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The Cause of Cuba: Island

Defenses have been offered for the systems of taxation that have prevailed from time to time. Not one of them ever fulfilled the conditions of being levied by Cubans for Cubans--by the people of the Island for the people of the Island. It is the peninsula that has had the power and has used it in Cuba for the peninsula.

The taxes are multitudinous and are searching, grasping and exacting, and vast sums of money have been raised and spent, not for schools, not for roads, not for the improvements that would have revealed untouched sources of riches, but for the enrichment and indulgence of Spain and Spaniards. If the Island had been transversed by roads as France is, if labor had been applied to the clearing of forests, the drainage of swamps, there would have been fewer fastnesses for the insurgent and hiding places for the bandit. If the cities could have received the attention to sanitary improvements that the care of the public health demands and science applies with infallibility, if even the harbor of Havana had been cleansed, if the filth of the sewage of a city for centuries had not been accumulated in one huge cesspool, the yellow fever would not have been a perpetual scourge and scare, an unquenchable fire that consumes its thousands and tens of thousands. There was a project of making a canal across a narrow peninsula that would have established a current to cleanse the Havana harbor, but of course the money had to go for fortifications and pleasure grounds, or to swell those corruption funds that have flowed in a rapid, ceaseless river from the Island to the peninsula. The Spanish have not forgotten the fourteen million dollars and the treasure ships besides, that were captured by the English, when they wasted their own and American manhood before Havana for spoil. The political economy of Spain has, from the beginning, looted the Island, and the Cubans can make the same complaint extending through the generations that the Spaniards make of the English for a space of time less than a year. The Spaniards remember, with a sense of injustice, that one hundred and twenty-four years have not softened, the severe government of the conqueror, Lord Albemarle. There is a gallery of portraits in the palace at Havana of the Spanish generals for nearly two hundred years, a supurb array of uniforms and striking Spanish faces, and they were all stern rulers, and with few exceptions they used their great office oppressively for the benefit of the official class, regardless of the interests or the susceptibilities of the people, and they were as little moved by the protests against the sinister methods of harvesting money as Lord Albemarle and his chief of artillery were, when they used the bells of the churches to rob the clergy.

There are differences of opinion in our country as to the propriety under the laws of political economy, and the profit so far as the people at large are concerned, of customs duties imposed for revenue and for the protection of industries at home, but it is not disputed by the free-trader that it is excellent to have a country so develop mechanical skill and manufacturing art, as to be capable of asserting herself, and of a certain self sufficiency in production that in times of trial enables the people belonging to the same political system to sustain themselves against foreign foes. It is conceded, after full acknowledgment of all the glories of commerce, that it is well to have markets at home. There are disagreements as to the better ways of the encouragement of varied industries, but that it is desirable they should be fostered, no one denies. How far they should be stimulated if at all, is one thing, but that it is important they should be established and thrive and promote the general welfare by their diversity and profitableness, is a proposition that needs only to be fairly stated to be frankly conceded. The Cubans have no political capacity to protect themselves. The islanders are helpless in the grasp of the peninsulars, and the policy of the peninsula is that the Island shall consume the manufactures of Spain and be doubly taxed as the goods go and come for the privilege of the exchange. Spanish soil is not rich in the sense of being productive of grain or articles of food and luxury to enter into commerce, and the idea that prevails is that Cuba is a farm let to agriculturists, who shall not manufacture for themselves, but purchase the goods they require from the proprietors across the ocean, and be taxed for doing it. There are many taxes--there were as many as the plantations in time of peace could bear, and there are but two articles that in ordinary conditions are raised largely for export, sugar and tobacco, even the cultivation of coffee having fallen into neglect. David Turnbull, Esq., M. A., writing of this said, in his "Travels in the West:" It was the revolution in San Domingo which gave the first great stimulus to the cultivation of the coffee plant in the Island of Cuba. The emigrants and refugees sought shelter wherever they could find it in the neighboring islands of the Archipelago, or on the nearest points of the American continent. The greatest numbers established themselves in Cuba and Jamaica; but it has been remarked that those in less easy circumstances made their way to Cuba, while the wealthier classes preferred the protection which the British government afforded them. A sort of social revolution, affording some striking indications of national character, has since taken place in the affairs of these refugees. In the English as in the Spanish island, they have undoubtedly been the means of turning land that was otherwise useless to profitable account; of improving the culture of the coffee, as well as the mode of preparing it for the market, and of increasing its production to a very large amount. In Jamaica, however, the coffee planters of French or San Domingo origin have not been able to withstand the competition of their English rivals, and have sunk into a state of comparative insignificance; whereas in Cuba, having only Spaniards to contend with, they have succeeded in rising in the social scale, and in maintaining their ascendency until the period which seems now to be arriving, when the coffee grower is to sink before the sugar planter, in consequence of the demand for sugar having increased in a more rapid ratio than the corresponding demand for coffee, combined with the fact that the supply of labor, although great, is still inadequate to the demand for it. Coffee can be produced more cheaply in other countries, but Cuba is likely to maintain its acknowledged ascendency in the production of sugar. The Cuban difficulty has been an artificial system--the interference of the government, always away over the ocean, favorable to cheap production and low figures for the two articles, sugar and tobacco, and unfavorable to home markets. Cuban industry being forced to export its products, and also to import many things that ought to be raised at home in the fields, or wrought in the shops, is taxed on exports and imports--on what is sold and what is purchased--on the sugar and the tobacco, and on machinery and clothing and food. Foreign flour and meat must be bought, and Spain, of course, discriminates in her own favor.