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The Crisis in Cuba: Cubans

Here is the bloodiest picture that has been painted, and that there is awful truth to life and death in it can be read in the lines and between them, and this sort of thing has filled the Cubans who are not frightened into abjectness, with fighting fire, and they are giving up all hope of preserving their homes, and are rushing into the war. The report is that eight hundred men have within a month, in the country in the Havana province and nigh the city. "gone to the insurgent army from a distance fifteen miles in circumference," and it is added, "most of them were armed, but few joined the patriot forces with nothing but heavy sticks."

It is stated that, in the first week of May, there appeared in New York a number of Havana business men seeking to deal with the Cuban junta to secure a pause in hostilities, for the purpose of seeing whether an understanding could be reached that might be enlarged to find the basis of an accommodation. This is not improbable, for disasters of the most serious nature are impending over Havana. The crisis must be near, and the rigors of military administration will be vainly exercised, for the laws of political economy are not subject to the orders of captain-generals.

The Cubans in New York warmly rejected all overtures, saying there was nothing but the recognition of the independence of Cuba that would make peace. It was claimed the Cubans were near winning the fight, and that the Spaniards had never kept faithfully their engagements. There is repeated the sharp summary of the causes of Spain against Cuba, drawn by Senor Enrique Jose Verona, ex-deputy of the Spanish Cortes. "Spain denies to the Cubans all effective powers in their own country. "Spain condemns the Cubans to a political inferiority in the land where they were born. "Spain confiscates the product of the Cubans' labor, without giving them in return either safety, prosperity, or education. "Spain has shown itself utterly incapable of governing Cuba. "Spain exploits, impoverishes, and demoralizes Cuba." And the business men of Havana are met with this passage of a revolutionary manifesto: The cause of the ruin of Cuba, despite her sugar output of one million tons and her vast tobacco fields, can be easily explained. Cuba does not capitalize, and it does not capitalize because the fiscal regime imposed upon the country does not permit it. The money derived from its large exportations does not return either in the form of importations of goods or of cash. It remains abroad to pay the interest of its huge debt, to cover the incessant remittances of funds by the Spaniards who hasten to send their earnings out of the country, to pay from our treasury the pensioners who live in Spain, and to meet the drafts forwarded by every mail from Cuba by the Spaniards as a tribute to their political patrons in the metropolis, and to help their families.