A POLITICAL EXPERIMENT: CUBA
The work of Spain--The North American reforms--The future.
By turns Spanish and North American, and frequently disturbed by the
conflict of these two Americanisms, the history of the "pearl of the
Antilles" has been a long political experiment. Its result, the
success of one method or the other, will prove the aptitude or the
incapacity of the Latins of America in the art of organising a State
or instituting a Republic.
The last colony, the final vestige of the vast Spanish Empire
overseas, Cuba still betrayed, towards the end of the nineteenth
century, the political and moral influence of the mother country.
The exuberant and classic land of tobacco and sugar, its tropical
opulence attracted pioneers and colonists. Spain therefore fought to
retain this country, which she granted in recompense of the audacity
of her adventurers and the rapacity of her officials.
Its geographical situation, its wealth, its traditions, are all
exceptional. The race, imaginative and precocious, is fertile in
poets, heroes, and orators. We see generals of thirty, poetical
swordsmen, divided between their battles and their verses;
irreducible guerillas, orators full of tropical eloquence, passionate
pilgrims, who wander through America relating the miseries of the
Spanish tyranny: a gloomy tale which has made the liberated
democracies attentive {314} to the fate of their captive sister.
Thus Europe used to shudder at the fate of Poland or Ireland.
Astonishingly audacious were these soldiers--Garcia, Maceo,
Gomez--who defended the national liberty to the death; bitter were
the battles, the hand-to-hand conflicts, the wars of skirmishes and
outposts. Of the high lineage of Bolivar, San Martin, and Sucre, the
last of the Liberators, at once poet, statesman, and warrior, a
Gothic knight enamoured of an ideal Dulcinea--the autonomy of
Cuba--Marti was the representative leader of the nation.
As in the other colonies, freed a century earlier, the action of
Spain in Cuba was at once fertile and limited, useful and disastrous.
What effort could be more paradoxical than that of loading with
fetters, with prohibitions and monopolies, the very cities whose
birth and development was the work of Spain? Authoritatively she
sought to stamp out the longing for liberty, and in this island
consumed by racial hatred--the old hatred of the conquerors and the
Creoles--she responded to every revolutionary demand for independence
by a terrible policy of repression. One of her governors left the
bloody traces of an Alva, the pacificator of Flanders.
In Madrid a great minister, Canovas del Castillo, an uncompromising
traditionalist, believed that Spain should possess a colonial empire
"to preserve her position in the world." From that time only
energetic action in the revolted islands could save the metropolis.
Already, in 1865, at the beginning of his career, he wished to limit
the representation of Cuba and Porto Rico; and in 1868, when the long
war broke out, he supported the demands of the 9,000 Spaniards who
demanded the rejection of all reform.[1] Once in power, in 1876,
Canovas was still more emphatic; the Cuban problem was to be solved
only by violence. The generosity of Martinez {315} Campos was
followed by the inflexible severity of governors who turned the
island into a vast barracks. The timid liberties granted to Zanjon
were soon suppressed; neither popular elections nor commercial
liberties were allowed, but martial law, and a general to aid the
Spaniards of the island in their war against the Creoles and mulattos.
In 1878 the first civil war was over, but in 1895 the revolt was so
successful, so popular, so terrible, that Martinez Campos abandoned
the government of the island, feeling himself incapable of "wholesale
shootings and other feats of the same kind." Marti, tragic symbol of
revolt, was killed. General Weyler installed a Reign of Terror; the
island was exhausted. No one could dislodge the guerillas from the
plantations of sugar-cane which served them as refuge. Weyler
ordered a "concentration" of women, children, and the non-combatants
in the fortified cities. Offences of opinion were punished by death,
and absolute submission was demanded. The intervention of the United
States forced Spain to grant a brittle autonomy in 1896. The
assassination of Canovas by an anarchist permitted a reaction against
his uncompromising ideals, and an offer was made of a constitution,
and of elective chambers, without, however, authority over the
governor sent by the metropolis, and a Council of Administration, to
which the Cubans would have access; but economic interests were
ignored and sugar and tobacco were not set free.
Cuba was awaiting her crusader, her Lohengrin. The United States
filled the _rôle_. Attentive to the affairs of the island, they
negotiated, arranged for intervention with non-official agents, and
New York began to fit out filibustering expeditions. The incidents
of the Yankee campaign against Spain are well known, from the sinking
of the _Maine_ by an explosion in Havana roadstead to the Treaty of
{316} Paris. Once their rival was vanquished would the States give
Cuba her longed-for liberty? Porto Rico was conquered and Cuba
obtained only a mediocre autonomy.
Here is a difficult question: what was it that impelled the Americans
to undertake the adventure: imperialistic ambition or chivalrous
impulse, as many Cubans still believe? The opinion of their
politicians was always clear; annexation of the island or
preservation of the _status quo_. They feared that Spain might cede
the colony to a power better armed than herself, and Cuba, since the
time of Jefferson, had been reckoned among those countries which a
"law of political gravitation" should eventually give them. An
eminent Brazilian historian and diplomatist, Oliveira Lima, has even
demonstrated that when Bolivar, after convoking the Congress of
Panama in 1826, had thereupon proposed, as the last stage of his vast
epic, to give liberty to Cuba, it was the United States that
prevented him. For they knew that independence would also mean the
enfranchisement of subject races, and they needed slaves for the
proud and wealthy feudal State of Virginia. These tropical
countries, Cuba and Porto Rico, were the promised prey of a future
Federal imperialism, and Spain might remain their guardian until the
States could demand their cession or undertake their conquest.
Thus the very interest which in 1826 vetoed the independence of Cuba
was later to give the choice between autonomy or war; a dilemma from
which the haughty metropolis could not escape. Between the
commercial brutality of old and this recent Quixotism there is only
an apparent contrast: a hidden logic has guided American policy. If
we consider the end in view--to assure the incontestable control of
the Caribbean Sea, by purchase or annexation of its islands--the
former attitude of a {317} country which had not yet peopled its own
territory, and that provoked to-day by a plethora of wealth and men,
no longer appear irreconcilable.
As early as 1845 the purchase of Cuba was discussed in Washington.
The famous "Ostend manifesto" (1854) issued by the American
diplomatists, expounded their right to seize the island in case Spain
should refuse to sell it. This resolution to give independence to a
country they despaired of buying was therefore only the end of a long
campaign.
Certainly in 1898, once peace was signed and Porto Rico conquered,
they respected this independence. But their detachment was
incomplete; they occupied the island, sent governors thither, and
generously reformed the finances, education, and hygiene of the
country. A provisional tutelage, soon followed by the proclamation
of the Republic. Was this the independence of which Marti had
dreamed? The treaty which proclaimed it also limited it; the Platt
amendment found its way into the margin of a liberal text, reserving
to the United States the right of intervention to remedy any possible
anarchy. A strange severity, to demand of an untried tropical
republic, where the hostility of castes was extreme, a serene and
untroubled existence! Eventual military occupation for the purpose
of suppressing revolts would be a dangerous snare to independence.
Intervention in the public affairs of the old Spanish colony, twice
repeated, was both times followed by a campaign of annexation in the
Yellow Press. It is difficult to guess whether Yankee imperialism,
with its ever-increasing appetite, will respect the autonomy of the
island in the face of periodic occupations. It will probably prefer
a protectorate or a final conquest when wearied of the turbulence of
a democracy incapable of self-government.
Will this beautiful island one day become a State {318} of the
Anglo-Saxon or Federal Union? The accession of the Cubans to this
democracy would cause a disturbance in the political and social world
as profound as that created by Japanese immigration in the Far West.
The plutocrats of the States have too much contempt for half-breeds
and negroes willingly to accept deputies from a country where the
profound admixture of races contains an important African element; a
society which despises the negro cannot wholly agree with one ruled
largely by Spanish half-castes of Indian and African ancestry. The
protectorate would be a step toward the control of the Tropics which
Mr. Benjamin Kidd and other English sociologists imagine to be the
appanage of their race.
The civilising work of the United States has been admirable. Once
Spain was defeated and her colony conquered, they transformed the
education, finance, and hygiene of the island to prepare the people
for the liberty they ignored. It was four years before they gave it;
four years of pedagogy, of which Brigadier-General Wood, military and
civil chief, was in charge, until on the 20th of May, 1902, "thanks
to the goodwill of President Roosevelt, we were recognised as having
attained our majority."[2]
Four years of extraordinary activity transformed the exhausted island
into a prosperous country, a reform which we may follow in the
memoirs of General Wood. Two years of endeavour extirpated the
yellow fever, which had prevailed in Havana since 1762. The Yankees
fought the mosquitos, the vehicles of the disease, and their sanitary
works and measures decreased the death-rate from 91.3 per 1,000 in
1898 to 20.63 in 1902. In the same period the deaths among the
American troops fell from 91.03 to 20.68. They also attacked malaria
{319} and tuberculosis, until Havana, as one of them proudly writes,
became one of the healthiest cities of America.
Pavements, gutters, sewers, the demolition of old buildings and the
construction of new; asylums, hospitals, and prisons, gave the island
an aspect at once modern and sanitary. The fiscal revenues, formerly
badly employed by an unskilful bureaucracy, found useful employment;
dilapidations were noted and a railway statute was passed. The
Yankees opened up new roads, knowing how far the prosperity of the
island depended on them; in 1906, the second year of the occupation,
there were only 610 kilometres of carriage-roads in Cuba, while
Jamaica, with one-fifth the area, had 10,113.[3]
Communications being thus improved, the sugar industry, on which the
prosperity of the island depends, developed rapidly. The visitors
did not forget to attract immigrants and to reconstruct the ports.
The government of General Wood installed modern schools in the old
Spanish school-houses, while it built special schools, kindergartens,
and technical colleges in the large towns.
Under the Spaniards education was obligatory, no doubt, but it was
the Americans who brought a lapsed law into force. Fines punished
parental neglect. A thousand teachers went to Harvard, in the year
1900 alone, sent thither by General Wood to improve their methods of
teaching; new pedagogic methods and a wider culture strongly modified
social and political life. The Americans left ten times as many
schools as they found, and an education adequate to the race and the
Cuban child, who is "impressionable, nervous, and furiously
imaginative."
Governor Wood requested his country to reduce by one-half the customs
rates upon the coffee, fruits, and {320} sugar which the island
produced, as the basis of a _Zollverein_ profitable to both
countries. He complained, in his memoir, of the indifference of the
wealthy towards the communal and political life, which he wished to
render more active. A law passed by him regulated the elections in
the new Republic.
The Cubans willingly recognise that the Americans have performed an
excellent work in education and finance, but accuse them of having
provoked in political life a corruption analogous to that of the
leaders or bosses of Tammany Hall, which replaces violence by fraud.
It is difficult to speak of such a matter, but perhaps the reaction
against these dangerous methods was insufficient. In 1906, after
four years of independent life, President Estrada Palma demanded
intervention. It must be recognised that the Americans did not
respond without some uneasiness. Mr. Roosevelt, in a letter to the
Cuban diplomatist Gonzalo de Quesada, gave some admirable advice: "I
solemnly exhort the Cuban patriots," he said, "to form a close union,
to forget their personal differences and ambitions, and to remember
that they have one means of safeguarding the independence of the
Republic: to evade, at all costs, the necessity of foreign
intervention, intended to deliver them from civil war and anarchy."
Heedless of the voice of the shepherd of the American people, they
asked him to put an end to the long quarrel between the liberals and
the moderates. The Americans occupied the island for a year; Mr.
Taft, the new President, was one of the pacificators. It is
difficult to judge whether the anarchical inhabitants of the island
have gained ground since the departure of the Americans. One of
their most remarkable politicians, Señor Mendez Capote, believes that
in Cuba--and more generally {321} in any very young country where the
government has need of an unfailing authority in order to check
discord--representatives of one or both parties ought to belong to
the Cabinet in order to render political life less changeable and to
decrease its contrasts.[4] This organisation is impossible in a
democracy which passes alternately from revolt to dictatorship.
Some Cubans, satisfied with the material progress effected, would
prefer annexation. Others, and among them one of the most remarkable
writers of the country, Señor Jesus Castellanos, are never tired,
remembering their happy intervention, of calling the United States,
"the great sister Republic." Certainly the States have given Cuba
autonomy, but was it not a treacherous gift? _Timeo Danaos et dona
ferentes_. The historic interest of Cuba for the Americans is to-day
increased by imperialistic ambitions. A Harvard professor, Mr.
Coolidge, writes in a book already cited: "A glance at the map is
enough to show us how important the island is to the United States.
Of great value by virtue of its natural resources and its temperate
climate, it is strategically the key to the Gulf of Mexico, where the
Mississippi Valley terminates facing the Caribbean Sea and the future
Panama Canal. Its situation is comparable to that of Crete in the
Eastern Mediterranean."
The danger is therefore serious; the island is already in the lion's
mouth. Only a skilful policy can keep the hope of deliverance alive.
The servitude offered by the modern Cyclops is only a gilded pill;
and to swallow it the merchants of the island would willingly forget
their national pride. Analysing Rodo's book, Señor Castellanos has
denounced the excessive utilitarianism of these men, without
idealism, and full of a cupidity and gross materialism, which makes
any collective effort towards national unity {322} impossible. Poets
and dreamers, the Cubans would need to undergo some prodigious change
before one could interest them in action, before they could
understand in the medley of political conflict what is really in the
interests of the country; before they could establish political
solidarity in the place of anarchy, and temper their easy confidence
in the Yankee by a necessary and self-preserving scepticism. Could
they ever transform their intellectual gifts into a less showy but
more efficacious capacity for conflict and discipline? Will they
acquire a sense of reality? Cuba should serve the rest of Latin
America as a kind of experimental object-lesson. She suffers from
the characteristic malady of the race, the divorce between
intelligence and will.
She opposes the Anglo-Saxon invasion, being still thoroughly Spanish,
her deliverance being a matter of yesterday, but American also by the
mixture of the two races, the conquerors and the vanquished, by the
usual Latin virtues and defects. The loss of her independence would
be a painful lesson to the republics of Central America, and to
Mexico even, where anarchy is paving the way for servitude. The
United States offer peace at the cost of liberty. The alternatives
are independence or wealth, material progress or tradition. The
choice between dignity and a future is a painful one. Only an
abundant immigration under benevolent tyrants strong enough to
enforce a lasting peace, only a new orientation of the national life,
setting business and industry and rural life before politics, could
save the country from the painful fate which seems to be hers.
A fresh intervention, followed doubtless by annexation, would
demonstrate the racial incapacity for self-government--a mournful
experience. The successive rule of Anglo-Saxons and Creoles would
render obvious the superiority of the former in the matter of
administration, economics, and politics.
[1] See _Como acabó la dominación, de España en America_, E. Piñeyro,
Paris.
[2] Enrique Collazo, _Cuba intervenida_, Havana, 1910, p. 93.
[3] _Informe del Gobernador Charles E. Magoon_, Havana, 1909, pp. 26,
39.
[4] Cited in _Cuban Pacification_, Washington, 1907, p. 506.
{323}