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The Crisis in Cuba: Spain

Heretofore the known riches of Cuba were a help to Spanish credit. Now it is known in all the money markets of the world that the disputed Island is mortgaged for far more than it will ever be worth, under Spanish rule, for the payment of the charges of old debts. Therefore there is a crisis as to the credit of Spain, and the war must be fought out speedily, or there will be a collapse in her finances.

The policy of Gomez has been to make the war a matter of urgency. He is, as Lord Randolph Churchill said of Mr. Gladstone, "an old man in a hurry," and he wants the fight fought before the famine comes. He responded to Spain's imposing military forces aggressively, and there were two purposes in the character he gave his campaigning. The first was to abolish the Cuban revenues of Spain by stopping the "grinding" of cane, and at first he only fired enough cane fields to give notice that sugar production was inconsistent with the Cuban struggle for liberty. Second, the discontinuance of the ordinary occupations of labor on the sugar plantations, set free, for war purposes, multitudes of strong men, and they ground their machetes, conscripted horses and mules, and set forth, soldiers of fortune and freedom. It was with these men the celebrated raid of November last was made, and that with the aid of the ultra-Spaniards, who demanded inhumanity, overthrew Campos and introduced Weyler.

During the long march from Santiago and Puerto Principe to Pinar del Rio, the insurgents gave out to all concerned that they wanted to stop the sugar works, doing as little mischief otherwise as they could, and they often spared cane fields, burning only those of men obnoxious to the revolutionists, and not sweeping away, killing or burning the horses and carts whose reason for being was the transportation of cane to the grinding mills and furnaces. At this time, which was about coincident with the Marin administration--Captain-General Marin filling the gap between Campos and Weyler--the understanding was that while the sugar interest was essential to the Spanish domination and must be "limited" so as not to yield revenue. The tobacco industry was, on the whole, favorable to the insurgents, in this at least, that many of the tobacco planters and merchants and manufacturers were liberal contributors to the Cuban war fund, and that was a revenue that must not be cut off.

Of course the appearance of Weyler introduced a new order of things. The Cubans who had means to keep them alive on the voyage to Mexico, South America, or other islands, or the United States, fled in thousands to avoid the dread mysterious criminality attributed to the new captain-general. The greatest panic was concerning the stringent measures anticipated from him to compel the Cubans to be active for or against Spain, and this meant persecution, confiscation, perhaps execution, and as a choice of evils exile was preferred.

It soon appeared that General Weyler held in reserve his dreadful reputation, and that the first chapter was to have some mercy and hint of conciliation in it, but the scattered Spanish soldiers were hunted up and rushed to the front. There was intelligence and energy in his administration, and the show of success in rolling back the rebels then largely in the west end, and most dangerous there--gave the general encouragement--and he congratulated himself that he was driving the enemy eastward and had them already in the southeast of Matanzas instead of in the southeast and centre of Pinar del Rio, where he had found them; and at this juncture came the hopeful anticipation that "the planters might grind," as they phrase it in Cuba, "with safety by the 15th of March." There was not quite a proclamation of this, but there was a positive and a confident expectation.

The insurgent's answer soon came. It was evident that the way to recruit the rebel columns was to stop work in the fields on the tobacco as well as on the cane plantations, and the war in the west took the form of a general strike--one may say a sympathetic strike--and as this was just the time for cutting tobacco which was giving signals of the coming blossoms, every hand was a treasure and each day was precious. The strike was ruin to the tobacco men, Labor got on horseback and rode away with the raiders. Soon it became evident that, instead of the resumption of the sugar industry, there was an end to tobacco raising while the war raged.