CUBA IN TRANSITION
A circumstantial account of the war of liberation would make anything
but pleasant reading. Aside from the fact that on one side was a
down-trodden people struggling to throw off the yoke of the oppressor,
there was little in the conflict to excite admiration, or even interest.
Barbarities of the worst kind were practised by the insurgents as well
as by the Spaniards, and it would be profitless to enquire where the
balance of blame lay when both were so deeply guilty. From the technical
point of view the protracted hostilities hardly deserved to be termed
war. Until the participation of the United States there was not an
engagement which might be justly described as a battle. Neither side
displayed any extraordinary military capacity, but the plans and
movements of the rebels were characterized by greater intelligence and
purpose than those of their opponents. During the entire war one
manœuvre alone was of a high order of strategy. That was the brilliant
operation in which Antonio Maceo, the mulatto, swept from end to end of
the Island, and lighted the flame of rebellion throughout its length.
One of the most important features of the war was the prominent part
taken in it by the black and colored elements of the population. They
formed the backbone of the insurgent army, and furnished several of its
most able leaders. As a result the “race of color” has secured a
standing and influence in Cuba which it does not enjoy in any other
country where the Caucasian is dominant.
On one of the closing days of 1895, the constitutional guarantees were
suspended in Cuba by proclamation. The Government had suddenly awakened
to the fact that a mine had been quietly laid beneath its feet. For
months a wide-spread conspiracy, having its fountainhead in the United
States, had been in existence. The Cuban Junta in New York had, during
this time, energetically collected money and arms for the purpose of
promoting a rebellion with greater determination and upon better
organized lines than ever before. With some of the leaders the object
entertained was autonomy; with others, complete independence; and with
a third element, annexation to the United States. All were united,
however, in a burning desire to terminate the rule of Spain over their
native land.
For some time previous to the proclamation of the Governor-General, arms
and ammunition had been shipped to Cuba from various American ports and
were secreted in different parts of the Island. Several local outbreaks
had presaged the approaching storm, which burst in March. Before the
close of April, the brothers Maceo, Jose Marti, and Maximo Gomez had
returned to Cuba and resumed their respective places at the head of the
rebel ranks. Close upon their heels arrived Martinez Campos, who had
effected the peace at Zanjon, to take the part of Governor-General.
Without delay, the insurgent generals set about carrying out the shrewd
design of spreading the rebellion over every part of the Island. Their
object was not only to increase the difficulties of the Spaniards, but
also to give the uprising as formidable an aspect as possible, in the
hope of securing the recognition, if not the intervention, of the United
States.
General Campos entered upon his task with the hope of bringing about a
cessation of the insurrection by means of conciliatory measures. One of
his first acts was to issue a manifesto to the rebels, offering pardon
to all such as should lay down their arms and resume their allegiance to
the Crown of Spain. In his proclamation of martial law he enjoined upon
his troops the observance of the recognized principles of humane
warfare.
Within a week of his arrival, General Campos took command of the troops
in the field. A period of desultory fighting ensued and, at length, in
the middle of July, the first serious action of the war took place. The
Spaniards in force met a body of insurgents near Bayamo. Probably there
were about three thousand on either side. The insurgents had the better
of the engagement, which was hotly contested, and General Campos
narrowly escaped the loss of his life.
Followed months of skirmishing, in which the rebels attacked isolated
garrisons with considerable success, but avoided encounters with large
bodies of troops. Meanwhile, numerous filibustering expeditions
disembarked with recruits and munitions of war, greatly strengthening
the revolutionary movement. By the end
[Illustration: VIEW OF BAIRE, NEAR BAYAMO, FROM THE CUBAN TRENCHES.]
of the summer, eighty thousand Spanish regulars, besides a number of
volunteers and _guerrillas_, were in the field. The insurgent forces did
not exceed twenty thousand men, a considerable proportion of whom were
armed only with _machetes_. But the Spaniards shortly learned to dread
this weapon more than the rifle.
Before the close of the year dynamite and the torch were brought into
play. The revolutionists began, at first with discrimination, to burn
plantations and to blow up bridges. On the other side the Spaniards
commenced to execute insurgent chiefs who were captured.
In December the march to the west was vigorously pushed by Gomez and
Maceo, whilst Campos employed all his resources in the effort to
intercept it. The result was a series of technical movements in which
the Spanish troops, although led by generals of experience, were usually
worsted. Detached bodies of insurgents harassed the royalist commands,
and diverted their attention, while Maceo steadily pushed westward,
gathering recruits in his progress and leaving a train of active
rebellion in his wake. The _trochas_, or trenches, strung with fortlets,
to which the Spaniards resorted as a means of stemming the tide, proved
of little efficacy. The insurgents, in large bodies, crossed them time
and again. With one hundred thousand troops at his command, Campos found
it impossible to check or circumscribe the rebel movements.
As time went on the insurgents became more and more unrestrained in the
destruction of property. Cane-fields, sugar mills, residences, were
given to the flames wherever they could be reached. This was done in
pursuance of a definite policy which Gomez had repeatedly announced in
his proclamations. He declared that the readiest means of inducing the
Spaniards to leave the Island was to make it worthless to them. If this
theory was somewhat farfetched, there could be no question of the
practical effect of the destruction of the sugar crop in curtailing the
resources of the administration.
Early in 1896, the insurgents had penetrated within a few miles of
Habana and the proclamation of martial law was extended to embrace the
whole Island. The Governor-General returned to the capital, which was in
a state of turmoil and panic.
Gomez, however, did not for an instant entertain the idea of so rash an
enterprise as an attack upon the City. His purpose was to make a
spectacular demonstration for the sake of its moral effect and to
concentrate the attention of the Spanish commanders upon himself in
order that Maceo might push on to Pinar del Rio with less opposition. In
both respects he was eminently successful.
Maceo traversed the entire length of Pinar del Rio, and that Province,
in which rebellion had never before reared its head, was soon in open
revolt from end to end. During January and February, Maceo ranged
through Pinar del Rio and the southern portion of Habana, constantly
engaged with one or another of the many detachments that were sent
against him. For a brief space he transferred his operations to
Matanzas, but returned to Pinar del Rio and for eight months withstood
the numerous strong bodies of troops which General Weyler threw against
him. Toward the close of the year 1896, Maceo began a march eastward and
was killed in a chance encounter with a small force of Spanish soldiers.
In the execution of the plan for the invasion of the western portion of
Cuba, which was conceived by Gomez, Antonio Maceo performed a splendid
service for the insurgent cause. Although inferior in intellect to his
chief and some other rebel leaders, Maceo was the most capable captain
of them all, and his prestige among friends and foes was greater than
that of any of his associates.
When General Campos returned to Habana, at the close of the year 1895,
it was to find popular discontent and political conspiracy directed
against him. Already discouraged by the failure of his military
campaign, and of his effort to break up the insurrection by
conciliation, the disaffection at the capital completely disheartened
the old soldier, who had conscientiously endeavored to do his duty
according to his lights. He tendered his resignation, and the home
Government appointed General Weyler, Marquis of Tenerife, to succeed
him.
This man, who amply earned his sobriquet of “Butcher,” was the unwitting
instrument of Cuba’s freedom. His atrocious barbarities, rather than the
destruction of the _Maine_, were the cause of the United States
declaring war against Spain. Although, at the outset, it appeared as
though his succession to Campos was a dire blow to the insurgents, the
event proved it to be a blessing in disguise. The retiring General
believed that Spain should grant to the Cubans the most liberal
administrative and political reforms, even to the extent of autonomy. It
is possible that he might have brought the authorities at Madrid to his
way of thinking and, in that case, quite probable that the rebellion
would have been brought to a peaceful termination.
Weyler lost no time in instituting his concentration system. It was a
measure in which he and Canovas, the premier of Spain, had great faith
as a means of subduing the insurrection, but it utterly failed in its
object and had a result of which its originators little dreamed. They
excused it on the ground of military necessity, but it contravened the
principles of civilized warfare in important particulars. It involved
making prisoners of peaceful noncombatants, and went farther in
neglecting to afford them the treatment which the least humane nation
concedes to military captives. Indeed its brutality was such as savages
would rarely be guilty of.
The people of the country districts, men, women, and children, were
segregated within certain restricted bounds, sometimes defined by
stockades, or trenches, and always guarded by troops. Sometimes they
were permitted to enter neighboring towns, but, even in such cases,
their movements were limited by military circumspection.
If this measure had gone no farther it might have been condoned. The
British, in the Boer War, resorted to such an expedient, but they made
their detention camps as comfortable as possible, they fed and clothed
the inmates sufficiently, and afforded them medical attention. Weyler’s
wretched _reconcentrados_ were simply herded together and left to their
own resources. They were reduced to begging of a people only one degree
less impoverished than themselves. The townsman who gave a _tortilla_ to
a starving _pacifico_ was usually depriving his own family. Disease,
unchecked, ran riot in the concentration camps.
The mortality was fearful and those who survived were unfitted for
years, the men to work, the women to bear healthy children. Cuba has not
yet passed from the effects of Weyler’s barbaric measure.
After General Weyler’s arrival, Spain continued to send steady
reënforcements to Cuba to fill the ranks thinned by disease. He never
had fewer than one hundred thousand men under his command. With these
he entered upon vigorous military operations, at first concentrating his
forces upon Pinar del Rio with the object of crushing Maceo. He
endeavored to isolate the leader at the western end of the Island by
constructing a _trocha_, from coast to coast, across its narrowest part.
The measure failed in its purpose. Maceo crossed the barrier and met his
death near Habana in an otherwise trivial skirmish.
Weyler now directed his efforts against Gomez and Garcia, but his task
was even a more difficult one than that of Campos had been. After
spreading the rebellion over the entire Island, Gomez changed his
tactics. It now became the practice of the insurgents to move stealthily
about in the _manigua_, burning and destroying wherever they could find
anything upon which to lay their hands, but avoiding contact with the
Spanish troops. Thus Weyler’s soldiers were kept constantly chasing back
and forth in endless and futile pursuit of an intangible enemy. By his
orders such property as had escaped destruction by the rebels was ruined
by the royalists.
By the middle of 1897, the Island was a mass of blackened ruins, an
expanse of homeless waste. And the flood of insurrection had not been
stayed in the slightest degree. Weyler had failed more utterly than
Campos. But he had done more; he had aroused in the public mind of
America a realization of the stubborn opposition of the Cubans to
Spanish rule and the hopelessness of Spain’s effort to reassert it,
combined with indignation at her methods. At length, but all too late,
Spain awoke to the futility of longer attempting repression, and the
necessity of conceding to the Cubans a liberal measure of justice and
independence. Weyler was recalled, and General Blanco came to Cuba,
bearing in his hand the olive branch of autonomy. He arrived in November
and immediately set about reversing the policy of his predecessor.
Amnesty was offered to all revolutionists; harsh decrees were annulled
or suspended; political prisoners were released; the rigors of
reconcentration were relaxed; the officials appointed by Weyler
throughout the Island were removed and Cubans invited to take their
places; a cabinet was actually installed at Habana and the machinery of
home rule put in motion.
It was all of no avail. The insurgent leaders in the field positively
refused to accept any
[Illustration: STREET SCENE, SANTIAGO DE CUBA.]
terms short of independence. In this attitude they were encouraged by
the _Junta_ in New York who, by the beginning of 1898, felt confident of
the early active interposition of the United States. Such a consummation
was rendered more probable by the movement, started at the close of the
previous year on the part of the Cuban sugar planters, to secretly
apprise the United States of their desire for its intervention.
The first overt act in the war with Spain was the President’s call for
volunteers, issued April 23rd, 1898. Four days later, Admiral Dewey left
Hongkong for Manila, where, on the first day of May, he captured or
destroyed the Spanish fleet stationed there. June 14th, the first
detachment of American troops left for Cuba under General Shafter, and
landed in the vicinity of Santiago de Cuba. On the first and second days
of July the Spaniards were defeated in the engagement of San Juan, and
on the third, Admiral Cervera’s ships were totally destroyed by the
American fleet under the command of Captain Sampson.
August 12th, a protocol provided for a cessation of hostilities, and on
December 10th, a treaty of peace between the United States and Spain
was signed at Paris, securing to Cuba absolute freedom on the single
condition of establishing “a stable government capable of maintaining
order and observing international obligations.”
Thus closed the final war of independence, which cost Cuba at least
twelve per cent. of her population and two-thirds of her wealth. She
emerged from it weak and impoverished, with political and economic
structures shaken to their bases, and helpless but for the supporting
hand of the United States.
Under the military government instituted by the United States pending
the creation of such conditions as would be favorable to the assumption
of full civil rights by the Cubans, many beneficial works were carried
out aside from the laying of a political foundation for the future
administration of the country. The most extensive reformative measures
were vigorously applied to the affairs of the Island. The most thorough
sanitation was planned and, to a great extent, carried out; a public
school system was instituted; many miles of highway were improved or
constructed; agriculture and commerce were resuscitated. A period of
prosperity resulted, which was proof alike of the effectiveness of the
American administration and of the wonderful recuperative power of the
country.
In its relation to the United States, Cuba was in a position different
from that of any other Latin-American republic. This unique condition
was due to the fact that the Cubans had adopted as a part of their
constitution a law enacted by the Congress of the United States and
known as the Platt Amendment, which had later been incorporated in a
permanent treaty between the countries. This constitution requirement
and treaty obligation bound the Republic of Cuba not to enter into any
compact with any foreign power which might tend to impair the
independence of the Republic: nor to contract any public debt to the
service of which it could not properly attend; to lease coaling stations
to the United States; and to execute and extend plans for the sanitation
of the cities of the Island. It expressed the consent of Cuba to the
exercise by the United States of the right to intervene for the
preservation of Cuban independence and maintenance of a government
capable of protecting life, property and individual liberty, and of
discharging such obligations imposed by the Treaty of Paris on the
United States as were now to be assumed and undertaken by the Government
of Cuba.
Under its first President, Dr. Estrada Palma, the young republic
progressed in a manner gratifying to its sponsors, but as the
presidential term grew to a close political dissensions arose and, in
the middle of 1906, an open revolt against the Government broke out, and
uprisings occurred all over the country. The ostensible cause of the
disaffection was undue interference with the national elections by
administrative officials, but there is no doubt that the majority of the
_insurrectos_ were moved by no higher sentiment than a love of
disturbance and the hope of loot.
The Government was quite unprepared to cope with the situation. It had
no army, very little artillery, and an entirely inadequate force of
rural constabulary. Efforts to organize militia met with such poor
success that they were soon abandoned.
President Palma appealed to the United States to exercise its right and
obligation of intervention, and announced his intention of resigning in
order to save the country from anarchy. President Roosevelt desired,
and hoped, that the difficulty might be overcome without a resort to
extreme measures. He begged the Cuban Chief Executive to retain his
post, and despatched Mr. Taft, Secretary of War, and Mr. Bacon,
Assistant Secretary of State, to Habana in the capacity of special
envoys to render all possible aid in securing an amicable _entente_
between the administrative party and the insurgents.
The commissioners entered upon this extremely difficult task in the
middle of September, 1906. They decided that the use of force or even a
show of it, would be calculated to precipitate _guerrilla_ warfare, and
wisely determined to rely upon diplomacy. Prominent citizens,
irrespective of party affiliations, were invited to meet the Commission
and to express their views of the situation freely. Many conferences
were held with the leaders of the different political parties, and their
suggestions for a settlement of the differences were given careful and
impartial consideration.
A compromise arrangement, which contemplated the resignation of all the
administrative officials, except the President, and the holding of a
fresh election, was formulated and presented to the leaders of the three
parties, but it failed to meet with the necessary unanimous acceptance.
The Liberal party assented to the proposition without reserve. The
Independent Nationalists approved of the general plan, but stipulated
for certain modifications. The party in power, the Moderates, were
irreconcilably opposed to the conditions.
President Palma called a special session of Congress, in order to tender
to it his resignation, which was accompanied by that of the Vice
President. The Congress accepted the resignations and immediately
adjourned without taking further action in the matter, so that the
principal executive offices of the Republic were left vacant, and the
country was without a government.
At this juncture Secretary Taft issued the following proclamation,
establishing the Provisional Government in Cuba:
“To the people of Cuba:
“The failure of Congress to act on the irrevocable resignation of
the President of Cuba, or to elect a successor, leaves this country
without a government at a time when great disorder prevails, and
requires that, pursuant to a request of President Palma, the
necessary steps be taken in the name and by the authority of the
President of the United States, to restore order, protect life and
property in the Island of Cuba and Islands and Keys adjacent
thereto, and for this purpose to establish therein a provisional
government.
“The provisional government hereby established by direction and in
the name of the President of the United States will be retained
only long enough to restore order and peace and public confidence,
and then to hold such elections as may be necessary to determine
those persons upon whom the permanent government of the Republic
should be devolved.
“In so far as is consistent with the nature of a provisional
government established under the authority of the United States,
this will be a Cuban government conforming as far as possible to
the Constitution of Cuba.
* * * * *
“I ask all citizens and residents of Cuba to assist in the work of
restoring order, tranquillity and public confidence.”
The attitude of the Peace Commission met with general public approval.
Although the insurgents had thousands of men under arms, and the only
American force landed was a squad of marines to protect the Treasury,
the Provisional Government was installed without the faintest show of
opposition. A general amnesty was proclaimed, and the disarmament of the
insurgents and newly raised militia was carried through without
difficulty.
Hon. Charles E. Magoon was appointed Provisional Governor, and officers
of the United States army were detailed as advisers to the acting
secretaries of the Cuban executive departments.
A new electoral law, recommended by the Provisional Governor, was
adopted, and under it a general election was held in November, 1908,
without the least disturbance, although it had been preceded by a
vigorous political campaign. The Liberal candidates, General Jose Miguel
Gomez, for President, and Senor Alfredo Zayas, for Vice-President, were
returned by a substantial majority and inaugurated January 28th, 1909.
[Illustration: MORRO CASTLE FROM CENTRAL PARK, HABANA.]