coast of Africa to punish savage king who butchers people because it
does not rain. Why should we tolerate Spanish savages merely because
they call themselves "the most Catholic," but who in reality are no
better than this naked negro? What difference is there between the King
of Benin who crucifies a woman because he wants rain and General Weyler
who outrages a woman for his own pleasure and throws her to his
bodyguard of blacks, even if the woman has the misfortune to live after
it--and to still live in Sagua la Grande to-day?
If the English were right--and they were right--in punishing the King
of Benin for murdering his subjects to propitiate his idols, we are
right to punish these revivers of the Inquisition for starving women
and children to propitiate an Austrian archduchess.
It is difficult to know what the American people do want. They do not
want peace, apparently, for their senators, some through an ignorant
hatred of England and others through a personal dislike of the
President, emasculated the arbitration treaty; and they do not want
war, for, as some one has written, if we did not go to war with Spain
when she murdered the crew of the _Virginius,_ we never will.
[Illustration: General Weyler in the Field]
But if the executive and the legislators wish to assure themselves,
like "Fighting Bob Acres," that they have some right on their side,
they need not turn back to the _Virginius_ incident. There are
reasons enough to-day to justify their action, if it is to be their
intellects and not their feelings that must move them to act. American
property has been destroyed by Spanish troops to the amount of many
millions, and no answer made to demands of the State Department for an
explanation. American citizens have been imprisoned and shot--some
without a trial, some in front of their own domiciles, and American
vessels are turned over to the uses of the Spanish secret police. These
would seem to be sufficient reasons for interfering.
But why should we not go a step farther and a step higher, and
interfere in the name of humanity? Not because we are Americans, but
because we are human beings, and because, within eighty miles of our
coast, Spanish officials are killing men and women as wantonly as
though they were field mice, not in battle, but in cold blood--cutting
them down in the open roads, at the wells to which they have gone for
water, or on their farms, where they have stolen away to dig up a few
potatoes, having first run the gauntlets of the forts and risked their
lives to obtain them.
This is not an imaginary state of affairs, nor are these supposititious
cases. I am writing only of the things I have heard from eye witnesses
and of some of the things that I have seen.
President Cleveland declared in his message to Congress: "When the
inability of Spain to deal successfully with the insurgents has become
manifest, and it is demonstrated that her sovereignty is extinct in
Cuba for all purposes of its rightful existence, and when a hopeless
struggle for its re-establishment has degenerated into a strife which
is nothing more than the useless sacrifice of human life and the utter
destruction of the very subject-matter of the conflict, a situation
will be presented in which our obligations to the sovereignty of Spain
will be superseded by higher obligations, which we can hardly hesitate
to recognize and discharge!"
These conditions are now manifest. A hopeless struggle for sovereignty
has degenerated into a strife which means not the useless, but the
wanton sacrifice of human life, and the utter destruction of the
subject-matter of the conflict.
What further manifestations are needed? Is it that the American people
doubt the sources from which their information comes? They are the
consuls all over the island of Cuba. For what voice crying in the
wilderness are they still waiting? What will convince them that the
time has come?
If the United States is to interfere in this matter she should do so at
once, but she should only do so after she has informed herself
thoroughly concerning it. She should not act on the reports of the
hotel piazza correspondents, but send men to Cuba on whose judgment and
common sense she can rely. General Fitzhugh Lee is one of these men,
and there is no better informed American on Cuban matters than he, nor
one who sees more clearly the course which our government should
pursue. Through the consuls all over the island, he is in touch with
every part of it, and in daily touch; but incidents which are
frightfully true there seem exaggerated and overdrawn when a
typewritten description of them reaches the calm corridors of the State
Department.
More men like Lee should go to Cuba to inform themselves, not men who
will stop in Havana and pick up the gossip of the Hotel Ingleterra, but
who will go out into the cities and sugar plantations and talk to the
consuls and merchants and planters, both Spanish and American; who can
see for themselves the houses burning and the smoke arising from every
point of the landscape; who can see the bodies of "pacificos" brought
into the cities, and who can sit on a porch of an American planter's
house and hear him tell in a whisper how his sugar cane was set on fire
by the same Spanish soldiers who surround the house, and who are
supposed to guard his property, but who, in reality, are there to keep
a watch on him.
He should hear little children, born of American parents, come into the
consulate and ask for a piece of bread. He should see the children and
the women herded in the towns or walking the streets in long
processions, with the Mayor at their head, begging his fellow Spaniards
to give them food, the children covered with the red blotches of
small-pox and the women gaunt with yellow fever. He should see hundreds
of thousands of dollars' worth of machinery standing idle, covered with
rust and dirt, or lying twisted and broken under fallen walls. He will
learn that while one hundred and fifty-six vessels came into the port
of Matanzas in 1894, only eighty-eight came in 1895, and that but
sixteen touched there in 1896, and that while the export of sugar from
that port to the United States in 1894 amounted to eleven millions of
dollars, in 1895 it sank to eight millions of dollars, and in 1896 it
did not reach one million. I copied these figures one morning from the
consular books, and that loss of ten millions of dollars in two years
in one little port is but a sample of the facts that show what chaos
this war is working.
[Illustration: Spanish Cavalryman on a Texas Broncho]
In three weeks any member of the Senate or of Congress who wishes to
inform himself on this reign of terror in Cuba can travel from one end
of this island to the other and return competent to speak with absolute
authority. No man, no matter what his prejudices may be, can make this
journey and not go home convinced that it is his duty to try to stop
this cruel waste of life and this wanton destruction of a beautiful
country.
A reign of terror sounds hysterical, but it is an exact and truthful
descriptive phrase of the condition in Cuba. Insurgents and Spaniards
alike are laying waste the land, and neither side shows any sign of
giving up the struggle. But while the men are in the field fighting
after their fashion, for the independence of the island, the old men
and the infirm and the women and children, who cannot help the cause or
themselves, and who are destitute and starving and dying, have their
eyes turned toward the great republic that lies only eighty miles away,
and they are holding out their hands and asking "How long, O, Lord, how
long?"
Or if the members of the Senate and of Congress can not visit Cuba, why
will they not listen to those who have been there? Of three men who
traveled over the island, seeking the facts concerning it, two
correspondents and an interpreter, two of the three were for a time in
Spanish hospitals, covered with small-pox. Of the three, although we
were together until they were taken ill, I was the only one who escaped
contagion.
If these other men should die, they die because they tried to find out
the truth. Is it likely, having risked such a price for it that they
would lie about what they have seen?
They could have invented stories of famine and disease in Havana. They
need not have looked for the facts where they were to be found, in the
seaports and villages and fever camps. Why not listen to these men or
to Stephen Bonsai, of the _New York Herald_, in whom the late
President showed his confidence by appointing him to two diplomatic
missions?
Why not listen to C.E. Akers, of the _London Times_, and
_Harper's Weekly_, who has held two commissions from the Queen?
Why disregard a dozen other correspondents who are seeking the truth,
and who urge in every letter which they write that their country should
stop this destruction of a beautiful land and this butchery of harmless
non-combatants?
The matter lies at the door of Congress. Each day's delay means the
death of hundreds of people, every hour sees fresh blood spilled, and
more houses and more acres of crops sinking into ashes. A month's delay
means the loss to this world of thousands of lives, the unchecked
growth of terrible diseases, and the spreading devastation of a great
plague.
[Illustration: For Cuba Libre]
It would be an insult to urge political reasons, or the sure approval
of the American people which the act of interference would bring, or
any other unworthy motive. No European power dare interfere, and it
lies with the United States and with her people to give the signal. If
it is given now it will save thousands of innocent lives; if it is
delayed just that many people will perish.
THE END.
End of Project Gutenberg's Cuba in War Time, by Richard Harding Davis