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The Destiny of Cuba: Spaniards

It is asserted that there is more food in this province than elsewhere, and therefore Maceo is in no danger of being starved out; and if he can keep, by staying in camp in the mountains, five times his number of Spaniards occupied--the best troops on the Island and about all that can be spared from garrison and guard duty--he is doing very well indeed. Why the whole array of available Spanish battalions is not concentrated and hurled upon him instead of lingering on a fortified line, is inconceivable of American, French or German troops. Of course the Island can never be conquered by this systematic and stolid immobility.

That the destiny of Cuba must be greatly influenced by the racial questions is certain, for the Spaniards make artful use of the prominence of colored insurgents in the war to excite race issues; but the census reports put to an end one bugaboo--that the majority of the people of the Island are black. The actual proportion is, in the latest thorough report, whites, I, III, 303; blacks, 520,684. The Spanish minister would reduce the value of these figures in removing American prejudice by saying: "In Cuba a mulatto must be a very distinctive type not to be rated as a white man, and the question who are the pure whites and the pure blacks and the mixed races was one of difficulty and delicacy in the West Indies. He much doubted whether the census figures given me were reliable in that respect, and supposed they counted the majority of people of mixed blood as white." He is in error here, for all of "visible admixture" of negro blood are counted black, though they may be octoroons. There is a white majority in each of the six provinces, and the blacks can no more rule Cuba, politically and socially, than they can make themselves, as blacks, the masters of Kentucky. In Cuba many of them have shown high capacity, and they are in a better position than in any of the American states, and they have escaped political prejudice, for they and the whites have had sympathies in the indiscriminate lack of liberty that has united them, and the lessons cannot be lost.

The Spaniards and Cubans are of the same blood, language, literature, religion, read the same authors, pray at the same altars, have largely the same past with its traditions, its glories of race, its achievements of arms; but grievous misgovernment has divided them. One million of the people of Cuba are white. Nothing could have separated them from the eighteen millions of Spain but the insistance that the Peninsula should rule the Island across the Atlantic, that the Island should be the prey of pirates and the resource of profligates.

Persistent, long-continued injustice, and indifference or bitter hostility to all entreaties and demands for redress, have caused the Cubans to become conspirators, revolutionists, enemies and destroyers, all for self-government. Their affections could easily have been retained. The golden colony would have been as loyal to the mother-country now as one hundred years ago, if the Spanish ruling class had condescended to mix a little kindness with their masterful ways. It would have paid Spain well to have been occasionally gracious, for the Cubans had suffered long every form of humiliation before they were incensed to fury, and goaded into a consummate purpose of redemption and vengeance.

The last chance of Spain was to interpret liberally and generously the outlined plans of the treaty that closed the ten years' war. When they were carved and rasped away until only a mockery remained, a skeleton reminder of the original, this war broke out, and it will be the last of the civil wars in Cuba, until there are developments entirely new, because there is but one end to this conflict that is logical or possible, and it is that the Island shall be governed by its own people--it cannot be subjected through endless ages to a series of foreign satraps and their swarms of consumers of the substance of the land.

The Spaniard's fault is that he has not been able to escape from his own system. He is its slave as Cuba is its victim. Oh, the pity of it, the disaster of it! So far as Spain is concerned, the Island covered with debts heaped upon her beyond all possibility of payment, mortgaged to the chimney pots, and scourged and bled and burned, no curse that befalls unfortunate humanity not visited upon her-the once royal and opulent Cuba is exhausted. Whatever there may be for others, there is nothing for Spain. If the peninsula and the Island should be manacled together by the old chains, both would be reduced to indigence and ignominy.

They must be freed from each other. If there are those in Spain who have read their own history with philosophy, they know this; but they are silent, for the tyrannical treatment of Cuba is necessarily associated with despotism in Spain. The Spaniards, fighting that Cuba shall not be free, have lost their own liberty, an old story told of all the nations that have perished. France lives, and lost Hayti long before Spain's troubles began with Cuba. The only mistake the French made when they found their great West Indian island was unprofitable and must be so, was in giving up so many lives and so much gold in strife to regain the possession that was certainly no more for her than if the ocean had swallowed it. Spain herself abandoned Hayti once, the seat of her capital of the New World, and the loss was gain. We may say there is now imposed upon Cuba the war debt that is indissoluble and irredeemable, and there is nothing to show for it. It is charged to Cuba, but it rests upon Spain, the unfortunate proprietor who looks over a beautiful estate whose future can have no income for him to dispose of. The only use of it is that of a country for the education, discipline and adventure of Spain's young men beyond the seas, and fat places for her military chieftains and their favorites, and the support of ungrateful and insatiable and forever swarming office-holders.

There is, no doubt, a certain convenience and blandishment in this, but it would be infinitely better for Spain if Spaniards would turn their attention to their own country--their own incomparable peninsula. Development at home is the hope of her future. She has for centuries wasted her substance in colonies, and the result is her comparative poverty, her men perishing, and her wealth in soil and labor wasted irrecoverably.

Why this war is the worst ever seen; labor refused compensation, annihilates capital to lay the foundations of liberty in chaos. Why should Spain impoverish herself to hold a title for land that must change owners before it can yield income? Will she ruin herself for Cuba's sake? If she does, where shall she find even the shadow of compensation for her sacrifice? We may have to take a lofty tone with Spain, but we should not insult her in the midst of her misfortunes. We owe her good-will. In the proclamation of the Monroe doctrine, she was placed apart as an exception among the European nations. That she had ancient rights was conceded. There has been a change, and the biggest fact in the whole business is that Spain has lost Cuba. The next thing is, what are we going to do about it? How shall we recognize the fact, as Spain is not sufficiently convinced of it? The civilian rebels in Cuba are especially vigorous in their freedom of speech about the United States. They are so in their demands that we should be up and doing, and that which is their mastering desire is that we should help them to be the ruling class of the Island.

On account of the people at large of Cuba, the action taken by the United States should be pursuant to a well considered policy of annexation. It is that which is of greater importance at this moment than anything else in sight that is not of intimate, domestic concernment. We must shape our national proceedings in accordance with interpretations of current history--that Spain has no further use for Cuba, but to get out of it with as much honor and saving of reputation and minimum of sacrifices as she has the conservative statesmanship to secure.

She has lost the Island through the affliction of her own misgovernment, and, so far as she holds any part of it in military subjection, it will be at vast cost and no profit. Gomez says, in his manifesto of December 3rd, that it is all right if the Cubans have recognition of rights as belligerents, but he shall go on to free the Island, sword in hand. That is the spirit of the soldier, and a matter of fact of moment.

American statesmanship should find the way with the concurrence of nations, at least their acquiescence, and that they may consent at last we should not say too much at first, to interpose our good offices to stop the effusion of blood and the consumption of property, and save from abject misery a million and a half of people; briefly, to end the incessant troop of horrors of the hopeless war in a truce that shall become a peace, and take Cuba under our protection as a territory, to become, with the hearty help of her people, a state of the Union! Some of the resolutions before Congress, relating rather remotely to this subject, have been well suited as preliminary steps, but the full measure of the matter has not appeared in any of the offerings tentative of a public policy equal to the emergency. Congress is too strong with the strength of this great nation to employ any frivolous words of mere belligerency. We need to shape a policy that is peaceable, politic, firm, possible and patriotic. The overhanging neighborhood and overshadowing mass of our nation impressed Cuba at large, and affected the imagination of her sons; and imagination is one of the creative forces. There has been a growth of Americanism in the Island, and the young men feel themselves Americans rather than Europeans--a fact full of promise. It is the pride and happiness and, they believe, the security of many of them to be or to become American citizens, and when we look at it closely the at first, apparent artificiality of the proceeding of "making themselves Americans," as General Weyler says, gives way to the appreciation of its naturalness and belief in its fruitfulness.

If we, the people of the United States, are Americans, in the great sense of the word, we should know from sympathy that the Cubans absorb Americanism from the atmosphere, and it is the true article. The time was when if Spain had been discomfited in or disenchanted about Cuba, the Island reduced from the control of the peninsula would have fallen a prey to homemade demagogues and imported adventures. That danger is over. The drift of Cuban sentiment is to Americanism, and there is behind it the teaching of a generation of sorrows. Whatever differences of opinion may exist as to the government at Havana and our relations to it, or the nature and extent of our associations with Venezuela, it is clear that the day when Americans can look with indifference upon the passage of the Hawaiian islands into the hands of one of the powers of Europe or the parcelling of South America after the manner of Africa, is gone never to return, and it is distinct also that when Spain's grasp upon Cuba relaxes, no nation in Europe can claim the exercise of authority. No remote ruler but Spain can be tolerated, and as we are bound by international comity to respect her ancient title, that of discovery and colonization, which has been broken by the contention of internal forces, we are inevitably to take her place when she goes; and surely the Spanish situation would be far more promising if her young men who are filling so many Cuban graves gave their lives to their own country, in the industries of home creation rather than foreign destruction.

The Venezuelan agitation has supplied the ingredient that will engage flagging attention to the waters south of us as of equal interest for us with those that unite us with and divide us from Europe and Asia. Look at Cuba on the map, and note how near she is to both Florida and Yucatan, her west end commanding the gates to the Gulf of Mexico, while eastward she slopes far down into the tropics, and dominates the Caribbean Sea. She is the most luxuriantly rich of the islands of the seas. She is almost as plainly ours in the course of nature as is Long Island. We do not undervalue the Hawaiian and Samoan groups, but it is not too much to say that Cuba is worth all the islands in the Pacific between our borders and Japan, including New Zealand. As an American state, Cuba would be worthy her place in the splendid and immortal sisterhood; and as a prize of peace, she would enter the Union with an endowment of the matchless prodigality of nature, adding the opulence of the tropics to the magnificence we inherit in the imperial north temperate zone; and the statesmanship of this work will have rank along with that which gave us California and the two oceans for our boundaries. On the Cuban shore the silvery surf breaks from a mighty sweep of waters, exquisite in color, reminding one of the Mediterranean embracing with crystal arms Italy, with all her gifts of beauty, but in Cuba we behold the royal palms waving over a soil surpassing Egypt in the accumulated wealth of ages; and as the arch of the western sky stands radiant over the shining waters, we cannot fail to remember that here is the American Mediterranean, and feel the thrill of an elevated ambition that of right it ought to be, and at last, with peace and honor, shall be ours.

Just when and how Cuba shall be won it is not the part of wisdom to be hasty in undertaking to say, but it is timely to declare that war with Spain should not be regarded unless in a dire complication a part of the proceeding. Avoidance of that calamity will bear testimony to our civilization, and command more respect than military conquest.

That element in affairs which we call business more and more emerges from private transactions, and decides the destiny of nations. There is a public power in the conservation of the general good of communities to which the prejudices of peoples and the passionate remonstrances of racial or imperial ambitions must give way, and we can already trace the tendencies that will apply this principle to the division, by natural law, of Spain and Cuba, when their vision is clear that the iron bond of union is the cause of mutual ruin.