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Leading Questions of Races and Crimes: Weyler

The Spaniards are equally facile in their accusing conversation, and with the list of offenses the Cubans charge upon them they return upon the Cubans; and the first thing in the indictment on their side, too, is that women have been abused. General Weyler invited questions and answered freely touching the tales told of himself. I do not refer now so much to the general tempest of detraction, but to the especial wonders of cruelty; and he was fiercely earnest in denouncing all representations of his enemies as false, and said it was strange indeed that he should be attacked by the American newspapers for what he did not do, and at the same time those papers had only sympathy for the rebels who committed all they imputed to others. They were themselves the firebugs, the murderers, the destroyers, the ravishers; and the pretense of patriotism covered it all. He was charged with having dozens of prisoners shot every morning--the rifle firing heard just at day-break--a crash of rifles--a morning ceremony--the bodies of the dead had been seen--the disposition of the bodies had been made known! "All this was imposture and false entirely," said Weyler. "Why," said he, "Campos killed three and I have killed none! not one!! And I shall kill no one unless it may be some guilty leader who has been proven to deserve death."

I could not doubt the truth of what the captain-general told me about the killing of prisoners--for those who said there were dozens shot daily named no one, and could not tell what prisoners, if any, were missing. There could be no reason for shooting obscure men in secret save mere killing, and it has not come to that. The prisoner-shooting stories located at the fort were not so, and yet they turned up every day, always about the same. The foundation for the persistent rumor seemed to be that loaded rifles were discharged in the morning. General Weyler said that not only had he not ordered any executions, when no one else had a right to do it, but he would deal severely with officers who killed prisoners without his express order. There have, however, since been executions by shooting at the fort, not consistent with Weyler's statement. But one who meant to have men shot as a daily lesson would be very unlikely to assume the personal responsibility for the executions and proclaim it to the newspapers of the United States and all civilized lands. The monster Weyler is said to be would boast of his bloody work--make a merit of assassination, never deny a crime, but with the fallen fiend declare: "Evil be thou my good." He has, however, the habit of the Island, of credulity that receives every tale of horrors committed by the enemies as "the truth and nothing but the truth," and he confounds the sanguinary and incendiary incidents of the operations of the organized insurgents with the killings and robberies and burnings by the bandits--the bands of mere outlaws--who add greatly to the aggregate of the mysteries and miseries of the war. The general was asked of what military advantage it would be to the insurgents to be recognized as having belligerent rights, and he answered, "none at all," on the contrary they would have to stop their house burnings and outrages of women, and he intimated that was all they knew how to do. The Cubans have so strong a case against Spain of misgovernment it is a pity to mar or shadow it by obscuring that which is substantial with clouds of romance. It is the misfortune of environment that they do so, but they think it is only self-defense for them to be as romantic as the Spaniards whose literary labors in preparing history for bulletins are as incessant as they are inaccurate and ineffectual. I happened to have information that was reliable of the preparation of one Spanish bulletin that was written four times before it was permitted to go, and it was not passed until all resemblance to the truth had been rubbed out. This peculiarity is not confined to Spanish official literature in Cuba. It is one of the familiar jests that, according to the bulletins, three times the number of insurgents engaged during the Carlist war were killed in action and counted dead on the field. Spaniards and Cubans do not do themselves justice, in the torrents of reproaches and accusations with which they characterize each other, and express the fierce intensity of the hatreds they have cultivated for generations, and that are now inflamed to a degree unknown in former times. One reason for the extraordinary indulgence of animosity, is found in the consciousness of all concerned, that the affairs of the contested island are in an extremely critical state, and that if conclusions cannot be reached, Spanish industries and the opulent commerce of the country will be totally destroyed.