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The Destiny of Cuba

A Personal Word--Account of a Mysterious Missionary--Comparison of Campos and Weyler--Spain has Lost Cuba--The Destiny of the Pearl of Islands is to be one of our Stars--Gentlemen are Rebels--The Volunteers as Business Men-Cubans Worthy to be our Fellow Citizens.

THE destiny of Cuba is in the darkest and deepest doubt. The problems to be solved, under afflictions the most distressing, are many and profound. A personal word may be permitted, as I have to express convictions and judgments, and it is but fair the reader should know how they were formed. I arrived in Cuba with, perhaps, the average American information, opinions, prejudices, feelings, impressions of various degrees of inaccuracy, arising from imperfections in the sum of gathered information. I remembered that Columbus discovered Cuba, and called the island Juana, believed it was a peninsula jutting out from the continent of Asia, and close to Cathay; that he found a childish race of red-men, who perished in slavery, and that black slaves were introduced; that Columbus had been sent home in chains from Hispaniola, and, dying poor, his remains were transported to the Indies he gave to the world; that Cuba was the key of the gulf during the centuries of Spanish domination on the shores of that Mediterranean Sea; that in this century the Island has been disturbed by many disastrous troubles, arising from the total denial to her people of self-government. Of course, I had shared in the American ambition of possession, in the conception of our manifest destiny, in the regretful remembrance of the tragedies of the shooting of Crittenden and of the bloody scenes at Santiago, in the wholesale execution of forty men of the expedition of the Virginius; and the news of the indicisive ten years' war passed under my eye as the editor of a daily paper; but I could not make out much more than a cloud of skirmishes and shadows of questions.

The fact that war broke out again in the Island in the early part of 1895, struck me rather as a revival of disagreeable memories than a topic of vital interest, and there passed dimly a procession of events: Thomas Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase; Andrew Jackson's settlements of all doubts as to the title of the United States to the mouth of the Mississippi at New Orleans, Jan. 8, 1815; Jackson's hard-handed dealing with the British subjects and Spanish officers, when he hanged Arbuthnot and Ambruster and seized Pensacola in 1817, when John Quincy Adams was, as secretary of state, his friend, and John C. Calhoun's position was at least ambiguous.