TWO METHODS OF WARFARE: THE SPANISH AND THE CUBAN.
Now let us turn to the one crime, so-called, that has been alleged
against the Cubans.
We refer to the burning of the sugar crops.
That this has been done on each and every occasion, no one will deny. At
first glance, it seems an act of vandalism. But is it so? Let us examine
carefully into the causes and reasons for it.
The Spaniards claim that it is a notable example of the reckless and
uncivilized methods of the insurgents. On the contrary, it is a policy
which was carefully planned and systematically carried out by Gomez and
the other Cuban leaders.
In a proclamation by Gomez, he ordered his lieutenants to burn the sugar
plantations, but he did not tell them to destroy the mills, because he
did not wish, in case of his succeeding in his purpose of liberating
Cuba, to lay the producers flat upon their backs, from which position
they could never, or, only with the utmost difficulty, arise.
The destruction of the sugar cane was a necessity of war. It must be
remembered that from the sugar crop Spain has received her largest
revenue from Cuba, and to cut off this source of revenue is to cripple
Spain and take away from her a large sum of money with which she might
otherwise wage warfare.
To show that the damage wrought is by no means irreparable, we cannot do
better than quote Baron Antomarchi, a Frenchman who lived for a long
time in Cuba, was there during the early part of the present
insurrection, and knows of what he is speaking:
"Since the suppression of slavery, and as a result of the high price of
labor the work of sugar making had been modified. In former times a
sugar planter considered his plantation his most necessary possession.
After the process of manufacture was modified, it was his sugar mill
upon which he depended; his plantation was less important. So in burning
the sugar crop, Gomez did not strike a death-blow at the producer. It is
a well known fact that when the cane growth is cut by fire and the
fields are burnt close to the ground, the yield of the following season
is increased and improved; so we see that Gomez did not ruin the country
when he burned the plantations. True, the fields have been burned, but
they will spring up with a more vigorous luxuriance after the rest which
was one of the conditions imposed upon the first agricultural community
of which we have any reliable record, and if the mills which Gomez has
left intact are not destroyed by some authority equally potent, when the
country is reorganized, the sugar industry may flourish to a degree
undreamed of before the Cuban war for liberty."
Besides depriving Spain of her revenue, Gomez had another though a
lesser reason, for burning the sugar cane. He knew that those who were
thrown out of employment would flock to his standard, and his forces
thereby be greatly augmented.
On the whole, we do not see that the criticism and blame which have been
given to the insurgents for destroying the crops and for the time being
laying waste the land, are deserved. It was a measure of war, and one,
which it seems to us, under the circumstances, was thoroughly justified.
Now let us contrast, for a moment, the different methods of the
Spaniards and the Cubans in waging warfare.
In the first place, we do not mean to affirm that the insurgents have
not committed actions, which, in the light of civilization, are
indefensible, but they are few and far between, and they were forced
upon them. After all the horrors to which they were subjected, they
would have been less than human if they had not retaliated.
The Cubans, both in the Ten Years' War and in the present one, have been
merciful to those of the enemy who fell into their hands. The latter
have been almost invariably treated with kindness and allowed to go free
and unmolested.
But the Spaniards never reciprocated. It has been their invariable
policy not to exchange prisoners, a notable instance of this being their
recent refusal to exchange the gallant Hobson and his comrades. To be
sure, according to international law they are not compelled to do this,
but it is doubtful if there is another civilized nation (by the way, it
is an undeserved compliment to intimate that Spain is civilized), which
would have acted as the country which boasts of its chivalry has done.
Just here, let us say that those acts of cruelty which have been
committed by the Cuban army have been very far from receiving the
sanction of their leaders. On the contrary, they have been done in
violation of the explicit orders of those leaders; and whenever the
offenders have been discovered, they have been hanged as bandits to the
limb of the nearest tree.
The hatred and barbarity which the Spaniards have without exception,
evinced toward the Cubans have done much to alienate the latter, have
been the chief causes why peace could not be maintained, and have made
only one outcome possible--the freedom and independence of the island.
We have already seen the humanity with which Gomez, Maceo and the other
Cuban chiefs treated the wounded of the enemy who chanced to fall into
their hands.
But how was it on the other side? How did the Spaniards behave toward
the insurgent wounded? When not killed at once and their sufferings
ended immediately, they were cast into loathsome dungeons, with
insufficient food and with no medical attendance whatever.
Now to a charge which has more than once been brought against Spain,
which has been brought against her recently, which her government has
indignantly denied, but which both in the past and the present has been
proved beyond any question of a doubt.
The charge refers to an action which, with the exception of Spain, has
never been committed but by the most savage tribes, the Indians of North
America and the inhabitants of darkest Africa. We do not think that even
the Turks were ever accused of such an atrocious, unspeakable act.
We mean the mutilation of the dead bodies (often in a horrible, obscene
way) left upon the battlefield.
It is with regret and loathing that we approach the subject. But facts
must be spoken.
There has been scarcely a combat between the Spaniards and the Cubans,
in all the revolutions which have occurred, where the former have not
been guilty of the revolting practice of the mutilation of dead bodies.
Indeed the most savage of tribes have never gone further in the demoniac
wreaking of vengeance upon the fallen bodies of the enemy than the
Spaniards have.
It has been a common custom with them to disfigure, mangle and commit
nameless indignities upon the dead.
When Nestor Aranguren, who you will remember was one of the bravest of
the Cuban leaders, the "Marion," the "Swamp Fox" of the insurrection,
was killed, his body, covered with honorable wounds was taken to Havana,
and paraded before the citizens, subject to their jeers and curses.
When another insurgent leader, Castillo, was killed, the same frightful
spectacle was witnessed.
Indeed, it has been the rule among the Spaniards whenever the body of a
so-called rebel leader fell into their hands, to drag his nude and
mutilated body, tied at the end of a horse's tail, throughout the
nearest town, and the excuse for this was--what? That the body might be
fully identified.
Among the Cubans, there is only one instance related where they
retaliated in kind. And this was when it is said that they sent a
Spanish soldier back to Havana with his tongue cut out. But even this
story, the only act of brutality alleged against them is not well
authenticated, resting as it does entirely upon Spanish evidence. And we
know well how much credence can be given to that evidence.
To come down to more recent occurrences.
When it was first reported that the bodies of our marines killed at
Guantanamo were subjected to unmentionable mutilations by the Spaniards,
we could not believe it. It was said that the condition of the bodies
was caused by shots fired from the Mauser rifle. But the Mauser rifle
inflicts a clean cut hole. It could not possibly have been responsible
for the horrible condition of the bodies. It is impossible for us to
explain further in print. Remember or look up what was done by the
Apaches in some of our Indian wars, and then from your knowledge, or the
knowledge gained by research, fill up the hiatus.
And the Spaniards cannot claim in this latter instance, if indeed they
can in any other, that these barbarities were committed by irregular and
irresponsible troops. It is beyond question that by far the greater
portion of the troops employed against Colonel Huntington (we are
referring now to the affair at Guantanamo) belonged to the regular army,
under the command of General Linares.
The New York Herald, in an editorial on the subject, remarks most justly
and forcibly: "What sort of a degraded spectacle, then, does Spain
present, going whining through Europe in search of intercession or
intervention, with such a damnable record against her, made in the very
first engagement of troops?
"We can hear good old John Bull sputter out his righteous indignation,
but will his Holiness the Pope recognize such degenerate child? Can the
punctilious Francis Joseph of Austria afford to condone crimes like
these? Will the Emperor William or the Czar of Russia lift his voice in
behalf of such fiends? Can our sister republic, France, sympathize with
the monsters who disgrace the very name of soldier?
"Not so! All Europe will join with our own government, now thoroughly
aroused to the indignities put upon it, and voice the stern edict of
humanity and civilization:
"Spain has now placed herself without the pale of the nations. Let her
meet the retribution she so justly deserves."
Senor Estrado Palma, the representative of Cuba in the United States,
has declared in a manifesto that the Cubans threw themselves into the
struggle advisedly and deliberately, that they knew what they had to
face and decided unflinchingly to persevere until they should free
themselves from the Spanish government. Experience has taught them that
they have nothing to envy in the Spaniards; that in fact, they feel
themselves superior to them, and can expect from Spain no improvement,
no better education.
Slavery is ended in Cuba, and the white and the colored live together in
perfect harmony, fighting side by side, to obtain political liberty.
Senor Palma, by the way, asserts, with how much authority we are unable
to state, that the colored population in Cuba is superior to that of the
United States. He says that they are industrious, intelligent and lovers
of learning; also, that, during the last fifteen years, they have
attained remarkable intellectual development.
There are certain utterances of Senor Palma in this manifesto which
deserve to be quoted in full, so pregnant are they with truth, and so
full of food for thought to the average American citizen, whether he
agrees with them or not. Senor Palma says:
"We Cubans have a thousandfold more reason in our endeavor to free
ourselves from the Spanish yoke than had the people of the thirteen
colonies, when, in 1775, they rose in arms against the British
government. The people of these colonies were in full enjoyment of all
the rights of man; they had liberty of conscience, freedom of speech,
liberty of the press, the right of public meeting and the right of free
locomotion. They elected those who governed them, they made their own
laws, and, in fact, enjoyed the blessings of self-government. They were
not under the sway of a captain-general with arbitrary powers, who, at
his will could imprison them, deport them to penal colonies, or order
their execution even without the semblance of a court-martial. They did
not have to pay a permanent army and navy in order that they might be
kept in subjection, nor to feed a swarm of hungry employees yearly sent
over from the metropolis to prey upon the country. They were never
subjected to a stupid and crushing customs tariff which compelled them
to go to home markets for millions of merchandise annually which they
could buy much cheaper elsewhere; they were never compelled to cover a
budget of twenty-six or thirty millions a year without the consent of
the taxpayers and for the purpose of defraying the expenses of the army
and navy of the oppressor, to pay the salaries of thousands of worthless
European employees, the whole interest on a debt not incurred by the
colony, and other expenditures from which the island received no benefit
whatever; for, out of all those millions, only the paltry sum of seven
hundred thousand dollars was apparently applied for works of internal
improvement, and one-half of which invariably went into the pockets of
Spanish employees.
"If the right of the thirteen British colonies to rise in arms in order
to acquire their independence has never been questioned because of the
attempt of the mother country to tax them by a duty upon tea, or by the
Stamp Act, will there be a single citizen in this great republic of the
United States, whether he be a public or private man, who will doubt the
justice, the necessity in which the Cuban people find themselves of
fighting to-day and to-morrow and always, until they shall have
overthrown Spanish oppression and tyranny in their country, and formed
themselves into a free and independent republic?"
Now, honestly, all prejudice aside, this is not a bad brief for the
plaintiff, is it?
There is one more document to which we desire to call your attention.
And that is, a letter written to Professor Starr Jordan, of the Leland
Stanford, Jr., University of San Francisco, by a Havanese gentleman of
undoubted integrity and of Spanish origin.
Professor Jordan declares that this letter seems to show that "the
rebellion is not a mere bandit outbreak of negroes and jailbirds, but
the effort of the whole people to throw off the yoke of a government
they find intolerable."
The letter states, among other things, that the insurrection was begun
and is kept up by Cuban people; that the Spanish government has made
colossal and unheard-of efforts to put it down, but has not succeeded in
diminishing it; on the contrary, the insurrection has spread from one
extreme of the island to the other; that the flower of the Cuban youth
is in the army of the insurrection, in whose ranks are many physicians,
lawyers, druggists, professors, artists, business men, engineers and men
of that ilk.
Professor Jordan's correspondent declares that this fact can be proved
by the excellent consular service of the United States.
He admits that destruction has been carried on by both sides, but
affirms that the insurgents began by destroying their own property, in
order to deprive the troops of the government of shelter and sustenance.
He further declares that the insurgents will continue in their course
until they fulfill their purpose, carrying all before them by fire and
blood.
He concludes as follows:
"All eyes are directed toward the north, to the republic which is the
mother of all Americans. The people of the United States must bear
strongly in mind now, as never before, that profession is null and void,
if action does not affirm it."
But action has come at last, as the fiendish Spaniards have already
found out to their cost.
What is Cuba, the "Pearl of the Antilles," at the present time of
writing? The answer to that question is as follows:
A land devastated and temporarily ruined; a gem besmirched almost beyond
recognition; a heap of smoking ashes; a population of starving men,
women and children, with an iron hand clutching remorselessly at their
hearts; a horrible, ghastly picture of what savage men are capable of in
the way of destruction.
Now, Americans, people of the free and independent United States; you
who enjoy all the blessings of liberty; you who can pursue your
avocations without let or hindrance; you who are the jury in this
case--the evidence is before you.
You have undoubtedly heard it said that the interference of the United
States was unwarrantable; that there was no real reason for the present
Spanish-American war; that a stronger country took advantage of a
weaker; and other arguments ad nauseam.
But is there one of our readers who would see a woman, or a weak though
honorable man, attacked by a savage foe, without interfering, and doing
the best he could to give life and freedom to the oppressed?
Think it all over, Americans, and think it over carefully and
judiciously.
At your own doors, is a poor, miserable, starving wretch, starving from
no fault of his, and with a bulldog, not your own, but belonging to a
neighbor (a neighbor, grant you with whom you have always hitherto been
at peace) about to fasten its fangs in the throat of this unhappy man.
Would you hold your hands, saying that it was no affair of yours, or,
with your superior strength, would you fly to the rescue?
Once more, Americans, you have heard the whole evidence. The case is in
your hands.
What is your verdict?