 24,000. The United States, in their turn, encourage within their own territory the productionof cane'sugar, beet root sugar, and of maple and sorghum sugar; the Government has been subsidising manufacturers, and spends many thousands of dollars in experiments and in the studies of the improvements which are adopted in Europe, both with reference to the cultivation and to the manufacture.
• In Cuba the State invests no money in this, but private parties do, yet it will be easily understood that individual action must be at a great disadvantage as regards our great neighbouring nation. Their aim is to arrive at the period when they will not want to purchase from abroad a single pound out of the
2.100.000	tons which they consume annually at a cost of from 100 to 115,000,000 dollars, and which represents more than one-fourth of the world’s consumption. In- August, 1894, an Act did away with the premiums, and this year it was intended to vote a large sum to-the producers in Louisiana, who had made a claim because, on the strength of the legislation which is now repealed, they had invested large capitals in fitting up immense factories which they, cannot maintain without the said subsidy, as the lowest rate at which sugar has been manufactured in that State is something over three and a half cents per pound in the principal establishments; and during the last eight years the cost has, on an average, been more than five cents per pound, whereas the average price in the New York market is something over three cents.
Finally, the Congress at the last moment1 decided to continue paying the subsidy during the present year in order to get temporarily out of the difficulty. • But the stopping of the premiums does not mean giving up the industry; these are two distinct policies as regards the means, but as regards their ends they ; are the same. The Republicans admitted sugar free, the only restrictions being that of the McKinley Act, and they compensated national manufacturers with' a premium of two cents per pound ; the Democrats do away with the subsidy, but they impose on foreign sugar a custom-house tax of 40 per cent, ad valorem. The tendency is always, as has been explained above, towards self-sufficiency.
Cuba has not long to wait to be excluded from that market; European beetroot sugar has long been sold in the United States, and as the cost of production is very low owing to the nature of the plant and scientific improvements, and as it is assisted with pecuniary subsidies by the respective Govern- * ments, it is in a position to compete with Cuban sugar. It is sold at less than five reales per arroba, which price is by no means a remunerative one to Cuba in her present position. In 1883 the United States only imported* 23,518 tons of European beetroot sugar. In 1890‘ they imported 300,000 tons; in 1894 Germany • alone offered the North American refiner^ to'place in New52
York within four months the entire supply of that article which they would require for one year.
Now, the Spanish Government comes on the scene.
It is only natural that a metropolis anxious for the world to believe (and particularly that American world which is so delighted at no longer having to render her homage) that she treats her colonies as a mother does her children, should run to their assistance in this formidable competition. In a fair field, that is on sound economic principles and in natural competition, without any artificial protection, there is no country in the world which could compete with Cuba in the cheap production of sugar; beetroot could not compete with the sugar cane; and this is the opinion of persons well versed in the subject. If the Island is threatened in the struggle it is because European nations and America have been paying premiums on this industry. Consequently, as the disadvantage consists in the premiums, the remedy is Indicated : maternal Spain should put her offspring Cuba in a position to enter the struggle with weapons equal to those of her competitors. (I should remark that no one in Cuba has ever dreamt of getting such a subsidy; there it is not regarded as necessary. The proximity to North American markets is a circumstance so favourable, owing to the small cost of freights, that of itself it constitutes an advantage.)
We were saying therefore, that Spain ought to afford financial protection to the Cuban producers, and as it would be a contradiction to take away with one hand what was bestowed with the other, it follows that sugar should not be burthened with duties which would counteract the advantages of the premiums.
To these two measures a further one should be added to open markets for Cuban sugar; and as Spain requires that product, to commence by the Peninsula markets. What would be more natural than for a nation to take 1ier indispensable articles of consumption when they are supplied in her own territory 1
With these three facilities alone, Cuba could defy European competition, the offspring could raise her head victoriously in gratitude towards her mother.
Let us see what the government is doing.
In the first place it grants premiums, yet not to colonial sugar, but to the sugar which is manufactured in the Peninsula. Certainly Cuba was on the point of paying the piper according to the tl Revista Mercantil” of the 18th of January last, published by Messrs, J. M. Ceballos & Company, of New York, in which it is stated that the American Government had given the order (subsequently revoked) to apply to Cuban sugars the surcharge of one-tenth of a cent per pound which is levied on the sugars from those countries in which premiums are paid, having heard that such was the case with Spain; that is to53
say, they were about to deprive the producers in the Island of the advantages enjoyed by those in Andalucía.
In the second place, Cuban sugar is subjected to heavy Custom-house duties, and consumption duties, in the Peninsula ($6*20 per 100 kilos) in order that it may not compete with Peninsula sugar, the production of which does not exceed 15,000 tons; so that one arroba of sugar, which in Cuba is worth 53 cents, and which, for instance, pays 6 cents for freight to Barcelona, and 70 for entry and consumption duty, finds itself when there with a surcharge of 76 cents, that is to say 143 per cent.
So that our product is abandoned to its own fate, to struggle unsubsidised^w ith its foreign rival which does enjoy a subsidy ; it is taxed in the Spanish market in the name of fraternity, that is to say, the mother extends her arms and-shows her claws when the child knocks at her doors to take shelter in nerbbfcom. Now comes the climax which consists in levying in the island itself a tax which is described as industrial, of 10 cents for every 100 kilogrammes of white or centrifugal sugar, and of 5 cents for the same amount of brown, concentrated or pieces ; and also another tax called lading-tax, payable at the time of shipment j besides which almost all the taxation in the Island weighs directly or indirectly on agricultural produce as the farms, and amongst them, of course, the sugar plantations, are subject to separate taxes under this head. Note this peculiar circumstance; machinery for sugar plantations, according to the tariff in force in 1890, and which, I think, is still in force, should not pay anything, or hardly anything, when imported; but the loose parts are rated very highly, and the exemption becomes a mockery, because a machine for a sugar plantation cannot be shipped already fit for working.
Very recently it was stated that the industrial tax was to be done away with, and the lading tax to be reduced by 25 per cent., but that it would be substituted by others; so that we should get the same dog with another collar, as the people say.
If the proceeds of the taxes were devoted to works of moral or material improvement, even then they would be excessive, but they are collected and applied to the service of a debt which ought not to be exclusively a Cuban matter, and at other times they never leave the hands of the collectors. A few days ago I referred to a fraud of more than $700,000 committed in the export sugar duties in connection with as many tons; now let us read what was stated at the beginning of this year in the “ Ateneo de Madrid ” by the famous counsel and deputy, Senor Dolz, who is not a revolutionist or anything approaching it, but a firm supporter of the Government:—
“ One single fact, namely, that in the Cuban custom-houses alone the State has been defrauded of TWO HUNDRED MILLION PESOS since the peace of Zanjon (1878), shows to what extremity is carried the corruption of theofficials sent out by the Governments, so that- by. their robberies over there they may support the corruption of politicians over here.”
Very sad conclusions must be drawn from all I have stated, even though the revolution, which is showing itself so powerful, should not triumph, Spanish rule will, nevertheless, have received its death-blow ; without any armed enemies, beetroot would achieve the independency of the colony. Because when competition puts an end to production there will be no revenue for corruption to plunder, and when fraud becomes impossible, what interest will such a vitiated Administration have in keeping Cuba ?
19th August, 1895.	• H. M. MERCHAN.
El Corneo Nacional 23rd August, 1895.
CUBA.—No. VI Tobacco.
The tobacco industry, once so flourishing, for in thè Western department alone the various agricultural, manufacturing and commercial elements of its wealth were estimated at 25,000,000 dollars, paying $60,000 daily to innumerable workmen and supporting 90,000 people, is also languishing and going sadly to decay. Let us nòte the downward course it is taking towards its ruin in the following table which I have copied from the last report furnished to the British Government by the British Consul in Havana, Mr. Alexander Gollan ; for greater clearness I have worked out the amounts :
Years:	Manufactured tobacco	Valued at $40 per
	exported.	thousand.
1889	250,476,000	$10,019,040
1890	211,823,000	8,472,920
1891	196,664,000	7,866,560
1892; .	166,712,000	6,668,480
1893	147,365,000	5,894,600
1894	134,210,000	' • 5,368,400
The downward	progress, as compared with	1889, is as follows :—
■ Years.	Manufactured tobacco.	Value.
1890	38,653,000	$1,546,120 .
1891	53,812,000	2,152,480
1892	83,764,000	... 3,350,560
1893	103,111,000	.... 4,124,440
1894	116,266,000	4,650,640
	395,606,000	15,824,240
From this it appears that the falling off of 395 millions odd in the cigars exported has involved a loss of $15,824,240 during the five years.55
In 1693 340,13 If kilogrammes of raw tobacco were exported, and in 1894 454,412*.
The main cause of the depression in the industry is as the then Minister, Señor Leon y Castillo, stated in the Cortes, that Cuba cannot be rilled at a distance of 1,600 leagues. Because Havana tobacco enjoys a world-wide reputation, it has been taxed with heavy duties, amongst them the export duty, at the same time that it is penalised all over the world with more or' less prohibitive duties, for its very merit, instead of opening markets for it, has awakened the general desire to compete with it.
At the Session of the 9th of May, 1887, • of the Congress of Deputies of Madrid, Señor D. José del Perojo stated:—
“ Having regard to out export duty which introduces such marked differences between the exports of raw and those of manufactured tobacco, and owing to the mistake in these ill-fated duties, you will see what the exports of this product to the United States amount to. The United States import 13,950,000 pounds of raw tobacco, and of manufactured tobacco only 983,893 3 this industry has assumed immense importance in the United States mainly on account of our export duties, and we have driven away from the Island of Cuba a large number of operatives who are note working in the States, living on a Cuban product, and thereby not only decreasing the population of Cuba, but contributing to the wealth and prosperity of the United States, instead of developing the same in our oversea province. This industry in the year 1880 in the United States was worth $118,600,000, having considerably increased since 1870, in which year the proceeds were estimated at $71,000,000. The number of workmen employed in 1880 was 87,504, but is now stated at 92,000.”
These striking data were of no avail. Our war of 1868 cast on the North American shores huge legions of first-class workmen, and with them the art of manufacture emigrated. After the celebration of peace matters might have been brought back to their original condition, but the enormous estimates and the arbitrary levying on Cuba of the whole of a debt which ought to be a national one, and not exclusively an insular one, weighed heavily on the already overwhelmed leaf as it did on all other manifestations of Cuban activity. The United States hastened to pick up these easy spoils left after our fruitless struggle. And why not*? The fault was not theirs, but the fault of those who, by stupid trickery, gave them the opportunity of checkmating us.
Duties paid by unmanufactured tobacco and fillings to the Custom House in the Union, which is' our principal outlet, are not so high as those on the manufactured article, nor would it suit them that it should be so, because they require raw material to mix with tobacco from Florida and Sumatra so as to produce an article which will easily compete in price With the similar article of Cuban manufacture of ordinary quality, and to which the consumer has already56
become accustomed. This article has been fraudulently labelled as Havana tobacco.
As regards manufactured tobacco, that is another matter; we pay to the American revenue, what with duties by weight and surcharges, ad valorem, $58 per thousand; owing to being thus handicapped our trade must necessarily be very restricted. Here are the figures showing Cuban tobacco introduced into the United States :—
Years.	Raw Tobacco.	Manufactured.
Amongst the means which the Spanish Government might avail themselves in order to raise the industry, the first, as in the case of the sugar industry, should be to modify the many duties now levied both on the soil in which the plant is cultivated as well as on the factory where it is manufactured, while at the same time the State has not, on the other hand, favoured the country-producing districts with railways, roads, bridges,etc., which would facilitate transport; and they might also absolutely do away with the export duties which, on manufactured tobacco, amount to $1.80 per thousand (1,000 weighs 12 to 14 lbs.); and facilitate their export from Cuban ports, while foreign Custom-houses are placing obstacles in the way of their admission.
At the same time the Government might open for us the National market. Against this it is urged that to give up the $18,800,000 which the Government monopoly annually pays to Spain would be to create a great gap in the estimates, of which this revenue constitutes one-eighth, for in 1895-6 the revenue stands at $151,703,444. The autonomists reply that Peninsula goods go into Cuba without paying scarcely any duty ; whereas, if they paid as goods going from the Island into the Peninsula do, the taxation which now handicaps tobacco and sugar might be reduced. The insurgent patriots go further, and say that independence will finally settle all these difficulties.
Another means of saving us would be to enter into general or special treaties in which advantages should be obtained for tobacco; but when they want to they cannot, and vice-versa. Although the company which leases the monopoly in the Peninsula annually purchases 340,000 quintals of tobacco from the United States, the States have not helped to favor us, because the McKinlay Act did not authorise the Executive Power as regards that product, nor have subsequent Congresses done so either, as what the nation wants is to cement and not to undermine its tobacco industry; and because it has been a frequent cause of irritation in that commercial community to see that Spain,
1889
1890
1891
1892
1893
$5,600,000
7.100.000
7.100.000
7.900.000
8.900.000
$3,500,000
3.900.000
3.300.000
2.800.000 2,700,00057
whenever she has had an opportunity, has levied very heavy duties on North American produce. During the convention entered into by virtue of the McKinlay tariff, many of these goods went into Cuba free, in spite of the very active opposition of the Peninsula producers, mainly those of Barcelona. Either by error or for some other reason, the manner in which the convention was carried out in the Island has given rise to claims on the part of the Government of the Union, which some people—though probably this is exaggerated—put down these claims at $7,000,000, this is taken from “El Pais,” of Havana, 9th June, 1894 ; at the expiration of the time stipulated for the duration of the convention, Spain wanted to return to her high tariffs on the United States produce, the States threatened reprisals, which meant excluding Cuban sugar from the American markets, and the Madrid Government was obliged to give way. All this reveals four very bitter facts : first, that the United States need not lend themselves to concessions in favor of a nation which supports them, but which from a commercial point of view (and probably from most others), bears them no goodwill; second, that even without this reason, it does not seem natural that the United States should modify their surcharges on tobacco when Spain herself penalises it, forcing it to pay more than is equitable, and prohibiting its free importation into the Peninsula; third, that in financial matters, Spain does not do what she likes in Cuba, except in so far as the United States permit it; and fourth, that independence again suggests itself as a solution of all these conflicts of semi-sovereignty.
The Argentine Republic has excluded Havana tobacco from her ports, notwithstanding that Cuba purchases from her annually 24,000,000 kilos of preserved beef, which amount to $3,500,000 ; on the other hand, we see that in 1892 that Republic imported 111,000 hectolitres of Spanish wines, and in 1893, 200,000, according to an Italian agent in Buenos Aires. It is evident that when Cuba can enter into treaties she will not try to sell wines which she does not manufacture, but her own produce, and then Argentina will either take Cuban tobacco or keep her own beef, which could be very well supplied at lower freights by Columbia or Central America, as both of these countries, until recently, were sending live catile into Cuba. It simply means establishing this business here on an economic and self-supporting basis, and in making Custom house concessions in exchange.
Far from thinking of this, what Spain has been proposing to do is to cultivate tobacco in the Peninsula; she imagined she would obtain magnificent results which would put an end to the crisis through which the wine trade is still passing, and which would enrich Almeira, Jerez, Jaen, Seville, Cordoba, Granada, Orensc, Pontevedra. An act was submitted to the Cortes for this .purpose, but nothing came of it, owing doubtless to the fact that the experiment had turned out so badly in the Canaries, that, as “ El Dia ” of Madrid58
observed, it is very rare to find an Islander so patriotic as to smoke the tobacco grown in his own country. Besides, the innovation would affect the revenue of the Government monopoly. The company holding the monopoly is bound to purchase annually from Cuba at least 3,000,000 kilogrammes ( and we have heard that she does not always comply with this obligation) ; when tobacco is produced in abundance in the Peninsula it is clear that she will take less from Cuba, and this would not exactly be a grievance to our brotherly protectors over there, but the inferiority of the article would render it unsaleable, or would diminish the consumption, and nineteen million dollars is an amount not to be despised.
Bogota, 22nd August, 1895.	R. M. MERCHAN.
“EL Correo National” 27th August, 1895.
CUBA.—No. VII.
Trade.
The idea of establishing the coasting trade between the Peninsula and Cuba would appear to be an evidence of metropolitan affection to anyone looking simply at the meaning of the word, and who was unaware of the conditions of the financial life of the two countries, and of the manner in which it was proposed to establish the coasting trade. What could be more natural, more patriotic, more elevated than to admit, free of custom house duty, Cuban produce into Spanish ports and Peninsula produce into the ports of the Antilles? At first sight, nothing doubtless ; but let us see what the Spanish coasting trade is really in practice looking at it for ten years.
On the 30th June. 1882, a law relating to imports into the Peninsula from over-sea ports was sanctioned, and on the 20th July of the same year, another with reference to Peninsula importations into over-sea ports. The spirit of both of these acts was to gradually reduce the custom house duty so that by the expiration of the ten years they would be completely abolished.
Now come the huts, which are many.
1.	Tobacco was not included in the exemptions, but was left subject to the legislation of the monopoly, and that article is, after sugar, the most important of Cuban produce.
2.	At the same time that the import duties on Cuban produce began to ' be reduced in the Peninsula, they were subjected to a tax known as a
transitory tax, thus for instance : $1.76 on every 100 kilogrammes of sugar; $3.20 on cocoa; $5.40 on coffee; and $0.75 on every hectolitre of spirits.
3.	They were also subjected to a municipal tax which was equal to the transitory one.
4.	Peninsula produce enjoyed in Cuba, the gradual exemption prescribed and no transitory or municipal tax was imposed on it.The principal therefore remained intact ; custom house duties Ì Nothing of the sort ; simple coasting trade, such as is proper between sister provinces. Any transitory and municipal taxes on Cuban produce Ì These are not intended for taxing the ever faithful,” but for the purpose of favoring Spanish production ; in Cuba they are not levied on Peninsula goods, because there are no similar ones in Cuba which require protection ; no com is cultivated there as in Santander, and no textiles or cloth are manufactured there as in Catalonia, etc., etc.
It is said that Littré held that meat ought not to be eaten. His doctor, who was not of that opinion, arranged with the philosopher’s cook, who every day artfully served up at the savant’s table some little round hard balls of flour, very daintily prepared and containing meat ; Littré eat them, but said nothing ; he continued to nourish himself and to carry on his campaign against meat, but his principles remained intact !
It is the same with the Madrid Government, they impoverish our trade, but the coasting trade remains .triumphantly intact. For the purpose of protecting Spanish industry and of increasing the custom house revenue, high duties, frequently prohibitive ones, were levied in Cuba on foreign merchandise. Then something very peculiar happened ; these goods were taken from the United States, and from other places to the Peninsula ; they were naturalised there, re-exported to Cuba, and were admitted without duty or with a minimum duty. In a report presented by Rafael Mon toro on the 2nd of October, 1890, to the Royal Economic Society of Havana, and approved by that Society, we Tead :—
“A cask (of flour) purchased m New York is taken to the Peninsula. It is landed at Santander, for instance, is re-shipped there to Havana, and after paying all the duty and all thè expenses, we have a total of $8.79. This same cask sent direct from New York to Havana, thanks to our Custom-house mechanism, represents a total expenditure of $11.46. It is therefore good business to send it the long way round, and the speculator in the Peninsula who devotes himself to this combination makes an easy and safe profit to the detriment of our consumers and our trade.”
The results of this fiscal legislation are thus :—First, American flour was not driven out of the Island ; second, instead of reaching Cuba in a fresh condition it arrived stale, and more liable to damage ; third, the price was increased by the greater freight and by the Custom-house duties paid in the Peninsula, which duties simply benefited the Treasury of the Metropolis ; fourth, no prejudice to the fraternal flour was avoided, because Spain does not produce sufficient for her own consumption, because there have been years in Which she has purchased from abroad to the amount of $12,000,000. Would it not‘have been better for Cuba to have provided herself with that article in a60
neighbouring market, thereby mitigating the severity of the duties? No ; because then the Peninsula Custom-houses would not have received the amounts which foreign flour pays there. Let Cubans eat bread made out of stale flour. Salus popult hispani suprema lex cubana esto. We have been saved from this anomaly by the United States who threatened Spain that they would put prohibitive duties on Cuban sugar if they did not reduce the taxes levied in the Antilles on American produce ; thanks to them, Cubans may eat bread made from fresh flour.
Here is another example : I take it from a number of the “ Economists,” of Havana, published in the middle of October, 1894 :
“In the month of August last, 1,977 sacks of beans were imported from the Peninsula, but there is no certainty that they were beans cultivated on Spanish soil because in that month 4,309 sacks of this article were exported from VeraCruz into Spain in mail steamers. If such things are possible at the end of the nineteenth century on what grounds is the colonial rule of Spain justified ||
On the 20th of August of the same year, 1894, the “ Boletin Comercial,” of Havana, copied the following paragraph from a Barcelona newspaper :—
“ Various consignments (1,175 sacks) of beans have arrived in Santander from Mexico, and are being sold at from four to five pesetas less than the national product, although Spain is par excellence the land of the bean.
Going on at this rate the day will arrive when foreign water will be cheaper in Spain than the water in our own rivers.
It is not my intention to ridicule the backward condition of agriculture, industry or commerce in Spain, as this dates from long ago, from the time when she expelled the most civilised section of her population in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Still if, when the American continent emancipated herself from the Spanish rule, Spain had hastened to re-establish commercial relations with these Republics which were already acquainted with, and were asking for her produce, she would have permanently retained markets which are now costing her a great deal of trouble to secure again; but if I do not rejoice at the misfortunes of any country, even at those of Spain, much less will I do so at those of Cuba, I will not applaud the endeavour to repair the financial errors of Spanish statisticians, past and present, which have destroyed the producing power of the land in which I was born. Would that Spain had always enjoyed prosperity! Probably in that case Cuba would not have become a prey to her.
With the notable exemption from duty in Cuba on Peninsula produce and on foreign produce passing as Spanish, with the reductions which the Washington Government has peremptorily demanded and obtained, and with the scandalous robberies, it will be understood that the custom-house revenue61
was bound to diminish ; and hence the reason for surcharging the produce and the exports from Cuba with fresh taxation, as I have shown in my previous articles.
Have we no reason then to try for independence ? However badly my compatriots may manage affairs after they are free, I scarcely think their system will be such a ridiculous one as the one which I have been only very roughly sketching. Very little knowledge would bo required to rule less clumsily.
The Havana Chamber of Commerce, composed of Spanish merchants, traders, and shipbuilders, in a report dated the 5th of September, 1890, stated
“ The custom-house exemptions established by the oft-quoted Act of 1882 only reach and benefit the produce and imports from the Spanish provinces, whereas the produce of these Islands—sugar, tobacco, spirits, &c., are subject, when imported into the Peninsula, to transitory duties, municipal duties, and other taxation which renders the reciprocity laid down in the Act completely illusory.
On the other hand, the exemption from duty which the act prescribes, has not produced here the smallest decrease in the prices of the articles exported from the Peninsula to our markets; either because the surplus of Peninsula production, after meeting the requirements of that consumption, generally turn out to be either nil or very slight, or because having secured the monopoly of these markets, every possible advantage is taken of the favourable position . ... so that the contributor in the Antilles, being always compelled to make up the deficiencies caused in the Custom House revenue by the exemption granted to imports from the mother country, and then not by the indirect means of cheapness, in a portion of what he consumes which ought to be the natural consequence of the privilege afforded, finds the most insignificant saving in this expenditure. • •
One would imagine that the writers were Cubans! These complaints from wealthy persons from the Peninsula explain why many of them, under the guidance of Count de Casa-More, were inclined for annexation to the United States, and why they have not displayed during the present revolution the mad enthusiasm in favour of Spain with which they scandalised the world during the previous revolution, and why there have been volunteers who, on the eve of joining the troops, have gone over with arms and baggage to the insurgents, as those of Camajuani did recently.
I will not end these lines without giving a few particulars about the export trade of Cuba, which may be interesting to persons fond of this kind of study. As there are no properly organised statistical offices in the Island, it is difficult to get tables of this kind j it is almost always necessary to appealIE§F~ :	-n. *
62
to private sources and to consular reports. The following figures, compiled by Senor D. Pedro Lopez Trigo, correspond to the year 1890. Since that time the exports have considerably increased; in 1891 they amounted- to $89,862,514,25 ; but according to the “ Diario de la Marina,” the condition of the producers has not ceased to be precarious. The imports amounted to $56,265,315 and the difference, namely $33,597,199,25 represents the immense capital in gold with which are paid abroad the- debt, retired pensions, and pensions to retired officials residing abroad, the Transatlantic Company’s services, and also the remittances made by employés and foreigners, &c., to their families. This explanation is not my own ; it is furnished- in the “Diario de la Marina,” the organ of the Peninsula reform party, in its issue of the 9th of December, 1893.
Cuban Exports in 1890.
Destination.	Amount.	Percentage.
United States	$58,557,641	.... ; 82-933
Spanish Peninsula	8,121,814	; n-502
British America	995,890	1-410 .
France	733,851	1-039
Germany ....	..v 657,068	930
England ...	394,616	... ! 549 l
Puerto Rico	269,191	... . . 381
Columbia	258,008	365
Mexico	211,902	301
Uruguay	159,522	. _ 226
Canary Islands	91,773	129
Hayti	33,274	. ¡¡I 47
Venezuela	32,768	47
Costa Rica	27,497	39
Danish America	21,791	31
Santo Domingo	17,309	..... 25
Dutch America	10,157	iH 15
Holland	11,119	.. 16
Balearic Isles	... . 3,472	... . 5
Phillippine Islands	290	• . . —
	Total $70,608,953	100
The exports to Columbia were more than in 1887, in which year they only amounted to $129,076, and less than in 1888, in which they amounted’to $279,982.
The money circulation of securities in Havana, according to official information, is from one and a half million to two million pesos.
R. M. MERCHAN.
Bogota, 26th August, 1895.
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N.UBA UNDER KSx.
SPANISH RULE.
<r^XK3" I
By DR. V. de ROCHES.
(From the “ Revué Contemporaine.”)mm67
CUBA UNDER SPANISH RULE.
The Queen of the Antilles it appears is about to free herself from Spain, either by means of an arrangement between the United States and the Spanish Government, or by the insurrection, which, unaided, in the end, will bring about the same result. The separation from the mother country is now a fact inevitable. It would not be uninteresting to examine the causes which have brought about the breaking up of former relations. But this will be easier of comprehension when one looks to the administration of affairs, to the judicial and taxation regime. He will then see how legitimate and just are the causes which have impelled the Cubans to raise aloft the standard of revolt. This work was written before the late events which have taken place ; its author lived in the Island during many years, and speaks of nothing except what he saw, and although a victim of the system there practiced, he has observed the strictest impartiality. If at any time the recital of sad events has disturbed his equanimity, which always admits of excuse, yet in truth he has copied the very words of official documents whose authenticity is undisputed. The reader has under eye an exact picture of Spanish Dominion in Cuba, and can detect from an examination of the same consequences which enable him to judge whether or no the mother country has in good faith fulfilled her duties or compromises, in short, he can determine on which side of the Atlantic are right and justice in these matters to be found.
Above all, the head of the Government is enthroned as a great dignitary, reuniting in himself the civil authority as well as military, and is, moreover, protector of the religious authority; takes as titles Captain General, Governor Superior Civil of the Isle of Cuba, President of its Real Andiencia, (highest court), and Vice-Royal Patron of its Churches. And all this is true, for he commands the army and marine, and has the direction of all branches of administration, including that of the treasury; watches over civil justices; regulates and even suspends the tribunals, that extraordinary tribunals may supply their places whenever he may think the68
event demands it. In respect to religious affairs he has not much sway. Beyond having the church bells rang at his approach into any of the towns and villages, he yields to the bishops the right to do what they please; but unless they do or cause this thing to be done, he sends them to Spain, as has happened. Besides, the Captain-General is president of all the societies and corporations established in the island. Without his presence, or that of those delegated by him, nothing can be done; not even can a meeting of shareholders of a stock company be legally held. His powers are unlimited, as are also his functions; he gives no account of his conduct other than to the government of the mother country; and then only to the Sovereign, when, as happened with General Lersundi, who was freed from interference on the part of the Minister of the Colonies before accepting the position. The decree of the 25th May, 1825, which regulates his powers, confers upon him “ the full use of the faculties which by royal ordinance are conceded to governors of besieged towns.” There is no remedy as against him while in office, and when he has given up the command to his successor, complaints are heard in the illusory juicio de residencia.
Beyond this, and until this epoch arrives, there exists no remedy to him who complains, other than remaining in patience and advancing large sums for the purpose of carrying on the trial. If he be young, and is disposed to fight it out, and besides has money to back him, perhaps he may succeed in obtaining a sentence which declares that he has been a victim of ill-used power—nothing more. A functionary as much occupied as the Captain-General, should be well remunerated. He is in the receipt of a salary of $50,000 per annum, and has a palace in the city and a chateau in the country.
This charge would be a little too heavy for Spain, where the Prime Minister is paid only $6,000 per annum, but it is the Island of Cuba that pays the expenses; yes, this sum it pays unaided to its royal jailor! Besides, if he wishes to raise unlawful taxes, who is to hinder him ? True, all do not do this, but, without doubt, many have so done.
M. D’Harponaille, in his admirable work on the Island of Cuba (La Beina des Antilles, Paris, 1850, says, in speaking of the administration of General O’Donnell, from 1848 to 1848: The clandestine introduction of African slaves encountered no opposition in him, though he received but a small tax or benefit on account of his vice-royal concessions. Such was the case also with the greater part of his predecessors. On arriving he intimated that he was an enemy of the slave trade, but we, at least know that he was not of that which it produced for the Governor. “ For each negro there was paid an ounce, or $17, to this personage. The custom, from long •user, has acquired the force of a law. Here we should, perhaps, stop, but69
it would be proper to add, such scandalous contracts were entered into that his wife had the control of the monopoly, that which occasioned such noise."
After the Captain-General came the Commanding-Generals, the Civil Governor of the Departments. These high functionaries are looked up to with nearly the same respect on the part of those governed by them as the Captain-General himself, under whose direction, more or less, they move.
They increase as much as possible the authority, civil and military, preside over the City Council of the capital, and intervene in public works through the lieutenants of the Governor, settle and arrange the contributions, whose sum is fixed by the Sovereign authority, apply at will the correctional punishments by prison and fines, up to forty days in the one case, and $50 in the latter. Taken from the line of the military, in order that they may not lose the custom of governing they manage a department as a military headquarters, and treat the people as common soldiers. Their pay is $12,000 per annum; they are given, besides, houses and other accessories.
The governors of the departments have under their orders the lieutenant-governors, commanders of the jurisdictions which are in number 81. These are divided into partidos at the head of which there is a functionary named by the governor, and who entirely depended upon him for orders. As to the administration of these lower functionaries nothing more appropriate can be said than what was the opinion of the Cuban delegates to Madrid in 1866 : “ The lieutenant-governors invested as they are, with the military command and the presidency of the council, as well as directions of the captains of partidos in their small precincts, are the sources of a great calamity for the Island of Cuba. Nominated by the Governor Superior Civil, without the slightest bond of interest with the interest with the inhabitants whom they are sent out to govern, without the slightest care for the opinion that may be formed of their conduct in the locality where they go to pass a few years of their lives, and to which they never expect to return when once their commands are given up, they become petty tyrants who cannot bear any sort of contradiction. If disposed to be bad, all the avenues towards becoming rich are open before them, to the cost of the people governed. If influenced by sentiments of honor—they are, at any rate, ignorant of the wants of their districts, and have no personal interest other than inaugurating some work, however useless it may be, that may perpetuate the remembrance of their administration. This, let it be said, does not prevent the greater part of the municipal resources from being consumed in expenses of representation, house expenses, and pay of employees. We have seen various localities in the interior of theIsland where though the municipal moneys levied and collected were large enough yet were almost entirely consumed in pay of employees, house rent and furniture, and if there were any funds remaining unspent these were devoted to the laying out of a paseo or square in which some stone was found erected to the honor of the Captain-General, his wife, or daughter.
As to the captains of partido, whatever might be said would be insufficient to convey a definite idea of the truth. They come to the different districts with a pay of $50 to $100 a month for self and family, which, however does not hinder them from growing richer day by day. We prefer to be silent on this point, referring as we do to the Captain-Generals who have governed the island, and whom we have heard often deplore their own impotency in the matter of preventing the frauds upon which the captains del partido fattened and grew rich. “ Informaciones de Reformas en Cuba. Tome 2o, p, 186.”
If, after having examined analytically the mechanism administrative, we should reconstruct it synthetically, we would bind ourselves in the presence of a despotic government of the first class; looking to the fact that it can condemn to prison, banish from the country, or send out at call and without the intervention of the tribunals whom it chooses, and even go so far as to confiscate property; seeing that it imposes and distributes the taxes without the tax-payers having a hearing in the premises; inasmuch as the country has neither a provincial nor a municipal representation, not even for the purpose of looking into its necessities. Nor has it the right to discuss its own proper interests, or to participate with the government in the direction of public affairs. It is not permitted even to publish opinions or thoughts without a severe and fastidious censorship shall have been previously passed; and to this is sometimes added an examination by the ecclesiastical authority #
The municipal representation exists really only in appearance—it is a mere fantasm. Chosen by the government from a list presented by the largest tax-payers, there is nothing of the independent connected with it, nor is there anything initiative in it. It has no power to control local interests, nor to fix or distribute the municipal taxes, except under the presidency of the Governor and with ratification of the Captain-General. The administration of real property, the use of the taxes, works of public utility, all these in fact are in the hands of the Governor, and the intervention of the Council is for nothing more than to give an aspect of legality to what is done. Thus we behold the principal towns in a condition of filth amounting to repugnance, without communications, with streets seldom paved, and through which run deep sewers ¿hat the rain heaps full, and in which all the filth of the neighbourhood is deposited. There are no decent hospitals,
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nor asylums for the mad. There is an establishment in Havana, but in the other towns lunatics and madmen are placed in the common jail, as was the case in the middle ages. These towns are left without means of any kind to prevent the approach of disease, or to succour the indigent: and notwithstanding this, the Councils are perplexed by the weight of an enormous debt that the tax, however great it'be, never pays off. Such is the state of the large towns. What sucoeeds in the smaller ones can be readily imagined. This is so in Santiago de Cuba, the second city of the isle, which for eighteen months has not paid its gas bills, nor police, nor school expenses, and all the other towns are in nearly the same fix. Moreover, there is no regular line of roads which unites the centres of the population together. The administration of the towns is an index of the administration of the whole country. Here we see the fruits of an absolute government imposed upon the country by the Mother Country.
To carry out this regime the ministers who succeed each other in Spain, free themselves from their political compromises by sending out to Cuba, upon large pay, functionaries without antecedents which justify their selection. At the head of an irresponsible government there is found a public accountability and another one secret, a scheme of taxes officially promulgated, and another one of a private character. So in fact while there figured in the tax scheme of Spain for the year 1866 the sum of $4,400,000 of Cuban money there is no mention of pensions paid out of these same moneys, neither of the expenses of Fernando Po, which are four times that sum. Neither does it include the unjust exactions occasioned by reason of the cost of the St. Domingo war, or those of the Mexican, Chilian or Peruvian difficulties, nor the $6,000 paid to the Queen’s confessor. The Mexican and St. Domingo expeditions sailed out from Cuba, and were paid for out of her money. All the coal of the Pacific squadron was contracted and paid for at Havana. Mendez Nunez (the admiral) came to Sto. de Cuba for provisions. The decree of 19th October, 1868, reveals to us the fact as to Padre Claret's pension, which it suppressed. But is it less ridiculous and unjust to make Cuba pay the expenses of Fernando Po than the pension of P. Claret, by the use of the same powers as were exercised in the other house ? It is because the ministry in Spain was changed, and not the relations between Spain and Cuba; there is one ministry more and one Padre Claret less.
The Treasury Minister has no means of getting out of the difficulty except by putting his hands, unopposed, into the cash box of Cuba and Porto Rico. There was a time, it was two years ago, when the treasury played traitor and showed signs of insolvency, when, in fact, the government having drawn out all the capital of the Spanish Bank of Havana,
1 --
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72


reserved to pay its circulation, was forced to pay its highest interest bearing obligations with depreciated paper, or authorize the Bank to do so in contradiction of its charter and of the law regulating the payment of its notes. Then commerce and industry had to do business without money. In this contingency a forced circulation of the notes was ordered by the government ; hence a panic spread through all classes, and numerous bankruptcies were the result, hence the discontent of the country increased, and this ran into insurrection. This government, let us resume, is a political monopoly which excludes popular representation, an intellectual monopoly which keeps in reserve the emission of thoughts, a religious monopoly which imposes only one mode of belief and worship, the monopoly commercial which imposes its flag and its products. All these assertions will be proved in this relation.
II.


This despotic government is very expensive, but it has the merit of preserving order in a heterogeneous populations. Let us examine this question.
If we look to the order which reigns on the sugar estates we find that it is due to a discipline established, a long time past, by the proper inhabitants of the Island, and on them it reflects honor. Is it less a matter of surprise to see the negroes of a sugar estate obey a few whites than to see the large crew of a ship of war out in the midst of the ocean obey the staff which commands it ? The relative leniency of the slavery of our days, the interested solicitude, in part of the master, the prestige that the white exercises over the negro, and that which the free man has over the slave, aid as much as discipline in the matter of maintaining order. The government seldom intervenes between the master and the slave; should the latter fly away the agents of the public force, rare in the country, take no steps towards arresting him. This is the duty of the master, and if unable to do it himself he employs a slave catcher, who, for five dollars, does the work. Ordinarily he does not even do that, but waits for the slave to return voluntarily, which he generally does with a padrino (protector), who is some inhabitant of the vicinity. It is very rare that the negro is away more than four or five days without desiring to return to the hut where lives his mother, his wife, or his children, to his little patch, his corral, to the companions of his diversions as well as the sharers of his labors, in a word, to the domestic hearth and its accessories. There are some negroes who never
WWÊÊÊtÊÊÊÊÊtÊÊk

return. These build on the highest mountains or in the deepest woods, what in the country are called palenques. Them the government permit to remain in tranquility, notwithstanding the harm they cause to travellers and to estates. The government has so little to do with established order that for two months after the occupation of the Eastern Department by the insurgents servile labor continued as before. The rebels proclaimed emancipation at the beginning of January, and the negroes still did not move; it was found necessary to tear them away from the ingenios, and by the middle of February the greater part had gone back to them again. Up to this time no serious violence had been committed on the persons of the whites by the negroes, except in the death of a man, in whose house a slave had been assassinated, but by whom was unknown. Nor down to this time was there any proof that the slaves had any ideas of vengeance against their masters, or that they had been illy-treated.
Persons who form an opinion of the social state in Cuba from the history of our ancient colony of St. Domingo find it difficult to comprehend how freemen of colour can live in good understanding under the pressure of a government, strongly constituted, which keeps them in peace; there are 260,000 against 794,000 whites. These are equal to the latter before the laws in everything affecting civil rights, and so far as those denominated political are concerned, neither the one or the other enjoy them. There are distinctions founded in old, musty privileges, but repeated intermixing and fortune cause these to disappear. The public voice “ besides” anticipates those favoured by birth and fortune, and discerns the difference between gentlemen and people whose color and conduct betray their mixed origin. In another generation all this will have disappeared.
It is easy to understand that the government has no difficulty in keeping good order where no one desires to disturb it. But let us ask, Has peace always existed without clouds ? and has the free colored population ever relied upon the slaves to inaugurate a social war ? or have the negroes ever made an attempt to break their chains ? There has never been a serious project of anything of the kind, though it was supposed in 1844 that a conspiracy had been discovered in Matanzas on the part of blacks.
In every manner this conspiracy was greedily used as a means to make money by the police and military commissions. “ That no complot was formed,” says a Spanish author who held important trusts on the Island at this period, “ cannot be denied, but never to the extent supposed. That in the proceedings directed by the military commissions and by a multitude of sub-agents, there was want of legality and impartiality, such as is demanded among civilized people when the matter of life and death to men is to be decided, needs no other proof than the punishment inflicted by the superior74
authority upon many fiscals (state attorney ) because of their venality and excesses, the suicide of two of these and the flight of others when they saw that their infamy had been discovered. The Secretary, Don Pedro Salazer, was condemned to prison. Three thousand colored persons were sentenced, the proof against whom was deficient in material points for the execution of projects which were attributed to them.* “ The banished, the condemned to prison were numerous, as were also the executions. The best poet of the Island, Gabriel Valdes, called Plácido, was one of the victims,” although, “ as said Pezeula,” his criminality does not appear tc be other than a sentence without explicit grounds.” His ardent muse inspired him even while surrounded by iron bars. He went up to the place of execution reciting his “ Plegaria a Dior,” the veritable song of the swan, the best of his poems.
This happened during the government of O’Donnell. Ten years before, General Tacon had instituted military commissions in a time of profound peace. But disorder and corruption were the foundations for the chronic state of the country under the regime of that government. It will be seen from the work already cited, that these tribunals fulfilled their mission by proceedings identical to those which gave them birth. M. D’Harponville relates the facts as conforming to a sentence pronounced in Madrid. “ Reine des Antilles,” p. 464, first edition).
In 1868, Captain-General Lersundi betook himself to the same resource, in order to aid—-though in ordinary times—the impotency of the courts,“ considering,” as he said in his decree of the 4th of January, 1868,“ the crimes, which are as frequent as scandalous, now being committed, we withdraw from the ordinary tribunals the trials of cases of homicide, robbery and incendiarism, whatever may have been the circumstances under which these were perpetrated by the guilty parties, or their accomplices and those who harbor them, without distinction. These shall be tried by military commissions, established at Havana, Santiago de Cuba, Porto Principe, Villa Clara, and Pinar del Rio. The specified charges will be remitted along with the criminal, if he has been arrested, to the disposition of the President of the Commission within twenty-four hours, and the cause shall be put to trial in the quickest time possible, under the personal responsibility of the President of the Judges and Fiscal (attorney of government), who will not forget for an instant that the principal object in the installation of these commissions military is to have a speedy disposition of matters, in order that justice may be as prompt as inexorable,” &c.
Notwithstanding the unfavorable antecedents of this institution, and the want of confidence which the intervention of government and military
* Diccorinario de la Ysla de Cuba. Tomo 4 p. 639.inspires, this hard measure of Lersundi was well received by the great majority of the best people in the island. It is a sad thing to say so, but the ordinary tribunals, inattentive as corrupted, only commanded the respect of the good. Who did not feel himself menaced as well as his property when he saw crime unpunished, and its authors go out of the prison-houses more audacious than ever ? Thus a subsequent proclamation assured the criminals and those who testified against them, “ that once condemned the former should not again make their appearance in the country,” to the end that the latter might not stand in fear of their vengeance. This assurance was opportune, because the vicinage was accustomed to see the criminals escape public vengeance as well as that inflicted by confinement in prison, which enabled them to avenge their informers and prosecutors. Without doubt, the military commissions as well as the civil tribunals might be composed of venal and corrupt judges, but the rapidity with which the proceedings were carried on, far from inspiring alarm, was considered as a guarantee against the uncertainty of legislation, the complication of judicial acts, the abuse of jurisdiction, and the fearful artifices of a shameless forum. I spoke of the uncertainty of legislation ? This results from the multitude of codes which govern us. We have the law of the Indies, the Nueva Becopilacion, La Novissima, the laws of the Toro, El Fuejo Juzo, El Fuero Beal, the law of Enjuiceamiento Civil, El Bando de Gobemacion y policira, and de Partidas laws, without mentioning the Ecclesiastical code, the Ordonnances of War and Marine and La Jurisprudence est ablecida.
The tribunals are not less numerous. There are Justices of the Peace of the first instance and Alcal des Mayores, both civil and criminal; Tribunals of Appeal or Beal Audiencia, Tribunal of Casacion at Madrid, Juzgado Ecclesiastico, Court of Military Orders, of War, of Treasury, of Marine, Tribunal of Commerce, and, in short, Military Commissions from time to time.
The proceedings are complicated to a certain extent, because of the matter of jurisdiction. Fuero signifies more than jurisdiction ; it comprehends, also, the idea of privilege. The clergy, the military, the marine, the grandees of Spain, the members of the military orders of knighthood, those who are decorated with certain honors hp»ve their appropriate tribunals, that is to say, there are appropriate tribunals for them.
All those nearly related to—or even holding distant relations with those corporations, enjoy their own proper privilege, such, as for instance, the military and the marines retired, the auxiliaries and supernumeraries of the army and marines, the counsellors and escribanos (notaries) of the courts, their wives, children and servants. If one of these privileged persons be sued for a debt, and if he be adjudged to pay the sum demanded, he will




¡ik.
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immediately ask for another place of trial, and it becomes a matter of necessity to commence a new proceeding and pay all the costs accrued.
One of the most remarkable things is that which raises a question of privilege as between the renter of a house and its owner. The first can leave the house whenever it suits him without any notification, but the owner cannot force him to leave the house unless he shall have neglected for three consecutive months to pay the rent, and then a fixed time will be granted him within which to procure another house. If the renter pays faithfully the owner, the latter cannot demand that the house shall be vacated. This he can obtain only by way of compromise; such as inhabiting it himself, or by shutting it up for four years. In no other way can the possession be obtained or the price raised, notwithstanding the fact that the value of rent of houses in the neighbourhood may have risen in value. However hard these conditions may be for the owner, he might get along very well in bearing them, but, unfortunately, he finds himself subjected to other conditions still worse ; for nothing is easier than for renters of bad faith to buy up the judge to the end that he may give them a long time to pay what is due, and the owner considers himself lucky if at the end of a year he should succeed in getting possession of his house, though losing all the rent. To avoid such prejudices, such scenes as these related below occur in which the sentiments of the renter are appealed to: u My friend, be so good as to leave my house. In such case I demand nothing of you for the last six months.” “My dear sir,” answered the other, “I am so much in love with your house that it would cause me much pain to leave it.” “Be just,” replies the owner, “I will pay the cost of moving.” “I am always at your service,” sneers the renter, “ but I am well here.” “ Very well, we must go to law.” “ Well, we will go into the courts then,” is the last answer.*
In Cuba it is not the creditor who passes along with high head before his debtor, for the latter occupies the sidewalk ; and this is easily understood, for as there is no such thing as imprisonment for debt, the debtor readily runs the risk of prison. In 1887, Tacon took out of the Havana prison a mason who had been shut up there for forty years, because he had demanded of a marquis his dues, and who probably pleaded to the jurisdiction of the court. In 1867, at Santiago de Cuba, a tailor asked of a rich man, for the second time, for the amount of his bill, which was a just one. The debtor put him off to the Greek kalends, which excited the indignation of the creditor, and he replied with some warm expressions. In any other country the matter would have gone at once before a competent tribunal,
* General Dulce slightly modified the rent-law by decree of 16th February, 1869. It was but little bettered.which would most probably have decided against the debtor ; but here, on the contrary, it was brought before the court of a drunken governor, who without delay, gave the decision in favor of the rich man and against the poor one, in favor of the friend and against the man unknown, and ordered the tailor to prison. It would seem that with so many especial jurisdictions, the ordinary tribunals could do all the labor occurring in the year; but this is not so, if we believe the statement of the Regent of the Real Audiencia in his opening discourse pronounced 2nd of January, 1868, wherein he said: “The number of processes determined in the different courts of the Audiencia for the year 1866, amounted to 8,453, of which 4,678 ended by a sentence of sobresamiento (discharged for want of proof.)* This is not because the worthy part of the people are brawlers or disposed to wrangle, but for the reason that the bad have the means of carrying on the litigation gratuitously, which is effected by having themselves previously declared, either really or pretendedly insolvent—that which confers another additional privilege or right of jurisdiction. Though the judges might be incorruptible and infallible, it is readily seen that in a proceeding so complicated, resources minister to the want of probity. There are, indeed, accommodations in the administration of Cuban justice, and with a few humble exceptions, the judges are not insensible to bribery. At each change of the ministry there is a complete change of the personnel of those administering justice ; and from their offices at Madrid the larger part of the magistrates for the island come. Ignorant of the interests of the country on local customs, they cannot form a correct opinion even were they honest and possessing experience and a sense of justice. In short, the Cubans are deprived of the precious guaranty afforded by trial by jury; and a single alcalde mayor renders alone, unaided, a decision which disposes of a man's life ! This, however, is subject to the revision and ratification of the Real Audiencia. The influence produced by the decision of the judge who first tried the prisoner, can be readily divined.
This system of justice has been passed upon by one of the best known Spanish Magistrates, Yarques Quivpo, fiscal that was of the Real Audiencia at Havana. “If justice was not dearer,” says he, this would be only the half of the evil. Is it not worse when dearly-bought justice purchased is not then obtained, notwithstanding the painful sacrifice made ? t
In France, in England, in Spain it is certainly not cheap, but one can
* The documents shows the crimes and misdemeanors to have been as follows: 4,000 offences against public order—that is to say, 35 more than in the previous year. 2,033 attempts against the person —348 more than previous year. 2,867 against property—202 more than the year before; 52 charges for deceit—12 more than in previous year; 51 against employees while in the exercise of their functions—7 more than previous year. The crimes were: a patricide, three infanticides, 160 homicides (13 more than the year before). Here is an example of the progress of moral and public order! t Informe fiscal of Dr. V.Vazquez Quipo. Madrid, 1845.expect reasonably to obtain it. This is not the case in the Island. It is not so in the Island, we repeat it. Reform does not consist in diminishing the expenses of justice which would be indeed, desirable, but in the fact it maybe secured. Nor can this be done, unless there be adopted a press law, clear and explicit, which will make effective the judicial responsibility. While these desired reforms are delayed, the prosperity of the Island is retarded by the nullity of a legal guaranty, by a want of reciprocal confidence in business affairs, by a timidity of capital and its consequent scarcity, because the lender knows that he must take into account the danger of loss, and so varies the rate of interest. Thus it is discovered that the great obstacle to the progress of a country is not the insalubrity of the soil, nor the heat of the climate, the insufficiency of the roads, and their little security, but consists in the want of legal guarantees which every man seeks for his liberty, his life and property.
It is clear that the absence of legal guarantees conduces to the taking of arbitrary means of order and security in order to supply them, whence springs the continual intervention of the authorities in the domain of the tribunal, and the shipping away en masse of the people, which policy Tacon, O’Donnell, and Lersemdi thought themselves obliged to recur to.
Without desiring to go back further than O’Donnell’s time, let it be said, that he, desiring to purge the island of vagabonds, adopted the idea of colonizing a desert isle, to favor the establishment of an industrial association, and to enrich, at the same time, his pocket. “ A company,” says M. de Harponville, “ was formed to exploit the Isle of Pines, which is situated to the south of Cuba.” *
This company was not slow in making money, but it owed this to the immoral and efficacious protection which the Captain-General lent to it.
The slave trade which he protected, or, at any rate, tolerated, inspired him with the idea of making white slaves, and, protected by the omnipotence and want of responsibility of his government, he did not fear to order to forced labor in the mines free white men. This order fell upon the people of the towns, and, above all, in the country, without questions being asked, or condemnations having been made. The pretext was that these men were vagabonds and of bad habits. The company made a present to his Excellency and to his wife of 200 shares, and while the Governor-General was enriching himself, the sycophants, who held the carte blanche to gather up men, made certain pretended vagabonds pay very dearly for their exemptions, some of whom were compelled to pay for their release as much as their weight in gold !
La Reine des Antilles, pp. 124.General Lersemdi had recourse to the same heroic remedy, but he did not make any capital by it. He contented himself with taking from the Havana prisons those who had fallen for the second time in crime, the in-corrigibles, and those who were upon process for correction by the police, and whose causes had not been ended by the laborious Audiencia, and these were embarked for Fernando Po on the coast of Africa. As a means of security and of warning to those interested, he caused a list to be made up of all those on the Island who lived without occupation of any kind, and who could not show some means of subsistence.
If arbitrary methods had not always produced bad effects, we should not complain though the sword might be hurtful and of two edges. What a suitable pretext, so convenient to get rid of all independent characters who exhibited any spirit toward the government ? Proceedings so expeditious might be deemed unjustifiable, even if supposed to be applied by perfect beings. But if the Captain-General were so, does that follow that his subalterns are so too ? With the exception of a few old officers who are found in the body of police, it is a thing well-known that the men who do the seizing are the dregs of the population. This the frequent discharges from employment for prevarication and numerous examples, which might be cited, abundantly prove.*
Justice only condemns to be sold those slaves sentenced whose masters are unwilling to pay the costs of the cause, doubtless, to the end that they may commit if they feel disposed, other crimes ! t
The governor has an established gambling house. This bears the pompous title of “ Royal Lottery of the Ever Faithful Island of Cuba,” which up to 1822, had already made for its owner, the (king), $5,865,625. Pezuela in his Dictionary calls the lottery the “ branch of service especially working in the interests of the Treasury, with more certainty than any other for the sources of revenues.” The Administration receives to itself as a product the one-fourth part of the capital to which the sum of the tickets amount. In 1864, 546,000 tickets were sold at the rate of $16 each, which made up the enormous amount of $8,786,000. When the taxes had been increased at the time of the crisis, the passion of all classes, including the slaves, was converted into a perfect furore. For this reason, the government drew, in addition to the eighteen ordinary lotteries, two other extraordinary,
* F. Dargo, Captain of partido of Jarrigua, says “ El Oriental,” of Hoguin has run away with the tax money, (July, 1868). “ In the night of June 1,1867, says El Boletin de Cardenas, some Chinamen led before the local authorities a white man tied, who had a knite (punal), saying that this man and a companion who made his escape” tried to rob them. The prisoner was no other than a night-watch, and his companion had been discharged 15 days before because of his bad conduct.” Do the police add themselves to the number of thieves ? This would indicate a propensity for monopoly.
t When a slave is apprehended for a great misdemeanor he is given over to justice because of the fear of expense in defending him, which may be more than his value. Whether guilty or no the expense must be paid, if absolved, immediately; if condemned, after his punishment has been expiated.and of high-priced tickets, all without prejudice to the lottery at Madrid, whose billets were also distributed throughout the island. The government does not admit competitors. Nothing is more immoral than this official institution, which extracts all the gains of the poor, and diverts him from labor and honest earnings with the deceptive hope of a fortune acquired at a single stroke! The desire of gaming is fostered by this means, and it becomes general; for, notwithstanding the legal prohibition of private lotteries, and of gaming, each one has his own lottery under the special title of “ raffle.” Men raffle off their horses or watches—the ladies their bracelets and dresses.
Gaming penetrated formerly into the convents,* and in a nearer epoch (1858 to 1862), extended its green table as far as the public square of Santiago de Cuba on the feast days, paying for the privilege a tax to the City Council, which was for the benefit of works of public improvement. Gambling goes on in concealed places where people of importance do not feel ashamed to go. In the country the veguero bets away his crop of tobacco while growing, and the overseer of a farm gambles off at times his oxen, hard pressed as he may be to support his family. The police cannot prevent it. More disposed to annoy than to be vigilant in the cities, there is hardly any in the country, where each captain del partido counts three or four guards on horseback, and whose principal business is to carry about the mails. The former stifles the essence, the latter kills the spirit that which is strictly insisted upon ; nothing beyond is deemed necessary.
To save appearances—this is the essential, and to spend much for stamped paper, which is for the interests of the state. In a country which is one-fourth part as large in extent as Spain, and whose inhabitants do not number beyond 1,400,000 inhabitants, which is equivalent to 289 for each square league, the same police regulations are applied as in Spain. Not only the rural police and judicial proceedings are regulated in this manner, but all the branches of administration likewise. “ The proof of the want of order in the government which we deplore is the immense number of rules and dispositions derogatory, in great part, the one of the other, in all matters of administration, and which no one, even those who are to administer them, knows. These dispositions, made by persons who are constantly being relieved from duty, and who consequently cannot become familiar with the country that they go out to aid in ruling, cannot produce other effect than to place the government in ridicule. As for example, the famous rural ordinances of 1856, (afterwards amended), by which premiums were conceded for capturing wolves, foxes and other ferocious animals, when
* Statement of Gen. Tacon on the state of the country after his arrival.81
there were never such animals to be found in the country, but whose stuffed skins were occasionally to be met with in cabinets of natural history.” (Información Sobre Reformas, New York, 1867).
A Spanish writer, Alcana Galiano, in his book entitled “ Cuba in 1858,” says, while criticising the mania for rules : “ No one knows with exactitude that which has been ordered, nor that which has been put forth as an order, nor when nor how the order should be applied.” All of us who have lived in Cuba are fully advised in this particular. Go into an office of the government upon any matters of business. “ My friend, where is your petition ?” is the first question asked. “But I come only to ask about a very simple thing. I only want a word with you.” The reply is : “ Put in your written application.” On the following day the party comes in with a memorial on stamped paper, as a matter of course. “ Well, come in day after tomorrow.” That day arrives, but the business is not arranged, and the further answer is given, “ Come to-morrow morning.” At last the matter is favorably passed upon, but nothing has been really done. Should my adversary practice a little underhand management, I am stopped. Certain little gifts (moneys) serve as an additional compensation to subalterns badly paid, who serve as intermediaries between the petitioner and the Superior Authority. This is a compensation which makes up for the delays of payment of salaries, which at times are in retard a whole year, and subject in critical times (which frequently happen) to be paid with deductions. In truth, the state makes as much out of stamped paper as the employees out of their clients.
IV.
Let us now examine how the other branches of the State are directed, as public works; public instruction; worship, for this, unfortunately, belongs to the public service.
Public works figure in the money statement fer the fiscal year of 1866—67 to the amount of $194,591, and the pay of the engineers charged with carrying them on foot up to $106,249. Is the proportion strong enough ? It seems to me a labor well paid for. And then there are no roads in the country, except those constructed and kept up by the inhabitants. There is not a single port opened or prepared by tbe hand of man, not a river canalized, not a marsh drained. The bridges over the streams are such as they may be classed, neither good nor bad, and are so useless in time of great rains as that the mails are detained for days, because there is82
no way of crossing them. There are not 150 miles of roads for wagons in a country whose superfice measures 8,604 square maritime leagues, and which pays 175,000,000 fcs. ($85,000,000) of taxes. So transportation is carried on by mules, except in the Western Department, where there is a sufficiency of railways to answer the purposes of agriculture. But these railways are due only to the public spirit of the inhabitants and to private industry. There is a territory of 111 square leagues, composed of the most beautiful country ever seen, and peopled by 88,678 inhabitants, which vegetates in misery by reason of a want of communications to pass out its products to market; this is the Department of Bayamo.
This section is watered by a majestic river, sixty leagues in length, and whose bottom is deep enough to permit the passage of the largest ship for twenty-two leagues distance. The Spanish caravels of the first century following the conquest went up this stream to take on board wood, suitable for cabinet makers, and hides, which formed its only wealth. In 1816, a great flood bore along the trees that had been left cut upon its banks, and with them made a bar upon its mouth. This bar still exists, and will most probably remain there until the Americans go and open it to their profit. Until this takes place, a district most richly endowed by nature, will remain robbed of half its population, and only half way utilized.
The bay of Nipe extends out into an area of 712 square leagues, deep up to its shores, easy of access and well protected. It is one of the most beautiful as well as the best bays in the world. Thanks to its position on the northern coast, and the advantages before detailed, it could become one of the best markets in the Island. But now its fertile and smiling shores do not present to the sight of the admiring traveller other than a small cultivated district, which is called Mayari, and is situated on the river of that name. There is no road which leads out into the green belts surrounding it, and the port has not been habilitated. What does this barbarous word signify ? That it is closed to commerce.
And what of popular education ! It hardly exists in the country and in the towns. To open schools for the free colored imposes heavy sacrifices. These schools which the Councils furnish, and whose expenses they propose to defray, derive much more money from associations of beneficence, called Sociedades Economicas de Amigos del Pais. The proportion of persons who can read, excepting the slaves, is greater in Cuba than in the provinces of the Peninsula Ibérica, (Informacin sobre Beformas). And in what respect does the government lend its aid ? In no wise. It simply favors it with Platonic stimulants, and as the Councils have been shorn of the greater part of their resources by the decree of the 12th of February, 1867, the greater part of the schools are going to be closed for want of teachers. InW
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effect these as well as the professors in the institutes of the second class schools have had no money, it is now 18 months, and the Diario de Cuba of the 18th of March, written under the eye of the censor, represents them as without shoes or clothing, dead of hunger, annoyed by implacable creditors, and obliged to look to other resources for an honorable means of living. Would it not be supposed from this that the government is negligent in the matter of literature ? I refer to the testimony of a respectable member of the city council of Guantanamo, who lately said to me : “ Our municipality received, it is now two years, an official communication from the governor of this department,” the tenor of which was: “ The Most Excellent Señor Governor Superior Civil, recommends to all the councils the purchase of the important work of Dr. Lanuela, because of its practical utility in the country, for the practice of medicine in private families. The consequence is, that the city council of Guantanamo ought *to subscribe for a respectable number of copies for distribution among the laboring men. The Governor of the Eastern Department, Juan Jose de Villar.” The cost was $200. The same recommendation was repeated with reference to the “ magnificent work of Dr. Villalon” on Agriculture.
Moreover, what is that which the state favors ? The religion, Catholic, Apostolic, Romanic, without doubt ? Yes, not that she ruins herself in founding parishes, for the country needs both churches and pastors, nor in disseminating religious instruction among the masses. Certain good regulations have been published, which are not, however, observed. A few Dracodian laws, which are, happily, not regarded at all. Good examples are given by paying profusely the high dignitaries of the church. For example, the Metropolitan Archbishop of Santiago de Cuba has an income of $18,000 per annum, which he duplicates by subventions—total, $36,000. Poor man ! The individual of whom we speak is the Most Excellent, Illustrious, and Most Reverend Señor Doctor Don Such-an-one, most worthy Archbishop of this Diocese. And now, having heard all these titles pro- -nounced, does it not seem that he is indeed well paid ? The salary of the Bishop of Havana is, however, larger. The Vicars General, the Canons, the Prebendaries, are paid in proportion. As to the smaller clergy, evangelical poverty is its patrimony, a little more or less everywhere.
We have said that the government gives a good example. This is a matter of justice due it to say. Every traveller who passes through Cuba on St. James’ day, can see the patron of Spain, with cap and sword, mounted on horseback, passing through the streets, followed by a brilliant
* Nearly all the Corporations have titles ; The City Council of Havana is Most Excellent. Besides those of the large towns are called Most Illustrious, while Illustrious_ is applied to the Councils of the smaller places. If Spain does draw a sufficient sum of money, she gives back at least a good number of titles.
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cortege, in which figure all the authorities, civil, religious, and military, In the same way, on Holy Friday, the Captain-General at Havana, and his representatives in the other points of the isle, make it a duty to follow the image of the Mother of Sorrows, whose bosom is pierced by a sword. These go in procession, heads uncovered, and tapers in hand. On the week of Pentecost, we have seen the troops conducted, for four consecutive days, to mass, the first three being in honour of the Holy Spirit, and the last for St. Anthony, of Padua. A third part of the year is made up of fête days, whose observance is prescribed by the civil law ; and, as the church does not grant enough, to these have been added numerous political holidays. In the last monarchy there were six of these : two in honour of a our bounteous Queen,” two for the King, and two for the Heir Presumptive. The negroes have their fête days likewise ; among these are numbered that of St. Christina. The country not only loses the money that would have been made by labor on these feast days, but spends, besides, a great deal of means already accumulated. We are ruined by the holidays—one injures the other, and the priest of some new saint adds for ever more to his cash-box.* Besides, the government occupies itself in avoiding the poison of heresy, the proof which is to be found in Article 1st of the royal order of 1817, always in full force. Strangers, subjects of foreign nations, who come to establish themselves in the Island of Cuba, should swear that they profess the religion, Catholic, Apostolic and Boman, and without this indispensable condition, they will not be permitted to domicile themselves. +
The rules of govemacion and police say in the first article : “ Sundays and days of precept will be observed, as prescribed by our Holy Mother Church,” and in the second article : “ When the Viaticum or Host is met in the streets, every one should get down upon his knees, and those on horseback and in carriages should descend, in order that they may do the same.”
V.
The government protects, likewise, commerce, but in the interests of Spain, though without much benefit, as the letter of General Dulce, written to the Minister of the Colonies, in 1867, declares: “ The cause of trouble
* On the ioth day of June, 1868, “ El Redactor,” the periodical official of the Eastern Department, distributed an extra, divided into two columns. In the first, there were the words: “ Official.—The procession of the most holy Corpus Christi, suspended because of bad weather, will take place on to-morrow, Sunday, the 14th, at 6 o’clock in the moraine.” In the second, there was this announcement: “ Royal Lottery of the Ever Faithful Island of Cuba. The largest premiums.” (Here follows the list of the premiums).
t Or swear that within two years they will become Catholics. Note of translator.85
and of the inquietude which oppresses the Island of Cuba should he sought for to a great extent in the tariff laws, which, under pretext of protection, make impossible a commerce carried on in good faith, render sluggish commercial and maritime movements, foster fraud, as well as make impossible a legitimate commerce, under which said aspects both national and colonial interests suffer. The custom-house system is very expensive, overloaded with formalities which do not impede fraud, but which embarrass and annoy honest trade. The ordonnance of matriculas, in lieu of protecting industry upon the seas, has well-nigh destroyed it, and in an Island where the multitude and excellency of its ports are well-known, there are to be found numerous keys on the coast which afford large facilities for coasting and fisheries.
Notwithstanding the number and excellence of its ports, of which General Dulce speaks, only fifteen are used for commercial purposes, on a coast of 560 leagues in extent. Wherefore ? Because the others are not opened.
Spain has reserved the monopoly of flour in Cuba to the farmers of Castille by the aid of an enormous differential duty. From this it results that bread, aliment of the first necessity among every civilized people, and especially those of the Latin race, has been converted into a luxury, and is placed beyond the reach of the poor ; for a pound of bread is sold at about twelve pence. The population of the Island in round numbers is about 1,400,000 souls; the consumption of flour annually is 75,000,000 lbs., according to the last statistics. The result is that each inhabitant consumes 53 lbs. 9 oz. the year, while in Spain the consumption is 400 lbs. for each individual. Here is a people condemned to live without bread for the greater benefit of the agriculturists of Castille. If the disposition should be felt to make the most of this monopoly, yet whole years pass occasionally as in the last, in which there is found to be more money gained by consuming the flour in Spain, or in sending it off to the rest of Europe, and not sending any to Cuba; there resulting in this way a protection which has nothing to protect, and a monopoly which has nothing upon which to use its power. As to the United States, Cuba cannot ask of them provisions, for since 1844, by way of reprisals for the excessive duties levied by Spain, the Union determined: 1st. That every Spanish ship which comes to the United States shall give bond in double the amount of the cargo taken on board. 2nd. That vessels coming from Cuba, over and above the differential duties common to the flags of all nations, shall pay an additional duty equivalent to the duty imposed in Cuba between the national and American flags.
If at any time the Castillians send their flour to Cuba, where a similar foreign product pays a differential duty of $320 per barrel of 200 lbs. inexchange, they do not receive our products except by the payment of an enormous tax for the privilege of entry, which in 1868 amounted for the Island of Cuba and Porto Rico, so high as 208,257,889 reals vellon, say : $10,412,866 91. The duties of entry are so high, that only, sugars of a superior quality can be imported into Spain, for no one thinks of introducing the inferior qualities, their selling price being only the one half, they are made to pay the same duty, The truth is, that these enter the Peninsula by way of France and Germany, after being refined in those countries. Thus it is understood in Spain how protection is given to its sugar refineries.
The result is that while Spain through her colonies is the greatest producer of sugars, she is the smallest consumer of them, according to the statistics found in the Diccoinary of Commerce and Navigation, which gives the consumption of sugars for each inhabitant in the different countries during the period of 1856 to 1859. She figures in the last rank even after the Roman States and the Government of Naples, at the rate of 760 grammes for each inhabitant, while England figures in the list at the rate of 15 kilogrammes 186 grammes. If Spain would deign to lower her tariffs, Cuba would sell her sugars, because there would then be more demand, and it is even probable that the government would gain by the operation. That which has been said with respect to sugars can be repeated as to coffee and cocoa; as to tobacco, it follows that the Island has to struggle with a state monopoly. Thus we see the proportion in which the tobacco of Cuba is used in Spain compared with that which is received from other countries. For the year 1862 and in the first six months of 1868, there entered for consumption, according to an official statement: Tobacco from Cuba, 5,105,664 lbs., Phillipines, 5,286,876 lbs., from foreign countries, 27,215,606 lbs.; that is to say, 78° of tobacco from other countries against 27° raised in its own colonies. In this manner the Spaniards are condemned by the fisc to use a tobacco of inferior quality when they have colonies which produce the finest tobacco in the world. What do we see in all this ? That the ships of Bremen and Hamburg come to Cuba for the purpose of loading tobacco in leaf, which is to be worked up abroad, and afterwards to be sold in the United States and Europe as Havana Tobacco.
The government has other means of favoring maritime commerce: for example, by obliging coasting steamers to transport its employees, its soldiers and effects, upon the presentation of an order from the treasury, which will pay when it can. Since the war, this protection has increased. This caused ships to be presented to the government, which are afterwards armed, or, at least, are diverted from their regular course of service in order that troops may be transported, cannons, ammunition of war, and these are87
paid for by a letter rendering thanks to the proprietor for the gratuitous service he has rendered the state. The merchant who receives this attentive recognition, proposes to himself, though it may be somewhat late to do so, that he will not again be thus used; but in fifteen days the same request is made, and this is always followed by a prompt obedience—in spite of all reclamations. Lucky is, indeed, the party fitting out if, by reason of dulness, his vessel be not sunk, as was the case with the “ El Cobrero.”
I reserve space within which to speak of the gavel duties, and the exactions without number which weigh upon the country. Here I will not cite more than one in which commerce suffers particulary. Every letter which the French and English steamers bring, though paid abroad, pays here lfc. —25c., and those coming from the United States, 12£c.* The journals and pamphlets pay more still, in proportion, and are calculated arbitrarily, according as they come by the mail from Havana or Santiago de Cuba. The amount varies, even to doubling itself, but is never less than 1 real fuerte, 68 centimes of a franc (12£ cents.) And you need not suppose that the letters and papers are going to be carried to your residence. It is necessary to go and ask for them at the post-office; and, if not, an additional 12 centimes (12J cents), is to be paid to the carrier. In vain have commercial men cried out against this gavel tax, which is onerous all the year round. Never has the slightest concession been obtained. Spain has taken care while celebrating postal treaties with France, to exclude her colonies from their benefits; and she is surprised that these colonies now would like to get rid of the union ! Add to all these things, so agreeable as they are, the most detestable of money systems, which, because of an exact relation between silver and gold, makes us pay more dearly and sell at cheaper rates in our negotiations abroad and with Spain. This phenomenon is due to the fact that an imaginative value is given to gold of 6J per cent, more than its actual weight—the object being solely, it is said, to keep it in the country. This is achieved, in fact, but the same process carries off all the silver.
The administration, desiring to remedy this evil,, increased the value of fractional money (1827 to 1840) to 25 per cent. Silver ran as a sheep, while the gold flew away.
Twenty cent pieces were again brought down to their true value; but as gold values were unchanged, silver went down the same track by which it had come up, and it became necessary to have recourse to foreign moneys (silver), which, fixed at a rate lower than was the Spanish value, lost nothing by entering into relations with over-valued gold. American money
* Even more is paid. Letters which come from Jamaica and Mexico pay afc.—50c.arrived, but not in sufficient quantity ; and hence a stimulus was given to French franc pieces (20 cents), and the five cent American pieces were received at par—that is to say, for five cents—and these were introduced into commerce with a real French vivacity. Commerce manifested a disquietude at this overloading speculation, and refused to receive the 20 centime pieces, except at one-half of what they had been taken. There was a crisis in the bodegas (provision stores), and among the lower people. Now the authorities intervened, saying “ Restless as is the most Excellent Captain-General and Governor Superior Civil for the well-being of the people, he has decided that the 20 centime pieces of French money shall continue to pass for 5 cents in the smaller classes of commerce.” The merchants rose against this order of the Captain-General, who, ever indefatigable and never erring, launched forth another decree, reducing the value of the piece to 4 cents. But the panic had commenced, and no one was willing to take it at this price. The Head Authority, surprised because of his not being able to control the money market as a camp, reiterated the orders, supporting them by heavy fines and imprisonment. He did not succeed in this, and the speculation was charged with shipping these moneys back the way whence they had come.
VI.
“ Agriculture is the stomach of States,” said Sully. Let us see how Spain treats this organ. The isle of Cuba counts 881,281 freemen and slaves devoted to agricultural labors—that is to say, of the three-fourths part of the fixed population, and pays consequently, the three-fourth part of the taxes. These ascended in 1867 to $32,882,253, according to the last statistics. The net product of rural property amounted to $38,032,502, which, in proportion to the three-fourth part of the tax, pays, consequently, $24,661,639. Add to this the fact that the tax is paid nearly always by anticipation, and agriculture, it will be seen, pays not exactly upon the taxes, but upon the expectation of the taxes. Hence, the necessity of asking a loan, of making a contract of refaction, which is the same thing; a necessity so much the more prejudicial, as the interest of the money is superior to that which the lands produce. That precious territory, known
* Decree 27th August, 1868.89
to the smokers of the whole world, and which possesses many natural ports whence all its products might be commodiously shipped, is obliged to transport them by means of mules, tracing routes which have no name, and rivers, even, up to the opened port. This is not all. Commerce of importation and exportation cannot be carried on in the same territory, and the vegueros find themselves compelled, in order to have objects of prime necessity, to submit to the law of the laboring population, which provides a credit based upon the next crop, and obtains for them money upon the same guarantees at an usurious rate, as high as from eighteen to twenty-four per cent. “ The truth is, and is important to be known,” say the delegates to Madrid, in 1866, “ that the principal Cuban product, sugar, causes at present a loss to those who devote their time and capital to it. The proprietors of estates are nothing more than simple administrators of property, the products of which are absorbed by taxes and usury. Let the mortgage offices be examined, and we shall see the different failures which daily occur.” In an extensive and judicious report presented to the Captain-General by Don Juan Poey, one of the largest proprietors in the Island, it has been demonstrated from the best ascertained facts, that, taking into account the total production of sugar in the country, there is an annual loss of $1,840,117, which is divided among the 1,865 sugar estates, or 487—1000 per cent, on the capital employed, and this interest, without taking into account the cost of insuring the machinery, houses, &c., the epidemics to which the negroes are subject as well as animals, nor the deterioration of capital employed on the lands, the establishments and machinery. If we pass over from sugar to tobacco, whose cultivation is in the second degree the; nerve of our agriculture, and the base of a very rich export, we see with alarm and pain that it moves off to other districts. .	.	. Coffee, a prin-
cipal source of abundant and valuable commerce in a day not far behind us, succumbed at last to the blows of our economical and tax-gathering legislation, so much so as that the question is now being raised whether there shall be enough made for our own consumption. And thus disconsolate, let us cut off from view this decadence of our richest agricultural industries in order to fix it upon those more modest, though not less important ones, which give life and occupation to the most rural of our population, where poverty, frequently misery, with all its suite of ills annexed presents itself to us in all its horrible nakedness. Thus we shall be convinced that there exists a profound disturbance, in all the elements that go to make up the country wealth of Cuba, much stronger than the efforts of science or the will of those who till the soil, and which cannot be remedied by more hands, with which it is pretended to combat it. (Información sobre Eeformas). What, then, are the disturbing elements that cause these evils ? Before all90
others, slavery! A short calculation is sufficient to demonstrate that the production of slave, is dearer than that of, free labor.
Let us suppose an estate which needs 800 hands; if the work be done by free labor, calculating the price at half a dollar per day for each hand, and fixing the nmber of work days at 250 during the year, which is the largest number employed in agricultural labor, the proprietors will have to pay out $87,500. But the Cuban estate owners, in order to have 800 day laborers, must employ at least 850 slaves, for from this number a deduction must be made for the old, infirm and children. These slaves, at the moderate price of $500 each, represent a capital of $175,000; they must be lodged, fed, taken care of, clothed and even baptized and buried, that which cannot be done except at an outlay of money; so that, even supposing the expenses cf keeping them is equal to the one half of the free laborers, who cannot cost less than $31,987 to the proprietor at the end of 365 days, which sum added to the interest of $17,000 at 10 per cent., makes $49,487,* the result is $11,397 more than in the first case supposed, and which did not involve the necessity of employing a capital of $175,000.
In the first case the sugar planter does not need more than $37,500 for carrying on his establishment; in the second he needs $175,0004-$81,987=206,000. The consequence of this excess of capital in the production is to make it exceedingly costly and possible only when products of great value, such as sugars, coffee, and tobacco are to be raised ; and even then their price in the market are such as that they are in a poor condition to meet the same sorts of products coming from other countries. To these evils which harass agriculture, there is to be added the excessive cost of articles of consumption and handicraft (provisions, sausages, clothing, instruments, &c.) which come from abroad, and are taxed when imported by a heavy duty at the custom-house and a direct tax. likewise, at 14 per cent.; so that the production is found to fall in exceptional conditions, and the producers in the road to bankruptcy.
It is not alone by reason of the great amount of capital employed that the cost of production is increased; it is by reason of the inferiority of. slave labor. Señor Poey, planting himself upon the official statistics, has demonstrated that with a middling force of 145 laborers, an estate makes 1887 boxes of middling product, whilst the experiences and example of foreign colonies show that 64 laborers aged from 10 to 60 years, are sufficient to the production. From which results there are an excess of 71 laborers, who at a valuation of $800 dollars each, the mean price of an adult slave, necessitates the employment of an unproductive capital of $56,800
* The interest is supposed to be io per cent., but the common rate is 12 per cent.91
on each estate. The inferiority of servile labor results from ignorance, from the want of enterprise and the absence of emulation on the part of the laborers, and those defects, in their turn, throw their influence back upon the proprietor, keeping him in the same routine and hindering agricultural progress in which there must be some intelligence with the laborer. So it happens that there is not to be seen in Cuba none of those new industrial proceedings of which the Americans make such admirable use, and which are adapted to all kinds of farm labor from the rude work of felling timber to the delicate process of sowing seed, of the cultivation, and in-gathering of the crop. There are no sawing machines to cut up the giants of the forest, no apparatus to draw up the roots from the earth, no steam machines, no ploughs to break up the virgin soil, no machines to sow or to plant, no scythes to cut the cane as is done by wheat and hay. All this is done by muscular force, with instruments of the most primitive kind. This requires more men and animals, and, as a matter of course more capital with less product. The scanty profit of slave labor, united to the cheapness and abundance of land, has conduced to a system of cultivation in which there is asked from the soil that which cannot be exacted from imperfect labor. For this reason we see agriculture obliged to seek new land, because of the sterility which comes upon those already opened by reason of ignorance, thus abandoning considerable capital and leaving behind devastation and desert places. The cultivation loses in intensity what it gains in extensiveness. According to Don Juan Poey, the mean extent of the estate is equal to 42J* caballerias of land, the value of which does not fall below $63,510, and which ought to render a product of 2,109 arrobas per each caballeria, notwithstanding in Jamaica and Bengal, a sugar estate mean rendering is estimated at 5,755 arrobas; in the Reunion, 7,425 arrobas; in Barbadoes and in English Guiana, 9,609 arrobas. “ Undoubtedly,*’ remarks he, “ none of the colonies have better lands than Cuba, but free labor, which has taken place of slave labor, permits a use of means more perfect. If the cultivation of the cane had been so far advanced as in Barbadoes and Guiana, 9,29—00 caballerias of land would give the same amount of sugar as the 42£ caballerias before mentioned, and in the installation of this estate of 9,29—00 callebrias there would be saved $44,475, the interest of which at the lowest rate, 9 per cent., would have a tendency to reduce the general expenses.”
The remedy, one would say, is easy: “ Give liberty to the slaves, and call them freemen.” That is just what is desired by the intelligent men of the country; that is what was vainly demanded by the delegates of Cuba
* The caballeria is equal to 3 hectares, 42 areas, about 33J acres. La arrobáis.—25 lbs.92
and Porto Bico, at Madrid, in 1866. By a Michaelivan policy, Spain is forced to preserve slavery, that she may oppose the brutal elements of the negro race to the legitimate aspirations of the white race. This is what the profound statesmen of Spain have honored with the expression—equilibrium of the races in the Island of Cuba. We give place to the statement of the representatives of Cuba to the government in 1866, to the end that the reader may see on which side is the wrong, and where should rest, according to impartial history, the opprobrium of preserving slavery up to this good day.
jj We protest,” said they, “ in the most solemn manner against the theory of a commission of government, which, up to yesterday even, had not indicated the equilibrium of the races in Cuba as a means of order and conservatism, thus giving a sad proof of its political designs, and of its love for civilization ! If we be told that only the black and yellow races are capacitated by nature for agricultural labor in a tropical climate—that the severity of this labor and the rigours of that climate, as well as its moderate cost, will be always a powerful obstacle to white immigration, we reply : This argument is not new. It has been made from the time of the conquest, and has ever had a support in the ignorance and avarice, which brought about the slave trade as well as slavery.”
Not to speak of the great number of agents, of engineers, of employees, European and American in origin, and who are engaged upon the ingeuos, the labor on ports, streets, quarries and railroads is done almost wholly by white labor.
More than this ; not only a great number of immigrants prefer agriculture on a small scale and for their own proper account as the Vizcainos and Gallegos, but there is a great number of employees, upon salaries, in the great fabrics considered, up to the present, as worked by negroes and Chinese. The official statistics number 41,621 whites employed on estates. Don Juan Poey, upon the authority of figures furnished by Dr. Artenor Betancourt, Eegidor de Holquin, tells us that in 1861 there were in that jurisdiction three small estates worked exclusively by whites, and there are now in the Island 200 small farms on which canes are grown and sugar made. In Cuba, the statistics prove that of the 798,484 whites (1861) 454,597 were devoted to agriculture. This demonstrates, likewise, that of the total of the agricultural population, being 853,242, 53f per cent, is white, 12J per cent, free colored, and 34£ are slaves ; proportions which are fruitful of reflection.
The progressive increase of the white population in the Island, which has mounted since 1795 from 86,440 to 798,484—does it not prove the emptiness of the statement that the climate hinders immigration and the in-crease of tlie white race ? What would be the consequence, if instead of being impeded, immigration were fostered and stimulated ? Why is it not larger ? Because the laborers find their places occupied by the negroes and Chinese; because of the gloom inseparable from the system of slavery which degrades and renders vile all labor, dispenses with intelligence and suppresses the free will of the laborer, rendering him a docile and inert instrument of the will of another, inaugurating thus in Cuba a brutal and destructive system of agriculture, which, at the same time that it wastes the soil, ruins the generations of laborers, sacrificing unnumbered victims to its avarice. In vain would it be to counsel the Cubans to reform their agriculture, as though it were not necessary to make a change in order to avoid henceforth a heap of obstacles foreign to science and the art of agriculture, and independent of its action and will. As if agriculture did not have a foundation in the very vitals of that society in which it was cradled, and as if it were thrown out of accord with the institutions which direct it.
Agriculture, the object of which is the production of riches—can it get along without roads, rivers, and maritime communications ? Is it dependent of the market situation, of commercial treaties, of the regimen of the custom-house, of the credit system, of the security of things and persons, of the administration of justice, of municipal management, as well as of provincial, of public instruction, in a word, of all the elements which combine to form the government of a society ? To pretend to better or to transform agriculture in the midst of immutable exterior conditions, of sedentary institutions, of elements economo-political which do not favor it, is to betray an ignorance of its nature and its laws.
To transform of itself a system of agriculture, which to-day owes its deplorable condition (as we have explained) to these same causes, and to the mode of governing, which has brought it about, overwhelmed by a mortgage debt, which represents nearly the whole of its fixed capital, and the interest on which absorbs the greater part of the current production ! .	.	. to transform itself, in spite of a concurrence of exterior causes, of
the most active kind, punished in its better markets by the system of reprisals originating out of our hard customs’ tariffs ; forced to sell at the lowest prices, to the end that articles of its own consumption and elaboration may be purchased at an extra price of at least 30 per cent. ... to transform it, when guarantees and security in the interior are wanting, without streets and neighbourhood roads, without institutes of learning of a primary class or schools wherein it may be taught, subject as they are to the abuses and arbitrary conduct of the lesser authorities and its moral agents .	.	. which pays more than 75 per cent, of the enormous taxof $32,852,228, to which is to be added nearly 18 per cent, on the crude, and of 48 per cent, on the net product.” . . . transform it, no; to transform it would be to ruin it completely, because there would be nothing left; it would not tend to put it in a condition to undertake the bettering of it in the way which science indicates.
To this end, nothing resembling the slave trade, nor the introduction of Chinese, which is a masked slave trade, is worth anything. That which is necessary is the suppression of embarrassments in the custom house; the abolition of injustice in the public administration, as well as its reparation: a politic as well as economical legislation, which would diminish our expenses of production, increase the number of our markets, and raise the price of our products. Thus will an agricultural transformation be obtained of itself, for the improvements and guarantees which flow from such a system, would give to agriculture the means of buying new instruments, to increase the pay of dependents, to adopt new methods—in a word, to bring about all those conditions within which all kinds of labor would be multiplied.
“ Let Spain bring about, in fine, (for her honor and our good), the abolition of slavery, without a compromise of material interests, or a violation of any acquired right—that is to say, by progressive emancipation, and within a fixed time. This would be the best stimulus for the immigration of the white race.” Información Sobre Reformas en Cuba y Porto Rico• Such were the just demands of the representatives of Cuba and Porto Bico. Eut the Spanish government was but little disposed to condescend to grant that which was asked for by the inhabitants of the Antilles.
In the meeting which took place on the 6th of December, 1866, between the delegates of the Antilles and the government commissioners, Señor Angulo, a representative from the city of Mantanzas, made a motion to declare the slave trade piracy, with all the consequences resulting therefrom. Señor San Martin, a representative from Havana, said on this occasion, “ that it was necessary to Spanish honor that the trade should be declared piracy—that the monarchy had lost its prestige before the nations of Europe, that we had been lying in the face of the world, and that it was proper to confess with shame that the treaty had been carried on solely because of the tolerance of the government.”
The motion was voted by the majority, only three members being opposed to it, of whom one was a senator, another a priest, who excused himself by saying that his sacred office impeded the giving of his approbation to a means which involved the death penalty; the other was an old minister of colonial affairs, who opposed the measure frankly. All the■■■■■■■■■I
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three were elected by the government, and commissioned by it to treat of colonial reforms in connection with those chosen by popular suffrage.
The committee named in consequence to take into consideration this motion, truly exposed the situation by saying, “ It is sufficient that a captain del partido is willing to let an expedition be landed, to have the thing done. How, in effect, can this officer resist him who says: ‘ Take ten, fifteen or thirty thousand dollars without receipt, silent and unobserved, which you may keep for yourself. I only ask that on to-morrow morning, instead of being here, you may be in some other part of your jurisdiction ?’ ” The Lieutenant-Governors, likewise, wink at the landing of these expeditions, because there is considerable money to be made, and a sense of honor is not strong enough to prevent their being seduced. The thing is to attain it in this case by the heroism of honor, and frankly as heroes are not oommon, and are exacting, however they may seem, (and particularly so to me, who look upon them as adventurers), the true reason is reached which explains the constant permission accorded by the authorities to the landing of these negro expeditions; and whatever means may be adopted, I believe will, in truth, continue to exist hereafter. “ Demoralization has reached the extreme point—that is, understandings and pre-arrangements are had with respect to this kind of business, and it has even happened that the public functionaries and employees of the government—those charged with enforcing its orders and causing the laws to be respected, have worked zealously to the end that landings might be effected in their own jurisdictions, thus taking means to prove their own complicity in the matter, and getting a good reward as the price of their prevarication and dishonor.”
“ To invent the theory of equilibrium of races—this supposes that the -Spaniards born in Cuba . . . were for the mere reason of having seen the light there, determined enemies of their fathers .	.	. whom it were not
possible to restrain without pouring in a constant horde of people antagonistic and semi-savage.” This doctrine having been made to embrace the slave trade, there was nothing to be done but to implore condescension: the upraised head of slavery, in effect said that he was a bad Spaniard who aspired to hinder the prevention of the national integrity by an equilibrium of races.
A man generally esteemed, counsellor Antonio G. de Mendoza thought of forming an association somewhat like the temperance societies in form, in which men would give their word of honor not to buy negroes introduced into the Island of Cuba after the 19th of November, 1863.
This project was authorized by General Dulce, but the Metropolitan government disapproved it and left it provisional, by putting the matter in the hands of the Superior Chief of the Island. Now returning to the com-

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mittee, of which we speak, its labors were concluded by asking : 1st. That the trade should be declared piracy; 2nd. That the purchasers of negroes, bozales or Africans, should be considered as accomplices in piracy; that the anti-slave society, the character of which was pacific and inoffensive, should command the approbation of the government.
None of these Conclusions were adopted, nor were they submitted to the deliberation of the Cortes Constituyentes. It is not sufficient to assimilate the slave trade to piracy, it is necessary to wound it in the heart by abolishing slavery itself. Why was it that Spain for her own good as well as ours, did not accept the plan of emancipation proposed, gradual in character, which would have required seven years’ time for consummation ? This conceded $450 to the proprietor for each slave between the ages of seven and sixty years; the indemnity to be paid by the island, and without costing Spain a dollar, asking of her only a fair and equitable tariff of duties. It was calculated that the total subvention for the owners of slaves would amount to $50,000,000, which the Island would have paid in seven years, without even increasing the scale of taxes, and which would have been withdrawn from the articles now unjustly made to pay duties. This is precisely what Spain did not wish to do.
Imagine all the infamy that the institution of slavery engenders ! As in the shadow of the poisonous Manchinelle tree there grow and conceal themselves envenomed grasses, so the shadow of slavery has given birth to the bastard 6tem, called emancipation. This name is given to the negroes who come out in ships caught in Cuban waters since the international treaty was made with reference to the trade. The government seizes these, and then delivers them up for a certain quantity of money, or hires them in a sum which varies more or less on according to the good-will of the Captain-General, and his particular friends, who become masters for the space of eight years. Those who are born of emancipated parents, before the latter shall have obtained their free papers, become slaves of the government for 25 years, at least such is the law; but in practice the emancipados, as a general thing, wait all their lives for their free papers.
In 1867, an order from Madrid was given that all the emancipados who had fulfilled the eight years should be set at liberty, unless they desired to remain with their patrons; but this order was delayed in the matter of being carried into execution.
I saw in 1867, at Santiago de Cuba, one of these unhappy men, who wished to redeem himself as an ordinary slave at $700 or $800, accumulated by sweat and privations ; the authorities (as ball-players) terrified him á la pelota in order to fix his position, which they could not do, because the disposition as to freedom was not applicable to an emancipado.97
Public opinion is, that in all epochs, the governors and other high functionaries have enriched themselves with the hires of the emancipados, whose number the government at Madrid could never ascertain. “ During my stay at Havana,” says D’Harponville, pp. 279, the same wife of the Captain-General had for her earnings men of this class, whom she hired out at $15 and $16 per month.” An author, already cited, Señor Galiano, who was for a long time director of the officious journal, the Diario de lo Mamia, says in his book (Cuba in 1858): “ With a little more condescension and flexibility in the back-bone, means of utility which I recognize though I do not practice, 1 could vegetate in peace, and even make use of my dozen emancipados
But this is nothing in comparison with the criminal abuse which is dealt out by piece-meal with respect to the persons of these unfortunates. They are made to pass for dead by means of certificates of interment, easily obtained. Or, when a negro of the estate dies, the emancipado is reported dead, to whom the name of the dead slave is given in the meantime.
It is not so easy to play the same game with the Chinese ; but what shall we say of the Draconic regulations which control them ? The contract once terminated, they are obliged to enter into a new one or return to their country at their own cost, or to employ themselves on the public works.
Is this not to condemn them to forced labour for their whole lives ? And this regulation does not authorize that they shall be whipped with the thong of a whip, which is used upon the slaves, but with a club.
If Spain desires the introduction of negroes and Chinese, she does not wish to introduce whites. The reason has been very clearly given by some of her statisticians. “ Peninsular emigration ought not to be encouraged ; because Spain needs hands, and that of foreigners should not be fostered, because Spain cannot bear the idea of losing her dominion in the Antilles.” In this spirit was written the royal order of 1817, which governs in this particular up to the present.
We well know the provisions of Article 1st. It is necessary that the party interested should be a Catholic. Conformably to Article 2nd, the oath of fidelity is taken before the Governor, and that of vassalage also 1 “ Within five years,” says Article 3rd, “foreigners should be naturalized or leave the country.” In this last case, they may take away their accumulations ; but conformably to Article 5th, they should abandon one-tenth of their acquisitions. The 18th Article says: “ During the the first five years, these persons cannot carry on commerce, neither possess a shop, nor store, nor be captains of vessels; but they may have an interest in a company or association of Spaniards.” Article 22nd has this: “It is declared that the duties under which the-government and fisc sequestrate and take possession98
of the property of foreigners, a rule reserved in that which concerns travellers, shall never be applied to persons domiciled.” Article 48th : “ Foreigners who have no letter of domicile, will be compelled to leave the Island in three months, under penalty of being tried and punished for disobedience to the law.”
Such is the by-law protecting foreign immigration. It is true that all its requirements are not enforced ; but this alone proves toleration on the part of the local authorities, and the central government does not omit to reproduce them in royal orders. It is not long since General Dulce made pretensions towards obliging foreigners, resident at Havana more than five years, to go through the process of naturalization. When Spain celebrates treaties with foreign nations, a provision is always inserted to the effect that her colonies are not to be included in their provisions. So declares the Royal Order of 25th of August, 1846, another of 5th August, 1847, and, in fine, the international treaty with France, in 1862, as well as by the cedula (order) of 1817, as by all the dispositions posterior. Foreigners are subjected to all the inconveniences possible. But again ; should a foreigner become naturalized, does he acquire the favor of the administration ?
A distinguished publicist, a worthy magistrate, known to the reader, Dr. Vincente Vazquez Quipo, will enlighten us as to this. According to. him, the founder of Cienfuegos, to-day one of the most flourishing towns in the Island, died in misery. He was a Frenchman, a naturalized Spaniard, who was called Don Louis Declouet, against whom the fisc brought ruinous suits.
“ Even though it were true,” said the government attorney of the Royal Treasury, Vazquez Quipo, “ that Declouet has realized more advantages than were embraced within the terms of the colonization contract entered into between him and the government”—has he appropriated the $180,000 of revenue which entered into the Royal Treasury during the past year, and the products, quadrupled at least, of the new colony, inuring to the benefits of the public wealth ?
To obtain such results it would not be a good means to bring against the founders of colonies, interminable and ruinous processes for each act done in virtue of the contract of colonization. The watchfulness of public employees is, indeed, noble ; but of a truth it has been indiscreet, and, above all, prejudicial to the public good. Hardly behind what is practised in our mother country is this fiscal spirit, which has bargained with foreigners for the right of establishing themselves in business in the country, as well as the privilege of bringing here their capital. The supposition seems to be entertained that they come here to rob us, as though that which they leave in the matter of knowledge and industry does not99
avail much more. Who has gained more in the production of the colony— Femandina, the Island, the public treasury, or Clouet ? Would that we had other such colonies ! but this is not to be looked for; the example of the colonisation of Cienfuegos will prevent other speculators from giving their time to undertakings so full of risk as long as this fiscal spirit exists, wretched as it is, and which has prevailed for so long a time, and forms the base of all the political economy of our government.” (Informe fiscal sobre el fomento de población blanca en la Isla de Cuba. Madrid, 1845.”)
VIL
Let us see what an impost the Island of Cuba is taxed with for being so well governed. In 1847, she paid $13,000,000, of which the mother country appropriated $6,000,000. This tribute money is called by the damnable expression, un sobrante (a surplus). In 1857 she paid $17,960,000, of which $8,000,000 was raised for Spain. In 1867, the $32,857,233 comprised the pension of Father Claret, which was at the rate of $32 per capita, while Spain only paid $7 per head. This progression would seem to indicate an increase of prosperity in the country, but this was not so. In 1857 there was more prosperity than in 1867, there being nearly the same population. In 1857 Spain was at peace with the Sultan of Morocco, with the Emperor of Cochin China, with the Presidents of Mexico, Peru, Chili, and with all the Generals of Santo Domingo. Between 1857 and 1867 she had conquered the Moors, fought the Kh-Du in Cochin China, occupied for an instant Vera Cruz, bombarded Valparaiso, cannonaded Callao, and, in fine, had endeavoured to fasten herself upon Santo Domingo. The increase of taxes in the Island can thus be understood.* In 1868 the imports in Cuba were laid at $43,959,903, but for this time they could not be paid.
This result and that which followed had been prognosticated sometime before the insurrection. “ I foresee a catastrophe near at hand, in case Spain persists in remaining deaf to the just reclamation of the Cubans. Look at the old colonies of the American Continent; all have ended in con-
* The economic year (Spanish), at least that which relates to the Cuban account, commences on the ist of July, and ends on the 30th of June. Thus, when the year 1868 is spoken of, the time between the 1st of July, 1867, and the 30th of June, 1868, is to be understood. About 30 dollars—a real is here 5 cents

100
quering their independence. Let Spain not forget this lesson; let the government be just to the colonies that remain. Thus, she will consolidate her dominion over people who aspire only to be good sons of a worthy mother, but who are not willing to live as slaves under the sceptre of a tyrant.” Don J. A. Saco, delegate from Santiago de Cuba to Madrid, 1866.
The Marquis of O’Gavan, another Cuban, but who being a senator of the kingdom could not be suspected by the government, used the same language. “ The provinces over the sea pay 618 reals for each free inhabitant, while those of the Peninsula do not* contribute more than 140. The disproportion will be much greater now under the new tributary system imposed upon the Antilles, and had it not been for a mistake in the calculations, the increase would have been $11,000,000. "When the affair touches a country overwhelmed with numerous charges which do not appertain to it, but to the nation, as for example, the tax for Fernando Po, when by the Mexican and Santo Domingo expeditions, the moneys (cash) of the bank (capital and deposits) were absorbed, and Cuba suffered from this fearful crisis which has mortally injured her credit, it is certainly not the mode to heal up her wounds by opening others.” (Informan.com solbe reformas). All the members of the committee exclaimed with a single voice: “ A radical reform in the tributary system is so much more necessary and urgent when the elevation of imposts has reached a point that cannot be borne, because they waste the element of wealth in those beautiful countries.” The committee demonstrated by a table drawn up and explanatory of the matter, that the tax for the economic year of ’66 —’67 exceeded the former one, by $14,780,150. If this pro-consular imposts had been properly and economically distributed, only one half of the evil would have been done, but it was not so. For example, the custom-houses, for reasons inherent in the social organization of the country and because of the corruption of their employees, presented a schedule of duties so heavy as that it was found necessary either to modify them to a very great extent, or to substitute another in lieu of it. In a country without industry as Cuba, and which pays almost the whole of the customs, a country of slaves— there is a very small number of proprietors who support all their weight. In Cuba it may be said, that the rural Contribution falls upon 50,000 inhabitants; the others do not pay anything in comparison with the slaves. Beside the custom-duty is anticipated, and as the owner of slaves sees himself obliged to make great purchases during the year, and as he generally borrows upon his crop, the custom-duties doubly press upon him. Such is. the interest ills of the system. And what shall we say of those which spring out of the mode by which they are adjusted and collected. It is notorious that at Havana fraud and contraband amounts to 40 per cent.,101
and in Santiago de Cuba of 70 per cent.* From this one can judge that which happens in points less is watched by the superior authority, and where scandalous fortunes are made in a short time by employees who have not refrained, while exercising their functions, from living in an ostentatious style. While speaking to the reader of the concessions and prevarications of employees of every class and category, I will rely upon the best authority in the matter, to wit—the Attorney of the Eoyal Treasury. “ The employees,” says Yasques Queipo, “ who have served in the island of Cuba upon small salaries, compared to the want of supplies in the country, insult, when in Spain, the honest poverty of the employees there, rivalling, as they do, in luxury and property, the nobility itself of the highest class, and even the most august personages.”! The audacity of the custom house employees rose to such a point in Sto. de Cuba, in these last times, that the state collected hardly anything. It is not solely in the maritime customs where these frauds are committed, but, also, in the administration of the country taxes! Thus the collector, charged with the collection of tax upon incomes, with reason or without it, supposes that the proprietor confesses less than what he should; and, to avoid any difficulty, the proprietor hastens to pay, without taking a receipt therefor, the one-half of the difference between his calculation and that of the collector. It is unnecessary to mention that this one-half never enters the cash-box of the State. Whenever a plantation is sold, the administrator of the landed tax ought to go to where he may meet the proprietor, in order that he may be assured of the number of his slaves. But the proprietor and the administrator have an understanding, thus avoiding the journey by means of a certificate—which is paid for according to the value of the properties. As large properties are treated as small estates, it is easy to understand how great a sum must necessarily be derived from this exaction in a year.
The delegates for Cuba had reason for asking a reform of the tributary system, ruinous and demoralizing as it is. They asked, in order that this cancer of immorality might be extirpated, that the custom-houses should be suppressed, and all the exactions practised in connection with them—the gavels, vexations, extortions ; and that there might be substituted in lieu, a fixed tax, which ought to be about six per cent, on the net income, and which would be sufficient to cover the expenses of the estimates.
The answer of the government was not delayed. On the 18th of February, 1867, that is say, a month after the report of the delegates, there
* Información sobre Reformas, tomo i8, page 243. í Information Fiscal, p. 193.102
appeared in the Official Gazette, a royal decree, reforming the tributary system. The custom-houses were not suppressed, but there appeared a direct tax of 14 per cent, upon incomes! Let us understand aright these innovations. The tax had been established in this way upon the income of real property, on commercial, industrial and professional enterprises, in such a manner that nothing except the churches and property of state escaped the fixed tax—ten per cent, net of which was destined for state purposes, and four per cent, for the municipalities. The delegates from Cuba and Porto Rico protested against such an enormous contribution, “ after having demonstrated,” said they, “ from official figures, that a tax of six per cent, on net incomes would be sufficient to cover the necessities of the estimates, how can it be figured out that the government, making a mixed report upon the old and new systems combined, should not interfere with the custom houses, notwithstanding all their inconveniences, but establish a direct tax of fourteen per cent. ? At the same time that the Antilles hoped to see the contributions discontinued, the Mother Country adopts a plan by which, retaining all the annoyances that the custom houses, the duties differential as between flags and other gavels impose upon commerce, there is added an enormous direct contribution in the examination of which their representatives neither had a share, nor did they give their approbation. The truth is, that $7,355,280 of former imposts have been abolished; but there remains $24,997,000, which, with the addition of 10 per cent, upon taxable wealth, ought to raise the sum to $43,959,908—that is to say, $11,107,670 over and beyond the former estimates,—without counting the estimate municipal. But the delegates were preaching in a desert; their commission ended at the moment when the “reform of the tributary system” had been effected, and there was nothing left to do but to dismiss them with fine words, such as these which were used by the Queen : “ Love makes no distinction as between distances. My children in Cuba and Porto Rico are, in reality, as dear to me as those of the other provinces.” This mode of comprehending love will probably cause the loss of Cuba to Spain.
Without loss of time there was sent out to Havana an able functionary in order to inaugurate a system of estimates. He discharged the duty to the satisfaction of the government, if one were to judge by the honorable distinctions of which he was the object, but the contributors (tax payers) did not participate in the enthusiasm, for in place of 14 they found themselves obliged to pay 18, 21 and even 24 per cent, upon the net income. So admirable was the exactitude of the calculations, or the honor which presided over the distribution of the estimates.
The assessors of the taxes in each jurisdiction, in each settlement, in108
each municipality, were liable to commit errors, or might perpetrate injustice, but the origin of the evil was, without doubt, in the faults committed at the treasury, where the sum of the public wealth was greatly exaggerated, besides the application of the rules for raising the estimates were enforced with a frightful rigor; the pastry cook, who in his store sold liquors with his cakes, was obliged to pay as a liquor dealer, and as though that was his regular business.
The proprietors of untilled lands had to pay upon them at the same rate as upon the adjoining cultivated fields. The proprietor in such case preferred to abandon his lands, as did also the keepers of country taverns who found themselves in the same condition. The lawyers gave up the practice of their profession in order to escape the tax! At Bayamo, a poor city of 5,000 inhabitants, five lawyers in a single day gave up their profession. How many remained ? One at least; too many for Spain; Don Carlos Emanuel Cespedes, to-day President of the Cuban Bepublic ! Under this system, the government instead of collecting $48,000,000, which it expected, was not able to realize the one-half of that sum. There was a reason for persisting in its plan.
Against the expectations of the country, this tributary system was continued in full play for the economic year of 1868. Moreover, the head officer of the treasury invented a means of coining money upon the moment without looking to the estimates; he obliged all the contributors (tax-payers) to take out a stamped paper in the office of the administration for their lists, costing 25 cents each, which produced for the treasury an additional $25,000.
This system of exaction and taxes, so extravagant as they are, never fails to produce corresponding fruits. The cash of the fisc varies more rapidly than it fills, and it has a horror of emptiness.
The collection of arrears is rigorously recommended with the premiums belonging to their corresponding duties. It seizes upon the oxen of the small laborer with which he tills the soil, or the horse, which serves the poor cattle raiser, used in carrying his vegetables to market. It puts up at public sale the estates of insolvent proprietors, and thus it happens, as was the case at Bayamo, there is no bidder, or he is assassinated on the next day. Hence there appeared in the Yara and Bayamo county the banner of insurrection with the inscription, Long Life to Prim, down with the taxes. As yet there was still hoisted the old flag of Castille. The shells of the Spanish soldiers bore this away, and when it reappeared in the morning of another day, there had been substituted in place of the yellow and red colors of the old Monarchy the red, white and blue of the New State.
Wise economists, illustrious authors of a determined tributary system,
ifcwUM

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you have not read the 8tb Satire of Juvenal. “ If according to your wishes Heaven were to concede to you the government of a province limited to your ambitious views, have pity of your own allies and their misery ; they have been chipped away to their marrow bones. Before the situation of our allies were less desolate, piles of dollars were heaped up in their coffers, and now? Shall we get hold of them? Some yoke of oxen, some other animals, . . a miserable field. . . Take care, I counsel you; robbery and violence are objects of danger to the brave who suffer. You have wished to take away all their gold and silver; but it is necessary to leave a dollar, the sword and their darts. To the despoiled. . . That which has been said is not coming from the air, it is an oracle as certain as that of the Sybil.”
vm.
What resources are left for Spanish dominion. The treasury is empty, so much so as the Banco Español. The municipal monies are not sufficient for the many necessities—as, for instance, the lighting of the streets by gas, the police, the keeping up of hospitals and food for the prisoners. Between the month of October, 1868, and the month of February, 1869, in the capital of the Eastern Department, various individuals, including the alcalde mayor, provided means out of their own pockets for the support of 400 or 500 men in the prisons. On the 30th of September, 1868, the governor of the same department convoked a junta of prominent men in the palace for the purpose of conferring with them with respect to the steps to be taken towards meeting the necessities of the moment, either by voluntary subscriptions, or by the levying of new taxes. The city was in debt for gas furnished during the preceding fourteen months ; besides it owed nine months’ salary to professors of schools of the second class, and seven months’ pay to the officers of police.
Nearly all the cities of the Island—Mantanzas, Trinidad, Havana, even, were more or less in the same condition, and found themselves obliged to submit to extraordinary sacrifices in order to get along at all. Plowed id this happen, when an additional tax was given them of four per cent, by the new law ? It is that the administration, which collects the contributions, applies them entirely, even in the matter of the ten per cent., and the municipalities collect the excess. As yet it has been found impracticable to collect the part coming to the state. Those who furnish supplies to the105
government, under contract, are not paid; and, notwithstanding, they are obliged to fulfil their compromises! In short, the authorities are constantly employing vessels, and do not pay the owners for the service rendered.
Such is the situation of the Spanish administration in the presence of the insurrection. There is left no other resource but a well-instructed, suffering, but badly-fed soldiery. Will this army be sufficient to preserve Cuba to the Spaniards ? This is hardly probable, considering the ruinous state in which the incomes of the Island and of Spain are now found. It is true that something may be, for a time, expected in the way of gifts from the rich Peninsulars of Cuba; but soon these resources will have been wasted, which are put in equilibrium by the sacrifices imposed in a contrary sense, and which the Creoles will continue to impose at any price, with the view of relieving their country of the humiliating and ruinous yoke under which their hopes have, for so many years, been crushed. It is unnecessary to say, that the disciplined troops of Spain are superior to bands wanting in experience, and to recruits who have only come into action since the revolution.
The first has been made so at the expense of the Island of Cuba, and are better armed than the forces in Spain; the second are imperfectly armed, having common guns of chase, and others of all sorts of calibre; they are without artillery, and are wanting in munitions. But even such as they are, their soldiers keep in check 50,000 men, thanks to the extent of territory and the difficulty of communication, and of these 80,000 are regular troops. Contraband ministers, though with great difficulty, and in quantities by no means sufficient, to this want. Arms and munitions do arrive, and they will be had in great abundance as soon as the United States shall have recognized the Cubans as belligerents. The Generals who command the Spanish forces are, doubtless, abler men than those who lead the improvised insurgent army, but they have fearful allies, yellow fever and the rainy season. For the first time the Spanish government will regret having left the Island without roads. All this is bad enough without counting upon foreign intervention. In truth, is it a good time for the United States to let such an occasion pass by for causing Spain to lose a prize which the former nation has so much desired ? Certainly its intervention in this case would be more plausible than that which was exerted in favor of Juarez in Mexico. Numerous symptoms presage that this intervention will not be looked for in vain for a long time in Cuba.
The party of annexation is not the strongest. Certain highly intelligent persons have experienced a certain inquietude with respect to the results that would follow annexation to the United States. They fear an invasion which would put out of possession the actual holders of the106
soil, or those coming after them, and that all lucrative branches of industry would be monopolized by others, not by violence, but by the superiority of one race over the other in physical and moral energy, drawn together by the desire of gain.
It is certain that in this struggle for life (battle of life) the advantage would not be in favour of the descendants of the Spaniards, and the selection would be at the expense of old possessors. To support this view, Florida, Texas and California are cited. Notwithstanding all this, the Cubans will not retrocede before this extreme view of the subject, and they will end the matter by throwing themselves into the arms of the Americans. Is this to say that the Cubans are incapable of conquering their independence, ? No, sooner or later they will acquire it; but I do not think they can preserve it for a long time, as well because of their geographical situation as of their neighbouring relations ; likewise because of the want of political instruction which is common to them as has been the case with all other people emancipated from the dark and smothering dominions of Spain. These considerations are not hidden out of sight by the majority of the Cubans, and for this reason they contented themselves with asking a reform of Spain, which conceded in time, would have saved all. Spain has never wished, either in the past or at this time to concede anything. She contents herself by promising from the mouths of her ministers the concession of reforms (which are not set forth) when the insurrection shall have been quelled. **■ Not before ?” answers the interrogator, “ You have deceived us so often that we do not trust your word.” The reply is hard, let us see if it is merited. In 1837, to go no further back, Spain gave herself a very liberal Constitution. It is known for how small a time this was enjoyed ; but in any event it was supposed that the Island of Cuba was to have participated in the benefit to flow from the new Constitution, and she was, in effect, invited to send deputies to the Cortes, to the end that her necessities might be known, and her interests be discussed. Very well. The deputies at the capital, compelled, a strange thing to say, by the most advanced faction of the Cortes, refused to receive them, and it was decided that the Island should be governed by special laws, to be enacted by the Cortes in the absence of the legitimate representatives of Cuba. The Cortes had so much to do afterwards, that they did not find time to enact these famous laws. Since 1837, that is to say, for a period of 32 years, the mean rate of human life, the Island of Cuba hoped for the execution of the promise of the Cortes, and, in particular, from the liberals of Spain ; while expecting it this titanic labor is submitted to the regimen of the arbitrary. This is not the occasion to say : “ Beautiful Phyllis is always in despair when she is always expecting.” But so far as the Spanish government is con-107
oerned— she never despairs, but rather produces this feeling, on the contrary, when there is taken into account the plenitude of her powers over the Island of Cuba. For example, in 1869 there was a necessity for a law) a thing dealt out in small doses), and not knowing what to borrow money upon, she thought of her daughter—the Ever Faithful, the Island of Cuba. A loan of $10,000,000, at 7£ per cent., was negociated, reimbursable in 15 years by successive payments, and to secure this the income of Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Phillippines were pledged for the same number of years. It is certain that the guaranty was sufficient, and a government which finds herself reduced to such a necessity in order to contract a loan under such conditions, does not enjoy a wonderful credit.
Notwithstanding, the money lenders at length repented, even before commencing to fulfil their compromise. The Spanish liberals, in order to damage Narvaez’s Administration, gave the buyers to understand that as the Cortes had not voted the loan, it was consequently unconstitutional, and they would incur the risk of having it repudiated by a liberal majority, that which bring about as a result—the total loss of their money.
The discretionary power of Spanish rule in Cuba does not produce barren results. P. Claret knows something of that, for he received 80,000 francs for the part he had in it as a matter of right. Likewise the camarilla (little room) knew something of this, for by it there is sent out upon each change of ministers a set of birds of prey that they may set themselves upon the estimates, linked, as they are, with the New World.
The Creoles compare their country to a green meadow in which the horses of Andalcia come to feed and grow fat.
These do not murmur immoderately at the pastures, but as the beasts are removed in detail the grass serves for grazing purposes even down to the ground. After the Revolution of September, which promised to correct all abuses and repair all matters of injustice, Lopez de Ayala, before known as a dramatic author, recruited in the lower part of the Spanish Parnassus an army of functionaries, magistrates and administrators unprovided for, with whom the employees then in Cuba were to be superseded, who, at any rate, knew something of their duties. “ Good mana for these Gaditanos,” said the Creoles, “ for us there has been no change, except in masters.” The thought which gave voice to these words is that they wished the mana to fall likewise into their own hands, and this is quite natural, inasmuch as they pay the expenses.
Ah ! the revolution of September is not destined, it seems to improve matters more than the other pronounciamientos of a changed ministry, of constitutions, of former reigns.
Poor sheep, how you are always sheared! To this everything comes,as said Saco, renowned and respected Son of Cuba, this money question is of more consequence than the political. If Cuba, were not, in fact, considered to be so rich, the question economical would not be so deplorable. Spain must have her hands free, which she can then at pleasure, put into the money bags of Cuba, and will never consent that this privilege shall be taken away by the adoption of a regime colonial, founded upon the principles oi autnomia (free government, in all things, recognizing only the sovereignty of Spain). This the Creoles well understand, and for this reason those who have taken up arms will not be ready to lay them down.
From these resulted the scrupulous slowness of the money dealers, who demanded of the Minister other guarantees or the revision of the contract. The Minister thus replied: The Constitution of 1887 declares that the Ultramarine provinces shall be governed by especial laws. But as these have not been promulgated, and until this is done, the Royal Power is fitted to govern them according to its will, to decree the imposts, and employ them as to it shall seem fit, without having to consult the Cortes. For this reason, the government of the Queen has the perfect right, without the vote of the Cortes, to hypothecate the income from its possessions beyond sea, and contract the loan in question. Is this not clear ? This was not sufficiently so for the bankers, who preferred to lose the deposit made.*
If General Dulce on his arrival, clothed as he was with discretional powers, had proclaimed and organized such a regimen, he would assuredly have given the death blow to the revolution, because all the moderate and sensible portion of the population, which is the wealthiest and most influential, would have rallied around him. Either induced by persuasion or force, unfortunately, he did not comprehend the situation, or did not hold sufficient powers. He was impelled forward by a ridiculous pride, of which the Spanish statistics have given so many proofs, as well as by a desire to preserve the milk cow for all those called to govern her, or else Dulce or the government preferred to conquer the revolution by arms and punishments inflicted. And we behold the spectacle of revolutionists shooting rebels for the same fault that they themselves have committed. The men most compromised in the last revolution are the Dulces, the Letonas, the Escalantes, the Caballero de Rodas, those who have solicited or accepted the honor of going to Cuba to represent such a roll, not to mention General Prim, the hero of the pronunciamientos, and of the last revolution, who has offered in full parliament to go with the whole Spanish army, if that were necessary, to avenge the honor of insulted Castille, and conserve the national integrity.
* This was paid by the provisions of a new loan of 100,000,000 francs, celebrated with the Provisional Government. The rate was 12$ per cent. -109
But I believe that the illustrious General, with his good Toledo blade, and the entire Spanish army, would do better not to go to America. Waiting for this event, the Spanish people who pretend to give much attention to business, would do well not to occupy themselves with the just complaints of the Cubans and of the actual situation. It would seem that the matter was critical for all, and that the quickest solution would be better both for Spain and Cuba. The time has gone by when the lips of the Ever Faithful, the daughter of Spain, can be firmly sealed up, those lips on which, if a generous voice had lifted itself in Parliament, or in the press, it would have encountered a minister to reply to the point in this manner : “ Hear well, no murmur reaches us from the other side of the Atlantic, Cuba demands nothing, she asks for reforms of no kind, and if this were not so, who has hindered her for so many years from demanding them ? ” A voice coming from exile answered: “ How could she demand them with her press full of sarcasms, her corporations without enterprise, and her inhabitants deprived of the right of holding public meetings, or of representation ?” On the other hand—how many conspiracies, how many insurrections has the government not been called upon to put down ? How much blood has there been spilt in the struggle and on the scaffold ? How many sons of Cuba have been obliged to abandon their property, their families, their country, all that they loved, to free themselves from persecutions ? The list would be very large, likewise, it would be full of conspiracies, because in the last thirty years there have been more than sixteen. The silence is not because she has no aspirations, it is the silence of sarcasm. So it was decided to call representatives to Madrid, without other rights than to come to discuss, in the ante-chamber of the Ministry, plans of reform, in company with an equal number of commissioners elected by the government, and known in advance to be enemies of every radical reform. They were invited by the minister to treat of all questions freely three : political, religious, and monarchical unity, and were dismissed after having been humiliated and confounded, without other advantage than bringing along with them for their fellow citizens, a summary of taxes larger than ever, in the preparation of which they had not been permitted to participate.
The position we have painted is indeed gloomy, but in truth it is none other than the truth, to a certain extent, softened.
It will now bo understood whether upon Cubans or Spaniards the responsibility shall rest for a separation, now almost realized, between the Mother Country and the Colony.Ulif 17-
university OF MIAMI
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