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[Illustration: The Death of Rodriguez]
CUBA
IN WAR TIME
BY
RICHARD HARDING DAVIS
Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society Author of "Three Gringos in
Venezuela and Central America," "The Princess Aline," "Gallegher," "Van
Bibber, and Others," "Dr. Jameson's Raiders," etc., etc.
ILLUSTRATED BY FREDERIC REMINGTON
NEW YORK. R. H. RUSSELL 1897 *[Note: Before Spanish-American War]
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Author's Note
Cuba in War Time
The Fate of the Pacificos
The Death of Rodriguez
Along the Trocha
The Question of Atrocities
The Right of Search of American Vessels
ILLUSTRATIONS
The Death of Rodríguez
A Spanish Soldier
Guerrillas with Captured Pacificos
A Spanish Officer
Insurgents Firing on Spanish Fort
Fire and Sword in Cuba
A Spanish Guerrilla
Murdering the Cuban Wounded
Bringing in the Wounded
Young Spanish Officer
The Cuban Martyrdom
Regular Cavalryman--Spanish
One of the Block Houses
Spanish Cavalry
One of the Forts Along the Trocha
The Trocha
Spanish Troops in Action
Amateur Surgery in Cuba
Scouting Party of Spanish Cavalry
An Officer of Spanish Guerrillas
A Spanish Picket Post
General Weyler in the Field
Spanish Cavalryman on a Texas Broncho
For Cuba Libre
NOTE
These illustrations were made by Mr. Frederic Remington, from personal
observation while in Cuba, and from photographs, and descriptions
furnished by eye-witnesses, and are here reproduced through the
courtesy of Mr. W. R. Hearst.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
After my return from Cuba many people asked me questions concerning the
situation there, and I noticed that they generally asked the same
questions. This book has been published with the idea of answering
those questions as fully as is possible for me to do after a journey
through the island, during which I traveled in four of the six
provinces, visiting towns, seaports, plantations and military camps,
and stopping for several days in all of the chief cities of Cuba, with
the exception of Santiago and Pinar del Rio.
Part of this book was published originally in the form of letters from
Cuba to the _New York Journal_ and in the newspapers of a
syndicate arranged by the _Journal_; the remainder, which was
suggested by the questions asked on my return, was written in this
country, and appears here for the first time.
RICHARD HARDING DAVIS.
Cuba In War Time
When the revolution broke out in Cuba two years ago, the Spaniards at
once began to build tiny forts, and continued to add to these and
improve those already built, until now the whole island, which is eight
hundred miles long and averages eighty miles in width, is studded as
thickly with these little forts as is the sole of a brogan with iron
nails. It is necessary to keep the fact of the existence of these forts
in mind in order to understand the situation in Cuba at the present
time, as they illustrate the Spanish plan of campaign, and explain why
the war has dragged on for so long, and why it may continue
indefinitely.
The last revolution was organized by the aristocrats; the present one
is a revolution of the _puebleo_, and, while the principal Cuban
families are again among the leaders, with them now are the
representatives of the "plain people," and the cause is now a common
cause in working for the success of which all classes of Cubans are
desperately in earnest.
The outbreak of this revolution was hastened by an offer from Spain to
make certain reforms in the internal government of the island. The old
revolutionary leaders, fearing that the promise of these reforms might
satisfy the Cubans, and that they would cease to hope for complete
independence, started the revolt, and asked all loyal Cubans not to
accept the so-called reforms when, by fighting, they might obtain their
freedom. Another cause which precipitated the revolution was the
financial depression which existed all over the island in 1894, and the
closing of the sugar mills in consequence. Owing to the lack of money
with which to pay the laborers, the grinding of the sugar cane ceased,
and the men were turned off by the hundreds, and, for want of something
better to do, joined the insurgents. Some planters believe that had
Spain loaned them sufficient money with which to continue grinding, the
men would have remained on the _centrals_, as the machine shops
and residence of a sugar plantation are called, and that so few would
have gone into the field against Spain that the insurrection could have
been put down before it had gained headway. An advance to the sugar
planters of five millions of dollars then, so they say, would have
saved Spain the outlay of many hundreds of millions spent later in
supporting an army in the field. That may or may not be true, and it is
not important now, for Spain did not attack the insurgents in that way,
but began hastily to build forts. These forts now stretch all over the
island, some in straight lines, some in circles, and some zig-zagging
from hill-top to hill-top, some within a quarter of a mile of the next,
and others so near that the sentries can toss a cartridge from one to
the other.
The island is divided into two great military camps, one situated
within the forts, and the other scattered over the fields and mountains
outside of them. The Spaniards have absolute control over everything
within the fortified places; that is, in all cities, towns, seaports,
and along the lines of the railroad; the insurgents are in possession
of all the rest. They are not in fixed possession, but they have
control much as a mad bull may be said to have control of a ten-acre
lot when he goes on the rampage. Some farmer may hold a legal right to
the ten-acre lot, through title deeds or in the shape of a mortgage,
and the bull may occupy but one part of it at a time, but he has
possession, which is better than the law.
It is difficult to imagine a line drawn so closely, not about one city
or town, but around every city and town in Cuba, that no one can pass
the line from either the outside or the inside. The Spaniards, however,
have succeeded in effecting and maintaining a blockade of that kind.
They have placed forts next to the rows of houses or huts on the
outskirts of each town, within a hundred yards of one another, and
outside of this circle is another circle, and beyond that, on every
high piece of ground, are still more of these little square forts,
which are not much larger than the signal stations along the lines of
our railroads and not unlike them in appearance. No one can cross the
line of the forts without a pass, nor enter from the country beyond
them without an order showing from what place he comes, at what time he
left that place, and that he had permission from the commandante to
leave it. A stranger in any city in Cuba to-day is virtually in a
prison, and is as isolated from the rest of the world as though he were
on a desert island or a floating ship of war. When he wishes to depart
he is free to do so, but he cannot leave on foot nor on horseback. He
must make his departure on a railroad train, of which seldom more than
two leave any town in twenty-four hours, one going east and the other
west. From Havana a number of trains depart daily in different
directions, but once outside of Havana, there is only one train back to
it again. When on the cars you are still in the presence and under the
care of Spanish soldiers, and the progress of the train is closely
guarded. A pilot engine precedes it at a distance of one hundred yards
to test the rails and pick up dynamite bombs, and in front of it is a
car covered with armor plate, with slits in the sides like those in a
letter box, through which the soldiers may fire. There are generally
from twenty to fifty soldiers in each armored car. Back of the armored
car is a flat car loaded with ties, girders and rails, which are used
to repair bridges or those portions of the track that may have been
blown up by the insurgents. Wherever a track crosses a bridge there are
two forts, one at each end of the bridge, and also at almost every
cross-road. When the train passes one of these forts, two soldiers
appear in the door and stand at salute to show, probably, that they are
awake, and at every station there are two or more forts, while the
stations themselves are usually protected by ramparts of ties and steel
rails. There is no situation where it is so distinctly evident that
those who are not with you are against you, for you are either inside
of one circle of forts or passing under guard by rail to another
circle, or you are with the insurgents. There is no alternative. If you
walk fifty yards away from the circle you are, in the eyes of the
Spaniards, as much in "the field" as though you were two hundred miles
away on the mountains.
[Illustration: A Spanish Soldier]
The lines are so closely drawn that when you consider the tremendous
amount of time and labor expended in keeping up this blockade, you must
admire the Spaniards for doing it so well, but you would admire them
more, if, instead of stopping content with that they went further and
invaded the field. The forts are an excellent precaution; they prevent
sympathizers from joining the insurgents and from sending them food,
arms, medicine or messages. But the next step, after blockading the
cities, would appear to be to follow the insurgents into the field and
give them battle. This the Spaniards do not seem to consider important,
nor wish to do. Flying columns of regular troops and guerrillas are
sent out daily, but they always return each evening within the circle
of forts. If they meet a band of insurgents they give battle readily
enough, but they never pursue the enemy, and, instead of camping on the
ground and following him up the next morning, they retreat as soon as
the battle is over, to the town where they are stationed. When
occasionally objection is made to this by a superior officer, they give
as an explanation that they were afraid of being led into an ambush,
and that as an officer's first consideration must be for his men, they
decided that it was wiser not to follow the enemy into what might prove
a death-trap; or the officers say they could not abandon their wounded
while they pursued the rebels. Sometimes a force of one thousand men
will return with three men wounded, and will offer their condition as
an excuse for having failed to follow the enemy.
About five years ago troops of United States cavalry were sent into the
chapparal on the border of Mexico and Texas to drive the Garcia
revolutionists back into their own country. One troop, G, Third
Cavalry, was ordered out for seven days' service, but when I joined the
troop later as a correspondent, it had been in the field for three
months, sleeping the entire time under canvas, and carrying all its
impedimenta with it on pack mules. It had seldom, if ever, been near a
town, and the men wore the same clothes, or what was left of them, with
which they had started for a week's campaign. Had the Spaniards
followed such a plan of attack as that when the revolution began,
instead of building mud forts and devastating the country, they might
not only have suppressed the revolution, but the country would have
been of some value when the war ended. As it is to-day, it will take
ten years or more to bring it back to a condition of productiveness.
The wholesale devastation of the island was an idea of General
Weyler's. If the captain of a vessel, in order to put down a mutiny on
board, scuttled the ship and sent everybody to the bottom, his plan of
action would be as successful as General Weyler's has proved to be.
After he had obtained complete control of the cities he decided to lay
waste the country and starve the revolutionists into submission. So he
ordered all pacíficos, as the non-belligerents are called, into the
towns and burned their houses, and issued orders to have all fields
where potatoes or corn were planted dug up and these food products
destroyed.
These pacificos are now gathered inside of a dead line, drawn one
hundred and fifty yards around the towns, or wherever there is a fort.
Some of them have settled around the forts that guard a bridge, others
around the forts that guard a sugar plantation; wherever there are
forts there are pacificos.
In a word, the situation in Cuba is something like this: The Spaniards
hold the towns, from which their troops daily make predatory raids,
invariably returning in time for dinner at night. Around each town is a
circle of pacificos doing no work, and for the most part starving and
diseased, and outside, in the plains and mountains, are the insurgents.
No one knows just where any one band of them is to-day or where it may
be to-morrow. Sometimes they come up to the very walls of the fort,
lasso a bunch of cattle and ride off again, and the next morning their
presence may be detected ten miles away, where they are setting fire to
a cane field or a sugar plantation.
[Illustration: Guerrillas With Captured Pacíficos]
This is the situation, so far as the inhabitants are concerned. The
physical appearance of the country since the war began has changed
greatly. In the days of peace Cuba was one of the most beautiful
islands in the tropics, perhaps in the world. Its skies hang low and
are brilliantly beautiful, with great expanses of blue, and in the
early morning and before sunset, they are lighted with wonderful clouds
of pink and saffron, as brilliant and as unreal as the fairy's grotto
in a pantomime. There are great wind-swept prairies of high grass or
tall sugar cane, and on the sea coast mountains of a light green, like
the green of corroded copper, changing to a darker shade near the base,
where they are covered with forests of palms.
Throughout the extent of the island run many little streams, sometimes
between high banks of rock, covered with moss and magnificent fern,
with great pools of clear, deep water at the base of high waterfalls,
and in those places where the stream cuts its way through the level
plains double rows of the royal palm mark its course. The royal palm is
the characteristic feature of the landscape in Cuba. It is the most
beautiful of all palms, and possibly the most beautiful of all trees.
The cocoanut palm, as one sees it in Egypt, picturesque as it is, has a
pathetic resemblance to a shabby feather duster, and its trunk bends
and twists as though it had not the strength to push its way through
the air, and to hold itself erect. But the royal palm shoots up boldly
from the earth with the grace and symmetry of a marble pillar or the
white mast of a great ship. Its trunk swells in the centre and grows
smaller again at the top, where it is hidden by great bunches of green
plumes, like monstrous ostrich feathers that wave and bow and bend in
the breeze as do the plumes on the head of a beautiful woman. Standing
isolated in an open plain or in ranks in a forest of palms, this tree
is always beautiful, noble and full of meaning. It makes you forget the
ugly iron chimneys of the _centrals_, and it is the first and the
last feature that appeals to the visitor in Cuba.
But since the revolution came to Cuba the beauty of the landscape is
blotted with the grim and pitiable signs of war. The sugar cane has
turned to a dirty brown where the fire has passed through it, the
_centrals_ are black ruins, and the adobe houses and the railroad
stations are roofless, and their broken windows stare pathetically at
you like blind eyes. War cannot alter the sunshine, but the smoke from
the burning huts and the blazing corn fields seems all the more sad and
terrible when it rises into such an atmosphere, and against so soft and
beautiful a sky.
People frequently ask how far the destruction of property in Cuba is
apparent. It is so far apparent that the smoke of burning buildings is
seldom absent from the landscape. If you stand on an elevation it is
possible to see from ten to twenty blazing houses, and the smoke from
the cane fields creeping across the plain or rising slowly to meet the
sky. Sometimes the train passes for hours through burning districts,
and the heat from the fields along the track is so intense that it is
impossible to keep the windows up, and whenever the door is opened
sparks and cinders sweep into the car. One morning, just this side of
Jovellanos, all the sugar cane on the right side of the track was
wrapped in white smoke for miles so that nothing could be distinguished
from that side of the car, and we seemed to be moving through the white
steam of a Russian bath.
The Spaniards are no more to blame for this than are the insurgents;
each destroy property and burn the cane. When an insurgent column finds
a field planted with potatoes, it takes as much of the crop as it can
carry away and chops up the remainder with machetes, to prevent it from
falling into the hands of the Spaniards. If the Spaniards pass first,
they act in exactly the same way.
Cane is not completely destroyed if it is burned, for if it is at once
cut down just above the roots, it will grow again. When peace is
declared it will not be the soil that will be found wanting, nor the
sun. It will be the lack of money and the loss of credit that will keep
the sugar planters from sowing and grinding. And the loss of machinery
in the _centrals_, which is worth in single instances hundreds of
thousands of dollars, and in the aggregate many millions, cannot be
replaced by men, who, even when their machinery was intact, were on the
brink of ruin.
Unless the United States government interferes on account of some one
of its citizens in Cuba, and war is declared with Spain, there is no
saying how long the present revolution may continue. For the Spaniards
themselves are acting in a way which makes many people suspect that
they are not making an effort to bring it to an end. The sincerity of
the Spaniards in Spain is beyond question; the personal sacrifices they
made in taking up the loans issued by the government are proof of their
loyalty. But the Spaniards in Cuba are acting for their own interests.
Many of the planters in order to save their fields and _centrals_
from destruction, are unquestionably aiding the insurgents in secret,
and though they shout "Viva España" in the cities, they pay out
cartridges and money at the back door of their plantations.
[Illustration: A Spanish Officer]
It was because Weyler suspected that they were playing this double game
that he issued secret orders that there should be no more grinding. For
he knew that the same men who bribed him to allow them to grind would
also pay blackmail to the insurgents for a like permission. He did not
dare openly to forbid the grinding, but he instructed his officers in
the field to visit those places where grinding was in progress and to
stop it by some indirect means, such as by declaring that the laborers
employed were suspects, or by seizing all the draught oxen ostensibly
for the use of his army, or by insisting that the men employed must
show a fresh permit to work every day, which could only be issued to
them by some commandante stationed not less than ten miles distant from
the plantation on which they were employed.
And the Spanish officers, as well as the planters--the very men to whom
Spain looks to end the rebellion--are chief among those who are keeping
it alive. The reasons for their doing so are obvious; they receive
double pay while they are on foreign service, whether they are fighting
or not, promotion comes twice as quickly as in time of peace, and
orders and crosses are distributed by the gross. They are also able to
make small fortunes out of forced loans from planters and suspects, and
they undoubtedly hold back for themselves a great part of the pay of
the men. A certain class of Spanish officer has a strange sense of
honor. He does not consider that robbing his government by falsifying
his accounts, or by making incorrect returns of his expenses, is
disloyal or unpatriotic. He holds such an act as lightly as many people
do smuggling cigars through their own custom house, or robbing a
corporation of a railroad fare. He might be perfectly willing to die
for his country, but should he be permitted to live he will not
hesitate to rob her.
A lieutenant, for instance, will take twenty men out for their daily
walk through the surrounding country and after burning a few huts and
butchering a pacifico or two, will come back in time for dinner and
charge his captain for rations for fifty men and for three thousand
cartridges "expended in service." The captain vises his report, and the
two share the profits. Or they turn the money over to the colonel, who
recommends them for red enamelled crosses for "bravery on the field."
The only store in Matanzas that was doing a brisk trade when I was
there was a jewelry shop, where they had sold more diamonds and watches
to the Spanish officers since the revolution broke out than they had
ever been able to dispose of before to all the rich men in the city.
The legitimate pay of the highest ranking officer is barely enough to
buy red wine for his dinner, certainly not enough to pay for champagne
and diamonds; so it is not unfair to suppose that the rebellion is a
profitable experience for the officers, and they have no intention of
losing the golden eggs.
And the insurgents on the other side are equally determined to continue
the conflict. From every point of view this is all that is left for
them to do. They know by terrible experience how little of mercy or
even of justice they may expect from the enemy, and, patriotism or the
love of independence aside, it is better for them to die in the field
than to risk the other alternative; a lingering life in an African
penal settlement or the fusillade against the east wall of Cabañas
prison. In an island with a soil so rich and productive as is that of
Cuba there will always be roots and fruits for the insurgents to live
upon, and with the cattle that they have hidden away in the laurel or
on the mountains they can keep their troops in rations for an
indefinite period. What they most need now are cartridges and rifles.
Of men they have already more than they can arm.
People in the United States frequently express impatience at the small
amount of fighting which takes place in this struggle for liberty, and
it is true that the lists of killed show that the death rate in battle
is inconsiderable. Indeed, when compared with the number of men and
women who die daily of small-pox and fever and those who are butchered
on the plantations, the proportion of killed in battle is probably
about one to fifteen.
I have no statistics to prove these figures, but, judging from the
hospital reports and from what the consuls tell of the many murders of
pacificos, I judge that that proportion would be rather under than
above the truth. George Bronson Rae, the _Herald_ correspondent,
who was for nine months with Maceo and Gomez, and who saw eighty fights
and was twice wounded, told me that the largest number of insurgents he
had seen killed in one battle was thirteen.
Another correspondent said that a Spanish officer had told him that he
had killed forty insurgents out of four hundred who had attacked his
column. "But how do you know you killed that many?" the correspondent
asked. "You say you were never nearer than half a mile to them, and
that you fell back into the town as soon as they ceased firing."
[Illustration: Insurgents Firing on a Spanish Fort "One Shot for a
Hundred"]
"Ah, but I counted the cartridges my men had used," the officer
replied. "I found they had expended four hundred. By allowing ten
bullets to each man killed, I was able to learn that we had killed
forty men."
These stories show how little reason there is to speak of these
skirmishes as battles, and it also throws some light on the Spaniard's
idea of his own marksmanship. As a plain statement of fact, and without
any exaggeration, one of the chief reasons why half the insurgents in
Cuba are not dead to-day is because the Spanish soldiers cannot shoot
well enough to hit them. The Mauser rifle, which is used by all the
Spanish soldiers, with the exception of the Guardia Civile, is a most
excellent weapon for those who like clean, gentlemanly warfare, in
which the object is to wound or to kill outright, and not to "shock"
the enemy nor to tear his flesh in pieces. The weapon has hardly any
trajectory up to one thousand yards, but, in spite of its precision, it
is as useless in the hands of a guerrilla or the average Spanish
soldier as a bow and arrow would be. The fact that when the Spaniards
say "within gun fire of the forts" they mean within one hundred and
fifty yards of them shows how they estimate their own skill. Major
Grover Flint, the _Journal_ correspondent, told me of a fight that
he witnessed in which the Spaniards fired two thousand rounds at forty
insurgents only two hundred yards away, and only succeeded in wounding
three of them. Sylvester Scovel once explained this bad marksmanship to
me by pointing out that to shift the cartridge in a Mauser, it is
necessary to hold the rifle at an almost perpendicular angle, and close
up under the shoulder. After the fresh cartridge has gone home the
temptation to bring the butt to the shoulder before the barrel is level
is too great for the Spanish Tommy, and, in his excitement, he fires
most of his ammunition in the air over the heads of the enemy. He also
fires so recklessly and rapidly that his gun often becomes too hot for
him to handle it properly, and it is not an unusual sight to see him
rest the butt on the ground and pull the trigger while the gun is in
that position.
On the whole, the Spanish soldiers during this war in Cuba have
contributed little to the information of those who are interested in
military science. The tactics which the officers follow are those which
were found effective at the battle of Waterloo, and in the Peninsular
campaign. When attacked from an ambush a Spanish column forms at once
into a hollow square, with the cavalry in the centre, and the firing is
done in platoons. They know nothing of "open order," or of firing in
skirmish line. If the Cubans were only a little better marksmen than
their enemies they should, with such a target as a square furnishes
them, kill about ten men where they now wound one.
With the war conducted under the conditions described here, there does
not seem to be much promise of its coming to any immediate end unless
some power will interfere. The Spaniards will probably continue to
remain inside their forts, and the officers will continue to pay
themselves well out of the rebellion.
And, on the other hand, the insurgents who call themselves rich when
they have three cartridges, as opposed to the one hundred and fifty
cartridges that every Spanish soldier carries, will probably very
wisely continue to refuse to force the issue in any one battle.
[Illustration: *Fire and sword in Cuba]
The Fate Of The Pacificos
As is already well known in the United States, General Weyler issued an
order some months ago commanding the country people living in the
provinces of Pinar del Rio, Havana and Matanzas to betake themselves
with their belongings to the fortified towns. His object in doing this
was to prevent the pacificos from giving help to the insurgents, and
from sheltering them and the wounded in their huts. So flying columns
of guerrillas and Spanish soldiers were sent to burn these huts, and to
drive the inhabitants into the suburbs of the cities. When I arrived in
Cuba sufficient time had passed for me to note the effects of this
order, and to study the results as they are to be found in the
provinces of Havana, Matanzas and Santa Clara, the order having been
extended to embrace the latter province.
It looked then as though General Weyler was reaping what he had sown,
and was face to face with a problem of his own creating. As far as a
visitor could judge, the results of this famous order seemed to furnish
a better argument to those who think the United States should interfere
in behalf of Cuba, than did the fact that men were being killed there,
and that both sides were devastating the island and wrecking property
worth millions of dollars.
The order, apart from being unprecedented in warfare, proved an
exceedingly short-sighted one, and acted almost immediately after the
manner of a boomerang. The able-bodied men of each family who had
remained loyal or at least neutral, so long as they were permitted to
live undisturbed on their few acres, were not content to exist on the
charity of a city, and they swarmed over to the insurgent ranks by the
hundreds, and it was only the old and infirm and the women and children
who went into the towns, where they at once became a burden on the
Spanish residents, who were already distressed by the lack of trade and
the high prices asked for food.
The order failed also in its original object of embarrassing the
insurgents, for they are used to living out of doors and to finding
food for themselves, and the destruction of the huts where they had
been made welcome was not a great loss to men who, in a few minutes,
with the aid of a machete, can construct a shelter from a palm tree.
So the order failed to distress those against whom it was aimed, but
brought swift and terrible suffering to those who were and are
absolutely innocent of any intent against the government, as well as to
the adherents of the government.
It is easy to imagine what happened when hundreds of people, in some
towns thousands, were herded together on the bare ground, with no food,
with no knowledge of sanitation, with no covering for their heads but
palm leaves, with no privacy for the women and young girls, with no
thought but as to how they could live until to-morrow.
It is true that in the country, also, these people had no covering for
their huts but palm leaves, but those huts were made stoutly to endure.
When a man built one of them he was building his home, not a shelter
tent, and they were placed well apart from one another, with the free
air of the plain or mountain blowing about them, with room for the sun
to beat down and drink up the impurities, and with patches of green
things growing in rows over the few acres. I have seen them like that
all over Cuba, and I am sure that no disease could have sprung from
houses built so admirably to admit the sun and the air.
I have also seen them, I might add in parenthesis, rising in sluggish
columns of black smoke against the sky, hundreds of them, while those
who had lived in them for years stood huddled together at a distance,
watching the flames run over the dry rafters of their homes, roaring
and crackling with delight, like something human or inhuman, and
marring the beautiful sunlit landscape with great blotches of red
flames.
The huts in which these people live at present lean one against the
other, and there are no broad roads nor green tobacco patches to
separate one from another. There are, on the contrary, only narrow
paths, two feet wide, where dogs and cattle and human beings tramp over
daily growing heaps of refuse and garbage and filth, and where malaria
rises at night in a white winding sheet of poisonous mist.
The condition of these people differs in degree; some are living the
life of gypsies, others are as destitute as so many shipwrecked
emigrants, and still others find it difficult to hold up their heads
and breathe.
[Illustration: A Spanish Guerrilla]
In Jaruco, in the Havana province, a town of only two thousand
inhabitants, the deaths from small-pox averaged seven a day for the
month of December, and while Frederic Remington and I were there, six
victims of small-pox were carried past us up the hill to the burying
ground in the space of twelve hours. There were Spanish soldiers as
well as pacificos among these, for the Spanish officers either know or
care nothing about the health of their men.
There is no attempt made to police these military camps, and in Jaruco
the filth covered the streets and the plaza ankle-deep, and even filled
the corners of the church which had been turned into a fort, and had
hammocks swung from the altars. The huts of the pacíficos, with from
four to six people in each, were jammed together in rows a quarter of a
mile long, within ten feet of the cavalry barracks, where sixty men and
horses had lived for a month. Next to the stables were the barracks. No
one was vaccinated, no one was clean, and all of them were living on
half rations.
Jaruco was a little worse than the other towns, but I found that the
condition of the people is about the same everywhere. Around every town
and even around the forts outside of the towns, you will see from one
hundred to five hundred of these palm huts, with the people crouched
about them, covered with rags, starving, with no chance to obtain work.
In the city of Matanzas the huts have been built upon a hill, and so
far neither small-pox nor yellow fever has made headway there; but
there is nothing for these people to eat, either, and while I was there
three babies died from plain, old-fashioned starvation and no other
cause.
The government's report for the year just ended gives the number of
deaths in three hospitals of Matanzas as three hundred and eighty for
the year, which is an average of a little over one death a day. As a
matter of fact, in the military hospital alone the soldiers during
several months of last year died at the rate of sixteen a day. It seems
hard that Spain should hold Cuba at such a sacrifice of her own people.
In Cardenas, one of the principal seaport towns of the island, I found
the pacíficos lodged in huts at the back of the town and also in
abandoned warehouses along the water front. The condition of these
latter was so pitiable that it is difficult to describe it correctly
and hope to be believed.
The warehouses are built on wooden posts about fifty feet from the
water's edge. They were originally nearly as large in extent as Madison
Square Garden, but the half of the roof of one has fallen in, carrying
the flooring with it, and the adobe walls and one side of the sloping
roof and the high wooden piles on which half of the floor once rested
are all that remain.
Some time ago an unusually high tide swept in under one of these
warehouses and left a pool of water a hundred yards long and as many
wide, around the wooden posts, and it has remained there undisturbed.
This pool is now covered a half-inch thick with green slime, colored
blue and yellow, and with a damp fungus spread over the wooden posts
and up the sides of the walls.
Over this sewage are now living three hundred women and children and a
few men. The floor beneath them has rotted away, and the planks have
broken and fallen into the pool, leaving big gaps, through which rise
day and night deadly stenches and poisonous exhalations from the pool
below.
The people above it are not ignorant of their situation. They know that
they are living over a death-trap, but there is no other place for
them. Bands of guerrillas and flying columns have driven them in like
sheep to this city, and, with no money and no chance to obtain work,
they have taken shelter in the only place that is left open to them.
With planks and blankets and bits of old sheet iron they have, for the
sake of decency, put up barriers across these abandoned warehouses, and
there they are now sitting on the floor or stretched on heaps of rags,
gaunt and hollow-eyed. Outside, in the angles of the fallen walls, and
among the refuse of the warehouses, they have built fireplaces, and,
with the few pots and kettles they use in common, they cook what food
the children can find or beg.
One gentleman of Cardenas told me that a hundred of these people called
at his house every day for a bit of food.
Old negroes and little white children, some of them as beautiful, in
spite of their rags, as any children I ever saw, act as providers for
this hapless colony. They beg the food and gather the sticks and do the
cooking. Inside the old women and young mothers sit on the rotten
planks listless and silent, staring ahead of them at nothing.
I saw the survivors of the Johnstown flood when the horror of that
disaster was still plainly written in their eyes, but destitute as they
were of home and food and clothing, they were in better plight than
those fever-stricken, starving pacíficos, who have sinned in no way,
who have given no aid to the rebels, and whose only crime is that they
lived in the country instead of in the town. They are now to suffer
because General Weyler, finding that he cannot hold the country as he
can the towns, lays it waste and treats those who lived there with less
consideration than the Sultan of Morocco shows to the murderers in his
jail at Tangier. Had these people been guilty of the most unnatural
crimes, their punishment could not have been more severe nor their end
more certain.
[Illustration: Murdering the Cuban Wounded]
I found the hospital for this colony behind three blankets which had
been hung across a corner of the warehouse. A young woman and a man
were lying side by side, the girl on a cot and the man on the floor.
The others sat within a few feet of them on the other side of the
blankets, apparently lost to all sense of their danger, and too
dejected and hopeless to even raise their eyes when I gave them money.
A fat little doctor was caring for the sick woman, and he pointed
through the cracks in the floor at the green slime below us, and held
his fingers to his nose and shrugged his shoulders. I asked him what
ailed his patients, and he said it was yellow fever, and pointed again
at the slime, which moved and bubbled in the hot sun.
He showed me babies with the skin drawn so tightly over their little
bodies that the bones showed through as plainly as the rings under a
glove. They were covered with sores, and they protested as loudly as
they could against the treatment which the world was giving them,
clinching their fists and sobbing with pain when the sore places came
in contact with their mothers' arms. A planter who had at one time
employed a large number of these people, and who was moving about among
them, said that five hundred had died in Cardenas since the order to
leave the fields had been issued. Another gentleman told me that in the
huts at the back of the town there had been twenty-five cases of
small-pox in one week, of which seventeen had resulted in death.
I do not know that the United States will interfere in the affairs of
Cuba, but whatever may happen later, this is what is likely to happen
now, and it should have some weight in helping to decide the question
with those whose proper business it is to determine it.
Thousands of human beings are now herded together around the seaport
towns of Cuba who cannot be fed, who have no knowledge of cleanliness
or sanitation, who have no doctors to care for them and who cannot care
for themselves.
Many of them are dying of sickness and some of starvation, and this is
the healthy season. In April and May the rains will come, and the fever
will thrive and spread, and cholera, yellow fever and small-pox will
turn Cuba into one huge plague spot, and the farmers' sons whom Spain
has sent over here to be soldiers, and who are dying by the dozens
before they have learned to pull the comb off a bunch of cartridges,
are going to die by the hundreds, and women and children who are
innocent of any offense will die with them, and there will be a
quarantine against Cuba, and no vessel can come into her ports or leave
them.
All this is going to happen, I am led to believe, not from what I saw
in any one village, but in hundreds of villages. It will not do to put
it aside by saying that "War is war," and that "All war is cruel," or
to ask, "Am I my brother's keeper?"
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 the mountains, will live.
It is a situation which charity might help to better, but in any event
it is a condition which deserves the most serious consideration from
men of common sense and judgment, and one not to be treated with
hysterical head lines nor put aside as a necessary evil of war.
[Illustration: Bringing in the Wounded]
The Death Of Rodriguez
Adolfo Rodríguez was the only son of a Cuban farmer, who lives nine
miles outside of Santa Clara, beyond the hills that surround that city
to the north.
When the revolution broke out young Rodríguez joined the insurgents,
leaving his father and mother and two sisters at the farm. He was
taken, in December of 1896, by a force of the Guardia Civile, the corps
d'élite of the Spanish army, and defended himself when they tried to
capture him, wounding three of them with his machete.
He was tried by a military court for bearing arms against the
government, and sentenced to be shot by a fusillade some morning,
before sunrise.
Previous to execution, he was confined in the military prison of Santa
Clara, with thirty other insurgents, all of whom were sentenced to be
shot, one after the other, on mornings following the execution of
Rodríguez.
His execution took place the morning of the 19th of January, at a place
a half-mile distant from the city, on the great plain that stretches
from the forts out to the hills, beyond which Rodríguez had lived for
nineteen years. At the time of his death he was twenty years old.
I witnessed his execution, and what follows is an account of the way he
went to death. The young man's friends could not be present, for it was
impossible for them to show themselves in that crowd and that place
with wisdom or without distress, and I like to think that, although
Rodríguez could not know it, there was one person present when he died
who felt keenly for him, and who was a sympathetic though unwilling
spectator.
There had been a full moon the night preceding the execution, and when
the squad of soldiers marched out from town it was still shining
brightly through the mists, although it was past five o'clock. It
lighted a plain two miles in extent broken by ridges and gullies and
covered with thick, high grass and with bunches of cactus and palmetto.
In the hollow of the ridges the mist lay like broad lakes of water, and
on one side of the plain stood the walls of the old town. On the other
rose hills covered with royal palms that showed white in the moonlight,
like hundreds of marble columns. A line of tiny camp fires that the
sentries had built during the night stretched between the forts at
regular intervals and burned brightly.
But as the light grew stronger, and the moonlight faded, these were
stamped out, and when the soldiers came in force the moon was a white
ball in the sky, without radiance, the fires had sunk to ashes, and the
sun had not yet risen.
So, even when the men were formed into three sides of a hollow square,
they were scarcely able to distinguish one another in the uncertain
light of the morning.
There were about three hundred soldiers in the formation. They belonged
to the Volunteers, and they deployed upon the plain with their band in
front, playing a jaunty quickstep, while their officers galloped from
one side to the other through the grass, seeking out a suitable place
for the execution, while the band outside the line still played
merrily.
A few men and boys, who had been dragged out of their beds by the
music, moved about the ridges, behind the soldiers, half-clothed,
unshaven, sleepy-eyed, yawning and stretching themselves nervously and
shivering in the cool, damp air of the morning.
Either owing to discipline or on account of the nature of their errand
or because the men were still but half awake, there was no talking in
the ranks, and the soldiers stood motionless, leaning on their rifles,
with their backs turned to the town, looking out across the plain to
the hills.
The men in the crowd behind them were also grimly silent. They knew
that whatever they might say would be twisted into a word of sympathy
for the condemned man or a protest against the government. So no one
spoke; even the officers gave their orders in gruff whispers, and the
men in the crowd did not mix together, but looked suspiciously at one
another and kept apart.
As the light increased a mass of people came hurrying from the town
with two black figures leading them, and the soldiers drew up at
attention, and part of the double line fell back and left an opening in
the square.
With us a condemned man walks only the short distance from his cell to
the scaffold or the electric chair, shielded from sight by the prison
walls; and it often occurs even then that the short journey is too much
for his strength and courage.
[Illustration: Young Spanish Officer]
But the merciful Spaniards on this morning made the prisoner walk for
over a half-mile across the broken surface of the fields. I expected to
find the man, no matter what his strength at other times might be,
stumbling and faltering on this cruel journey, but as he came nearer I
saw that he led all the others, that the priests on either side of him
were taking two steps to his one, and that they were tripping on their
gowns and stumbling over the hollows, in their efforts to keep pace
with him as he walked, erect and soldierly, at a quick step in advance
of them.
He had a handsome, gentle face of the peasant type, a light, pointed
beard, great wistful eyes and a mass of curly black hair. He was
shockingly young for such a sacrifice, and looked more like a
Neapolitan than a Cuban. You could imagine him sitting on the quay at
Naples or Genoa, lolling in the sun and showing his white teeth when he
laughed. He wore a new scapula around his neck, hanging outside his
linen blouse.
It seems a petty thing to have been pleased with at such a time, but I
confess to have felt a thrill of satisfaction when I saw, as the Cuban
passed me, that he held a cigarette between his lips, not arrogantly
nor with bravado, but with the nonchalance of a man who meets his
punishment fearlessly, and who will let his enemies see that they can
kill but can not frighten him.
It was very quickly finished, with rough, and, but for one frightful
blunder, with merciful swiftness. The crowd fell back when it came to
the square, and the condemned man, the priests and the firing squad of
six young volunteers passed in and the line closed behind them.
The officer who had held the cord that bound the Cuban's arms behind
him and passed across his breast, let it fall on the grass and drew his
sword, and Rodriguez dropped his cigarette from his lips and bent and
kissed the cross which the priest held up before him.
The elder of the priests moved to one side and prayed rapidly in a loud
whisper, while the other, a younger man, walked away behind the firing
squad and covered his face with his hands and turned his back. They had
both spent the last twelve hours with Rodriguez in the chapel of the
prison.
The Cuban walked to where the officer directed him to stand, and turned
his back to the square and faced the hills and the road across them
which led to his father's farm.
As the officer gave the first command he straightened himself as far as
the cords would allow, and held up his head and fixed his eyes
immovably on the morning light which had just begun to show above the
hills.
He made a picture of such pathetic helplessness, but of such courage
and dignity, that he reminded me on the instant of that statue of
Nathan Hale, which stands in the City Hall Park, above the roar of
Broadway, and teaches a lesson daily to the hurrying crowds of
moneymakers who pass beneath.
The Cuban's arms were bound, as are those of the statue, and he stood
firmly, with his weight resting on his heels like a soldier on parade,
and with his face held up fearlessly, as is that of the statue. But
there was this difference, that Rodriguez, while probably as willing to
give six lives for his country as was the American rebel, being only a
peasant, did not think to say so, and he will not, in consequence, live
in bronze during the lives of many men, but will be remembered only as
one of thirty Cubans, one of whom was shot at Santa Clara on each
succeeding day at sunrise.