Our War with Spain for Cuba's Freedom

by Trumbull White

CHAPTER XVI.

PREPARATIONS FOR ANOTHER REBELLION.

Spain's Policy of Distrust—The Cost of the Ten Years' War—Work
of the Cuban Exiles—Revolutionary Clubs in the Western
Hemisphere—An Expedition Checked—Heroism of Cuban Women—The
Struggle Begun.

Ever since Spain lost her colonies on the American continent the Cubans have striven to gain their independence. The Ten Years War cost the mother country 300,000,000 pesetas and 100,000 men, most of them victims of yellow fever. When slavery was abolished in 1880 fresh disturbances ensued. The majority of slave holders, who received no compensation, joined the party of independence.

Spain, adhering to her old policy of distrust, retained a large army in Cuba and a navy round about her shores, the expenses of which caused the budget to amount to $46,594,000 at a time when two-thirds of the island was nothing but a mass of ruins, and when Cuba was beginning to feel the effects of the competition with other sugar-producing countries.

While the European manufacturers received important bounties those of Cuba had to pay export duties on their sugar, and the importation of all agricultural and industrial implements was subjected to a tariff almost prohibitive.

Two laws were enacted in 1882 to regulate commerce between Cuba and Spain. By the provisions of these laws the import duties on all Spanish products were to be gradually diminished until their importation in Cuba became entirely free, while the Cubans had to pay on their imports to Spain duties which practically closed the Spanish market to all their products.

Spanish goods, as a rule, are much inferior to those of English, French or American manufacture, but the Cuban consumer was forced to buy Spanish goods or pay an exorbitant price for those which he would have preferred to buy at a fair price. An instance will suffice to illustrate this: When the present war began in 1895 the duty on a hundred kilogrammes of woolen cashmere was fifteen dollars and forty-seven cents if Spanish, three hundred dollars if foreign. These differential duties opened a reign of prosperity for industry in Spain, where foreign goods were imported or smuggled, to be later sent to Cuba as Spanish.

The injustice of these commercial laws was so evident and so detrimental to the interests of Cuba that in 1894 the Planters' Association, the president of which, the Count de Diana, was a Spaniard, referred to them as "destructive of our public wealth, a source of inextinguishable discontent and the germ of serious dissensions."

The insular budgets could never be covered, and the result was that the public debt was kept on the increase. The expenditures were classed as follows: For army and navy, 36.59 per cent of the budget's total; for the debt, 40.89; for justice and government, 19.77, and for public works, 2.75. No public work of any kind was begun in the seventeen years which intervened between the two wars.

The Cuban Treasury, between 1823 and 1864, sent to Spain $82,165,436 in gold. This money entered the Spanish Treasury as "Colonial surplus," but as a Spanish writer (Zaragoza) says in his book, "Las Insurrecciones de Cuba," it was absurd to speak of a surplus when not even the opening of a bad road was undertaken.

Politically, the condition of the Cubans after the restoration of peace in 1878, was as bad as it had been before. Laws existed which might lead unobserving persons to believe that the Cubans enjoyed every liberty, but as a matter of fact the Cubans were kept under the most unbearable vassalage. The Spaniards in Cuba before this war numbered only 9.30 per cent of the island's population, but, availing themselves of a law which gave to them a majority in the electoral census, they were to return twenty-four of the thirty deputies which the island then sent to the Spanish Cortes.

So restrictive was the electoral law that only 53,000 men were qualified to vote in the entire island, although its population was 1,762,000. In the municipal district of Guines, with a population of 12,500 Cubans and 500 Spaniards, the electoral census included 400 Spaniards and thirty-two Cubans. This is one among many similar instances. The Board of Aldermen in Havana, the capital city of the island, has for years been made up entirely of Spaniards, and the same may be said of Cienfuegos and other important cities.

Despite all constitutional provisions the governor-general of the island had the power to deport from the island, without a trial, any person whose presence there he considered dangerous to the security of the State. The island was at peace when Cepeda, Lopez de Brinas and Marquez Sterling, all journalists, were deported. The liberty of the press was and still is a myth. El Pais, the Autonomist organ, was criminally prosecuted in 1889 because it denounced the appointment of one of the sons of the president of the Havana Court of Appeals to a place which he could not lawfully hold.

What liberty of association the Cubans enjoyed may be judged from the fact that a delegate of the government had to be present at their meetings, with power to dissolve them whenever he saw fit to do so.

No Cuban was able to obtain a place in the administration unless he was rich enough to go to Madrid and there become acquainted with some influential politician. Even so, Cubans seldom succeeded in being appointed to places of importance.

The Cuban exiles in Key West, New York and other cities in the United States, and in Costa Rica, Honduras, Santo Domingo and other parts of Spanish America, had been planning a new uprising for several years. The desire of the Cubans for national independence was quickened by what they suffered from Spain's misgovernment. For two or three years the exiles in the United States and Spanish American countries, veterans of the war of 1868-78, and younger champions of free Cuba, organized clubs, collected a war fund, purchased munitions of war and laid plans with their compatriots in Cuba for a new struggle for independence. There were 140 revolutionary clubs in North and South America, Cuba and other West India islands, affiliated under the name of the revolutionary party, ready to support an uprising with financial and moral aid. Cuban workingmen in the United States promised to contribute a tenth of their earnings, or more if necessary. There were firearms on the island that had remained concealed since the former war, some had been bought from corrupt custodians of the government arsenals, who, finding it impossible to get pay due them from Spain, took this method of securing what was rightfully theirs.

AN EXPEDITION CHECKED.

An expedition that planned to sail in the yacht Lagonda from Fernandina, Fla., on January 14, 1895, was broken up by the United States authorities. General Antonio Maceo, its leader, with Jose Marti, the political organizer of the new government, went to Santo Domingo, where they could confer with the revolutionist leaders living in Cuba. There Marti found Maximo Gomez, the veteran of a dozen struggles and a brave and able soldier, and offered him the command and organization of the army. Gomez accepted and began at once to arrange his programme.

The plan of the revolutionists was to rise simultaneously in the six provinces on February 24. The leaders on the island and the organizers abroad had a thorough understanding.

HEROISM OF CUBAN WOMEN.

The men of Cuba were not alone in their plans for independence, for their wives and sisters, mothers and sweethearts, were enthusiastic and faithful allies. The island was full of devoted women reared in indolence and luxury who were tireless in their successful efforts to get word from, one scattered rebel band to another, and to send them food, medicines and clothing. These women were far better conspirators than their fathers and brothers, for Cuban men must talk, but the women seem to know the value of silence.

Beautiful and delicate senoritas would disguise themselves in men's attire and steal out at night to the near-by haunts of lover or brother in the "Long Grass," as the insurgents' camps are called, with food secreted in false pockets, or letters, whose envelopes had been dipped in ink, hidden in their black hair. Medicines were carried in canes, and cloth for clothes or wounds was concealed in the lining of coats. One girl, disguised as a vender, frequently carried to the woods dynamite in egg shells deftly put together.

She had many thrilling experiences, but her narrowest escape was when a Spanish soldier by the roadside insisted on taking from the basket an egg, to let its contents drop in a hot and ready pan. He was with difficulty persuaded to forego the meal. The dynamite was made by another woman, who carefully obtained the ingredients at various times and at widely scattered drug stores.

And so, with almost every Cuban man, woman and child united in a fixed determination to make the island one of the free and independent nations of the earth, the final struggle was begun.