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The Spanish War Policy: Cuba

The greatest surprise in the course of the war in Cuba is that the scene of it should have been shifted from the east end, which has long had the reputation of being rebellious, to the west end, which never, until after Maximo Gomez and the Maceos flanked Havana and entered Pinar del Rio, had been supposed to be accessible to an enemy. When the central board of the Liberal Autonomists addressed the people of Cuba a year ago, opposing a resort to arms, they opened with the sharply defined expression of the confidence the partisans of Spain positively felt; Although the revolutionary onset is doomed to suppression-being already isolated and limited to our Eastern province, it has given rise to political and financial difficulties so serious for the present and for the future, that notwithstanding its lack of strength, it has succeeded in creating intense excitement in the peninsula, and suspicious fears in the countries that have dealings with ours.

It was the inability of Campos to justify this confidence that drove him defeated to Spain. The west end has become the seat of war, and there the Maceos have carried out the policy of devastation, ruining many of the finest plantations in the world. And then the innumerable little islands southward, and the harbors, afford incomparable facilities for the filibuster, and there are ambuscades in the midst of a plenteous land for the insurgents. Thus is more than doubled by the invasion of the rebels, the difficulties and dangers to the Spaniards, of the enterprise of conquest they have undertaken. In a work on the "Pearl of the Antilles," written by Antonio Gallenga in 1873, we read of the war as it then raged:

The Sierre Maestra, or main chain, running along the whole southern coast from Cabo Cruz to Punta de-Mayzi, rises to a height of 8,000 feet, i. e., on a level with the loftiest Apennines. What culture there was in this region is rapidly disappearing. Many of the landowners, with such wealth as they were able to save from the wreck of their estates, have migrated to the United States, to Jamaica, or other British possessions; others have sold their slaves and cattle to the planters of the western, or Havana, department; and even in these districts from which, out of sheer exhaustion, the scourge of war has been removed, agriculture and industry find it difficult to revive, owing to the want of public confidence, as well as to the utter absence of capital and labor.