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The Destiny of Cuba: Cuban

It has seemed to some writers fair to refer to the Cuban rebels as a rabble and a lot of barbarians, unworthy respectful attention or sympathy as representatives of a popular cause. But certainly many of those supporting the rebellion with all their hearts are gentlemen and ladies. The charge that they are ruffians and monsters is shameful, and its assertion, to turn a sentence, is mean. There are none more clever and accomplished than they. The following testimony from a Cuban "country newspaper" is more notable because it was reproduced as official news in a Havana paper:

SANTIAGO DE CUBA, Feb. 9, 1896.

In these days there have been solicited and granted a great number of passports for Venezuela, Costa Rica, Santo Domingo, Mexico and Hayti. If this emigration should continue, within a very short while we will remain without population.

The want of work is the principal cause that many people have abandoned the country.

It is said, and it appears to be certain, that in this week a good many persons have joined the rebels, some quite well known. The line about the well-known people going over to the rebels should be marked. Insurgents resent the imputations of ruffianism and vulgarity, and of the prevalence of self-seeking foreign adventures, saying that "the best blood of Cuba" is in the rebel raids; that men are in their ranks who have helped to burn their own cane, using the torch upon their property in the belief that they were serving the cause of freedom.

It is the voice of ignorance and violence that denounces the Cuban rebels as a rabble of miscreants, adventures, mere cut-throats and incendiaries. They are Americans, and worthy to be with and of us.

There are in Cuban towns 60,000 volunteers, uniformed, drilled, armed with rifles and bayonets, and as they have no armories and supervise themselves, it is safe to say they have no masters. Each man keeps his gun and ammunition at home. The volunteers are, as a rule, native Spaniards, and have Spanish sympathies, but they are identified with Cuba, and proud of their places. They are considered by the majority of the Cuban insurgents their most determined and remorseless enemies. But the volunteers are the armed representative men of business, and they hold the balance of power. More than once they have deposed captain-generals, and they can do it again. They mean, above all, to hold their arms and positions, and the latter are departing, for business is taking to itself wings and flying away.

There are in Havana men and women who were worth millions in the old days, and are in poverty so pinching that it would be advantageous to their personal comfort to exchange places with their old servants. A man who spent not less than $30,000 a year for thirty years, and regarded it as economical living, does not keep a servant, because he cannot pay one. His wife does the cooking, and there is little to cook, and there is not a ray of light in the darkness of the future, save the glimmering hope that something will come out of the great country to the northwest that will change the scene and give another chance.

A friend inquiring in Havana for a planter he once knew, and whose hospitality had been one of the charmed recollections of his life, was told that he was destitute in a village near the city, and called, finding him poor indeed--plantations all gone, no sugar or tobacco to sell, and no telling when work could be done. He was on the brink of the dread abyss of despair, but the word America bade him hope. A planter still active, who has by no means yielded to gloomy fortune, whose cane has not been burned, was told by the military commandant in his neighborhood, that if he would provide for and pay the soldiers to guard his fields and buildings, they could be furnished. "But," said he, "I have no money to pay soldiers--that tax, this tax, and the other tax, has eaten up all my gains. My only chance is in the sugar fields, and you can see what that is. I have no money and cannot borrow a dollar, though I thought myself worth two millions. The end for me is not far off." There is an impending collapse of business--to be one of the most destructive and instructive that has fallen upon a once great and prosperous community. "An earthquake could not overthrow a city with a surer blow" than the shock that must come when the war has done its worst, and the sinking of the one hundred sugar and tobacco millions is not a speculative but a verified fact. Can the politicians, and the chambers, and boards, and committees, fail to see that the extraordinary will occur; that the unexpected, if we calculate on customary conditions, will surely happen; that what we are in the habit of calling the impossible is precisely that which is to be anticipated ? There is a business army, with the physical force to turn and overturn. The calamity that approaches announces itself in many ways to these very men. They have already felt the pinch of hardening times, and fancy 60,000 business rifles and bayonets, between the Spaniards and Cubans, and that some day they say as one man, "It is time to stop the destruction of the Island. Stop !" When that time arrives the war must be ended, and the rest is easy. The solution will flow like a river. The ocean that is its home is Americanism, and the current will carry Cuba into the American Union as surely as the Mississippi pays tribute to the Gulf.

The volunteers, 13,000 strong in Havana, 60,000 in Cuba, are held to be the sure guarantee of the enduring supremacy of Spain, but the Providence that shapes our ends has other uses for them. The Cubans dread them, and it is understood that they, more keenly than others, antagonize the Americans and are the most fiery and relentless of all who oppose suggestions for the independence of the Island.

Every day declares the incapacity of Spain, and there is a point at which conservatism saves itself with revolution. The time is not far off when the final question of bread will be uppermost, and when the bread-and-butter question is raised there will be some improvements. It is when the existence of butter is forgotten that the bread appeal is most powerful. When business is gone from Cuba, Spain must go, for business will compel her. Business does not regard a foolish pride or deadly revenge, but takes into account the wholesome and substantial, and preaches peace with the promise of prosperity. This is one of the ways in which Cuba may be cleared for her great future, without our intervention, and by the prevention of further blood-shed by superior force. It would be a happy solution. Hope for and help it ! The peace and prosperity of the most fertile and fairest, the largest and noblest of the American islands, demand that it shall, through pacific international processes, yield to the drift of manifest destiny, and the attraction of gravitation of the great republic, and take its place as an indestructible State of the indissoluble American Union--one of the stars of our national constellation--the United States.

The contention is that this, "consummation devoutly to be wished," will be led up to by the procession of events in the course of a few years, and the achievement celebrated in our history as ranking with the memorable expansion of our domain, from the Mississippi to the Pacific.

The people of Cuba, when they are free, will vindicate once more the inalienable rights of self-government.