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Leading Questions of Races and Crimes: Spaniards

It suits the Spaniards very well to say these men were rebel brigands, and it serves the Cubans a purpose in harmony with their passionate desires to admit the construction, that the Spaniards have been guilty of another massacre. The military conditions of Cuba unfortunately lend themselves to this sort of mutual misrepresentation. The columns of Spaniards and insurgents are in motion nearly all the time, and all the roads are unsafe, while many fugitives are fleeing far and near, hoping to find places of refuge. The brigandage that is rife all over the Island, save the towns, where there is at least military law, is one of the most deplorable of the misfortunes of the war, and will be of the lingering results of the struggle hardest to eradicate. Whether the Spaniards or the Cubans are asked, and the inquiry is incessant, how long the war will last, the answer from both sides is substantially the same. It is impossible to say how much time will be required to put down the gangs of robbers, as there is really no cure for them except to hunt them and kill them.

The machete is the sword of the Cuban soldiers, and will be famous forever. It is not the delicate weapon sometimes pictured, nor the mere cane-knife that flourishes in the accounts of the warfare in "the Pearl of the Antilles." It is a heavy, straight sword, usually with a horn handle, and without a guard, with a fine edge on one side that curves to a point. The back of the big knife is square and solid, the prevalent idea that there is a double edge being an error. The scabbard is plain, firm leather, and the belt that supports it is, as a rule, narrow. There are competing machetes on the market, one made in New England and the other in Old England, and they are alike good stuff. The scythe-blades American farmers attach to a wooden handle, and call a corn-knife, closely resemble the machete in looks and use as an agricultural implement, only the scythe is not often straight, and the edge is on the inner side of the curve.

The primary object of the machete is not cutting sugar-cane, as supposed by the average citizen, though it serves that purpose excellently; it is in cutting paths through tropic vegetation. It is impossible to travel in an uncultivated part of Cuba, or along a narrow road, as most of the roads are, without something to cut away the shrubbery, the vines, the wild pine and cactus, and the thousand thorny boughs and bushes. The rebels, hastening across the wild regions, make way for themselves with machetes, and the most effective stroke is upward, shaving away the prickly verdure, striking the dense, upreaching limbs as hedges are roughly trimmed; and there is developed in this habitual hard labor wonderful muscular force and expertness in delivering a blow with the big knife, taking an ascending sweep. This weapon becomes perfectly familiar, and to save an excessive strain, it is keen as a razor and heavy as a cleaver. It is about the length of a dress-sword, but there is variation, according to personal strength and taste, of several inches, and that is not held important, for the knife is not used as a fencing-sword or a stabber, and is in no way like the rapier, or the steel with which the Romans conquered the world by thrusting under their shields and upward with the heavy dagger called the sword of Rome. The Cubans handle the machete so constantly that they do it gracefully and deftly, cutting open green cocoanuts with a single blow, and without spilling a drop of the milk or touching their fingers; and, it is said, in battle the Spanish rifle-barrels are sometimes clipped off, while it is a common incident for a soldier to lose an arm at a blow. The most dreaded cut, the one when the blade rises--the same motion as in trimming thorn-bushes--is the more terrible blow because it is queer, and seems uncanny, and to be a diabolically cunning and tricky style of fighting.

There is a peculiar, wild, shrill cry the Cubans give that announces a machete charge--a "rebel yell," sure enough, fierce and prolonged--and it means going in at the high speed of horses, for "war to the knife," and there is no doubt and no wonder that the Spaniards are alarmed always by that battle-cry. There has been more hand-to-hand fighting in Cuba than in any other war of modern times.