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Chapter XVII: Spain

The clouds came up from the Caribbean Sea, majestic in their gloom and poured rivers over the city, and the sun and the wind came and the mud was dust again. Troops arrived from Spain and saw rockets flaring and heard the guns of Moro, and flowers were thrown, and birds, adorned with ribbons, were flung by fair hands from windows into the ranks. Marching up from the wharf from which Cortez sailed for Mexico and conquered Montezuma, and De Soto embarked for Florida and discovered the Mississippi--the little temple and big tree on the spot where the first mass was said in the Americas on one hand, and the palace of the captain-generals on the other--were the dusky boys of Spain, the bayonets twinkling over them. The cries of the newsboys are heard in the streets with "Extras," and the Cubans in their own way interpret the Spanish sheets, and who shall know what is so, and who shall tell that the truth is here when he sees or hears that which is the fact or fancy of the hour? It was a sunny Sunday morning and I was invited to go to breakfast twelve miles away--down the road to Marianao--not then so well known as now, and from that charming suburb by a prong of roads that slanted westward to the Gulf of Mexico. I had visited Marianao before, another lovely day, and walked beyond where there was a bright deep stream that they call a river, and stood upon the gigantic mass of stone arches, a bridge that would have passed in Europe as one of the mighty works of the Romans. This was the frontier; cattle were grazing in the valley, boys were fishing with little scoop nets on poles; there were cocoanut palms and orange trees hanging over fences of wild pine trimmed with the machete; there were little forts in conspicuous places, and the porch of a large house at the corner looking toward the bridge was walled with sand bags, and volunteers walking about with glittering rifles, and on a spire was a look-out with a glass, with ceaseless vigilance watching all the approaches. But I need not have been surprised, for I had seen the Treasury Building aft Washington barricaded and guarded by many loaded rifles, At Marianao there were trees in bloom, and hanging over the side of a noble residence was a wondrous sheet of flowers, rich in color-looking like a matchless dropcurtain in a gorgeous theatre, too radiant for the entertainment of mortals.

It was over the huge bridge, spanning the small stream, that the volunteers and firemen and a company of Spanish regulars marched a few days later-on the night before I set out for that neighborhood to breakfast by the sea-to the village of Punta Brava and the further village of Gautao, where a tragedy, of which the world has heard, took place. The sun was hot that Sunday morning on the white shore and coral rocks and the snowy surf and the shining waters, each wave crested with jewels of incomparable splendor that vanished in the exquisite sand.

Before we sat down to breakfast, a gentleman who lived in the vicinity said, "We had our friends, the enemy, with us here last night. They came in and were all around us, and helped themselves to hams and chickens. They were quiet fellows and behaved fairly well, were rather hungry though, and those about very early this morning wanted coffee above all things. One was suspected of milking a cow!" "You refer to the insurgents, of course?" "Yes, they go about freely, and there is not anybody to molest them; no troops, no firemen, no police. This is a free country." "How far is it to where there is a position that they hold." This question was mine. "Come with me to the top of the house, and I will show you their flag;" and we ascended to the roof, the citizen carrying a big spy-glass, with which I was directed to scan a hill a couple of miles southwest, and there was a flag sure enough, but from the way the wind was blowing the folds I could not make it out further than to be sure it was not the flag of Spain. "What do you call the boundary between the ground held by the opposing forces?" "You see the bridge there," pointing to one a quarter of a mile distant across the same stream that flows under the walls of Marianao and through the colossal arch said to be a monument to slave labor, "that bridge may be called neutral territory." "How far beyound is it supposed one would have to walk to meet the gentlemen who want to be recognized as belligerents?" "That depends. The sand is deep on the road and there is not much shade, but walk that way and you can probably find yourself under the jurisdiction of a Cuban government half a mile from this. I can warrant your meeting a picket half a mile over the bridge. There are but a few, say ten, with good horses and guns, and where you see the flag there are about fifty, and half an hour's walk beyond, fifty more, and so on all the roads. If there is a main body it is four or five miles away. They do not do much shooting, for they have very little ammunition, and are ordered to spend no cartridges unless the shooting is good." "This would be rather a clever side road into the region of the rebellion, would it not? What is to hinder the Havana men who want to join the army from doing it right here?" "Nothing." "Why do they not come this way, then?" "Cannot say. Maybe they do." "Why do not the Spaniards, who take so much pains in many places, guard this line?" The answer was to the effect that the Spaniard, unless stirred up, was rather stupidly a disbeliever in danger. The long white slope up which the surf flashed, one curling line of snow succeeding another with regular pulsations, and the delicate greens and blues of the deep glowing in the sunlight, suggested a bath and a question about sharks, and it appeared that the biters were unpopular visitors to that part of the coast. But owing to the precautions that are Cuban and effective, there had not for several years been fatal accidents.