THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY.
To enlarge upon the sufferings of the Cubans is a painful task, but it
is a task that must be accomplished, in the interests of justice and
humanity, and also that the reader may clearly understand why it was the
bounden duty of the United States to interfere.
Let us therefore proceed with the evidence.
Julian Hawthorne gives his testimony as follows:
"These people have starved in a land capable of supplying tens of
millions of people with abundant food. The very ground on which they lie
down to breathe their last might be planted with produce that would feed
them to repletion. But so far from any effort to save them having been
made by Spain, she has wilfully and designedly compassed their
destruction. She has driven them in from their fields and plantations
and forbidden them to help themselves; the plantations themselves have
been laid waste, and should the miserable reconcentrados attempt under
the pretended kindly dispensation of Blanco to return to their
properties they would find the Spanish guerillas lying in wait to
massacre them. No agony of either mind or body has been wanting. The
wife has lost her husband, the mother, her children; the child its
parents, the husband, his family. They have seen them die. Often they
have seen them slaughtered wantonly as they lay helpless, waiting a
slower end. The active as well as the passive cruelties of the Spaniards
toward these people have been well-nigh unimaginable."
Call Richard Harding Davis to the stand!
"In other wars men have fought with men, and women have suffered
indirectly because the men were killed, but in this war it is the women
herded together in the towns like cattle who are going to die, while the
men camped in the fields and mountains will live."
General Fitz Hugh Lee says:
"General Weyler believes that everything is fair in war and every means
justifiable that will ultimately write success on his standards. He did
not purpose to make war with velvet paws, but to achieve his purpose of
putting down the insurrection, if he had to wade through, up to the
visor of his helmet, the blood of every Cuban, man, women and child, on
the island."
Now hear General Lee relate the following incident, an incident which
created much discussion and feeling in the United States:
"Dr. Ruiz, an American dentist, who was practicing his profession in a
town called Guanabacoa, some four miles from Havana, was arrested. A
railroad train between Havana and this town had been captured by the
insurgents, and the next day the Spanish authorities arrested a large
number of persons in Guanabacoa, charging them with giving information
which enabled the troops, under their enterprising young leader,
Aranguren, to make the capture; and among these persons arrested was
this American. He was a strongly built, athletic man, who confined
himself strictly to the practice of his profession and let politics
alone. He had nothing to do with the train being captured, but that
night was visiting a neighbor opposite, until nine or ten o'clock, when
he returned to his house and went to bed. He was arrested by the police
the next morning; thrown into an incommunicado cell; kept there some
fifty or sixty hours, and was finally (when half crazed by his horrible
imprisonment and calling for his wife and children) struck over the head
with a 'billy' in the hands of a brutal jailer and died from the
effects. Ruiz went into the cell an unusually healthy and vigorous man,
and came out a corpse."
James Creelman, a brilliant newspaper correspondent, gives his
testimony:
"Everywhere the breadwinners of Cuba are fleeing in terror before the
Spanish columns, and the ranks of life are being turned into the ranks
of death, for the Cuban who has seen his honest and harmless neighbors
tied up and shot before his eyes, in order that some officer may get
credit for a battle, takes his family to the nearest town or city for
safety, and then goes out to strike a manly blow for his country."
Senator Thurston, who was sent to Cuba to investigate and report the
condition of affairs, in a passionate address to the United States
Senate testifies:
"For myself I went to Cuba firmly believing the condition of affairs
there had been greatly exaggerated by the press, and my own efforts were
directed in the first instance to the attempted exposure of these
supposed exaggerations. Mr. President, there has undoubtedly been much
sensationalism in the journalism of the time, but as to the condition of
affairs in Cuba, there has been no exaggeration, because exaggeration
has been impossible. The pictures in the American newspapers of the
starving reconcentrados are true. They can all be duplicated by the
thousands. I never saw, and please God I may never see again, so
deplorable a sight as the reconcentrados in the suburbs of Mantanzas. I
can never forget to my dying day the hopeless anguish in their
despairing eyes. Huddled about their little bark huts, they raised no
voice of appeal to us for alms as we went among them. The government of
Spain has not and will not appropriate one dollar to save these people.
They are now being attended and nursed and administered to by the
charity of the United States. Think of the spectacle! We are feeding
these citizens of Spain; we are nursing their sick; we are saving such
as can be saved, and yet there are those who still say: 'It is right for
us to send food, but we must keep our hands off.' I say that the time
has come when muskets ought to go with the food."
Finally, Senor Enrique Jose Verona, who was at one time a deputy to the
Spanish Cortes, sums up the situation as follows:
"Spain denies to the Cubans all effective powers in their own county.
Spain condemns the Cubans to a political inferiority in the land where
they were born. Spain confiscates the product of the Cubans' labor
without giving them in return either safety, prosperity or education.
Spain has shown itself utterly incapable of governing Cuba. Spain
exploits, impoverishes and demoralizes Cuba."
This is only a very small portion of the testimony which might be
offered, but can the opinions of men of undoubted honor and veracity be
impeached?
Not a tithe of the horrors which has existed in the island of Cuba has
been told, and probably never will be told. Because a large proportion
of the sufferers did not, like Du Barri, shriek upon the scaffold, but,
like De Rohan, died mute.
But still something further can be said as to "The Butcher's" methods,
and, worse still, as to the putting into practice of those methods. The
insurgents have invariably been treated as if they were pirates. The
tigerish nature of Weyler spared no one. Refugees, that is those who did
not obey his barbarous proclamation, were shot down in cold blood.
Starvation was his policy, and starvation too of those, whatever their
sympathies might have been, had never raised a finger against the
existing government. The reconcentrados, harassed beyond all measure,
saw nothing before them but death, and the happiest among them were
those who died first.
How would you, reader, like to be shut off, with no means of
subsistence, for yourself, your wife and your children, within military
lines, to cross which meant instant death?
The Butcher could not conquer this valiant people in honorable warfare,
and therefore, worthy scion of his blood, he, without one qualm of
conscience, determined to exterminate them. Young boys, not more than
fifteen or sixteen years of age, were charged with the crime of
"rebellion and incendiarism" (that was the favorite charge of Weyler),
and sometimes with the pretence of a trial, sometimes with no trial at
all, were shot down in cold blood by the score. Poor little starving
babies clung to their mothers' breasts from which no substance was to be
obtained. Weyler knew all this, and in his palace in Havana simply
laughed, content so long as each day the death rate of the Cubans
increased, and he himself was gaining favor with his government, and
meanwhile had all that he wanted to eat and drink.
The merciless wretch, by the way, was ever careful not to expose his own
precious person to bullet or machete.
But what could be expected of him? He was a Spaniard, a man after
Spain's own heart, and one whom it was her delight to honor.
This picture is not over-painted. The colors if anything are laid on too
thin.
Although the so-called rebels were not conquered and never could be
conquered, Weyler was constantly sending reports home of the
"pacification" of first this and then that portion of the island. This
he probably supposed was necessary to placate the Spaniards, who are
divided amongst themselves and ever ready to rise against the existing
government whatever it may be.
In spite of all this, brute Weyler has been and still is the idol of a
certain class of Spaniards. In spite of all? No, we should have said,
because of all.
One of his adherents, among other things, said to Stephen Bonsal, and
this is the sort of utterance that the majority of Spain applauds:
"The only way to end this Cuban question is the way General Weyler is
going about it. The only way for Spain to retain her sovereignty over
these islands is to exterminate--butcher if you like--every man, woman
and child upon it who is infected with the contagion and dreams of Cuba
Libre. These people must be exterminated and we consider no measure too
ruthless to be adopted to secure this end.
"I read in an American paper the other day that General Weyler was
poisoning the streams from which the insurgents drink in Matanzas
province. It was not true, but I only wish it had been.
"General Weyler is our man. We feel sure of him. He will not be
satisfied until every insurgent lies in the ditch with his throat cut,
and that is all we want."
Stop a moment and think! These words were spoken at the end of the
nineteenth century by the representative of a professed Christian
country. How have the teachings of Christ, who always and primarily
advocated charity, been forgotten or perverted!
The whole matter of Cuba under Spanish rule is a disgrace to the age we
live in.
But (call it spread-eagleism if you like) the United States now has the
affair in hand. It can and will right this wrong, and so effectively
that there will be no possibility of its recurrence.