The History of Cuba, vol. 4

The first great apostle and martyr of the Cuban War of Independence, José Martí, was born in Havana on January 28, 1853, and fell in battle at Dos Rios on May 19, 1895. He was a Professor of Literature, Doctor of Laws, economist, philosopher, essayist, journalist, poet, historian, statesman, tribune of the people, organizer of the final and triumphant cause of Cuban freedom. He suffered imprisonment in Spain and exile in Mexico, Guatemala, and the United States, doing his crowning work in the last-named country as the vitalizing and energizing head of the Cuban Junta in New York. His fame must be lasting as the nation which he founded, wide as the world which he adorned.
BY WILLIS FLETCHER JOHNSON A.M., L.H.D. Author of A Century of Expansion, Four Centuries of the Panama Canal, America's Foreign Relations Honorary Professor of the History of American Foreign Relations in New York University WITH ILLUSTRATIONS VOLUME FOUR
NEW YORK B. F. BUCK & COMPANY, INC. 156 FIFTH AVENUE 1920
Copyright, 1920, BY CENTURY HISTORY CO. All rights reserved
ENTERED AT STATIONERS HALL LONDON, ENGLAND.
PRINTED IN U. S. A.
Cuba for Cuba must be the grateful theme of the present volume. We have seen the identification of the Queen of the Antilles with the Spanish discovery and conquest of America. We have traced the development of widespread international interests in that island, especially implicating the vital attention of at least four great powers. We have reviewed the origin and development of a peculiar relationship, frequently troubled but ultimately beneficent to both, between Cuba and the United States of America. Now, in the briefest of the four major epochs into which Cuban history is naturally divided, we shall have the welcome record of the achievement of Cuba's secure establishment among the sovereign nations of the world.
We have said that the War of Independence was inevitable. That was manifestly so because of the determination of the Cubans to become independent. It was also because of the failure of the Spanish government to fulfil the terms and stipulations of the Treaty of Zanjon, concerning which we have hitherto spoken. It must remain a matter of speculation whether that government ever intended to fulfil them. It is certain that few thoughtful Cubans, capable of judging the probabilities of the future by the actualities of the past, expected that it would do so. We may also regard it as certain that even a scrupulous fulfilment of those terms, while it might have postponed it, would not and could not permanently have defeated the assertion of Cuban independence.