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The Spanish War Policy: Havana

The western department has remained untouched throughout the struggle. Havana has little reason to distress itself about the Cuban insurrection. This prosperous, pleasure-loving city can afford to make itself as easy about Cespedes and his rebels as New York ever was to the skirmishes with the Modoc or other Red Indians on the borders of the remotest territories, or Milan with respect to Pallavicini's attacks on the brigand fastnesses in the Basilicata. Indeed, as I have before hinted, the Havana people have had not only nothing to lose, but simply too much to gain, from the calamities by which two-thirds of the Island have been laid desolate.

All is now sadly changed for the Spaniard, and the proud and brilliant city of Havana. The war has roared and flamed at her gates, and even her milk and water supplies have been threatened, and her vegetable gardens have been robbed by rebels, and the writer has seen half an hour from the great city the flag of the rebellion flying from a hilltop. It is by comparing the present conflict with that which was compromised eighteen years ago, that we can measure with an approximation to accuracy the development of the insurrectionary movement.

And we can hardly appreciate the passions aroused, if we do not bear in mind the splendor of the prize over which the bloody contention goes on. We read, in "Ballou's Cuba" (1854), before the habit of civil war was fixed in the soil of the Island and blood of the people:

The virgin soil of Cuba is so rich that a touch of the hoe prepares it for the plant; or, as Douglass Jerrold says of Australia, "Just tickle her with a hoe, and she laughs with a harvest." So fertile a soil is not known to exist in any other portion of the globe. It sometimes produces three crops to the years, and in ordinary seasons two may be relied upon--the consequence is, that the Monteros have little more to do than merely to gather the produce they daily carry to market, and which also forms so large a portion of their own healthful and palatable food. The profusion of its flora and the variety of its forests are unsurpassed, while the multitude of its climbing shrubs gives a luxuriant richness to its scenery, which contributes to make it one of the most fascinating countries in the world. Nowhere are the necessities of life so easily supplied, or man so delicately nurtured.

The richest soil of the Island is black, which is best adapted to the purpose of the sugar planter, and for this purpose it is usually chosen. So productive is this description of land that the extensive sugar plantations, once fairly started, will run for years without the soil being even turned, new cane starting up from the old roots, year after year, with abundant crops. This is a singular fact to us who are accustomed to see so much of artificial means expended upon the soil to enable it to bear even an ordinary crop to the husbandman. The red soil is less rich, and is better adapted to the planting of coffee, being generally preferred for this purpose, while the mulatto-colored earth is considered inferior, but still is very productive, and is improved by the Monteros for planting tobacco, being first prepared with a mixture of the other two descriptions of soil, which, together, form the richest compost, next to guano, known in agriculture. We should add to this the words of the poet Long-fellow, on the poetry of Spanish America, in the North American Review for January, 1849: Cuba, that garden of the West, gorgeous with perpetual flowers and brilliant with the plumage of innumerable birds, beneath whose glowing sky the teeming earth yields easy and abundant harvest to the toil of man, and whose capacious harbors invite the commerce of the world. In the words of Columbus, "it is the most beautiful land that ever eyes beheld."

And the lines of James M. Phillippo, inspired by the Cuban sky, sparkle even beside the prose of a great poet:

Ye tropic forests of unfading green, Where the palm tapers and the orange glows, Where the light bamboo weaves her feathery screen, And her tall shade the matchless ceyba throws:

Ye cloudless ethers of unchanging blue, Save, as its rich varieties give way, To the clear sapphire of your midnight hue, The burnished azure of your perfect day.