Cuba: Its Past, Present, and Future

by A. D. Hall

"Dr. Ruiz, an American dentist, who was practicing his profession in a town called Guanabacoa, some four miles from Havana, was arrested. A railroad train between Havana and this town had been captured by the insurgents, and the next day the Spanish authorities arrested a large number of persons in Guanabacoa, charging them with giving information which enabled the troops, under their enterprising young leader, Aranguren, to make the capture; and among these persons arrested was this American. He was a strongly built, athletic man, who confined himself strictly to the practice of his profession and let politics alone. He had nothing to do with the train being captured, but that night was visiting a neighbor opposite, until nine or ten o'clock, when he returned to his house and went to bed. He was arrested by the police the next morning; thrown into an incommunicado cell; kept there some fifty or sixty hours, and was finally (when half crazed by his horrible imprisonment and calling for his wife and children) struck over the head with a 'billy' in the hands of a brutal jailer and died from the effects. Ruiz went into the cell an unusually healthy and vigorous man, and came out a corpse."

James Creelman, a brilliant newspaper correspondent, gives his testimony:

"Everywhere the breadwinners of Cuba are fleeing in terror before the Spanish columns, and the ranks of life are being turned into the ranks of death, for the Cuban who has seen his honest and harmless neighbors tied up and shot before his eyes, in order that some officer may get credit for a battle, takes his family to the nearest town or city for safety, and then goes out to strike a manly blow for his country."

Senator Thurston, who was sent to Cuba to investigate and report the condition of affairs, in a passionate address to the United States Senate testifies:

"For myself I went to Cuba firmly believing the condition of affairs there had been greatly exaggerated by the press, and my own efforts were directed in the first instance to the attempted exposure of these supposed exaggerations. Mr. President, there has undoubtedly been much sensationalism in the journalism of the time, but as to the condition of affairs in Cuba, there has been no exaggeration, because exaggeration has been impossible. The pictures in the American newspapers of the starving reconcentrados are true. They can all be duplicated by the thousands. I never saw, and please God I may never see again, so deplorable a sight as the reconcentrados in the suburbs of Mantanzas. I can never forget to my dying day the hopeless anguish in their despairing eyes. Huddled about their little bark huts, they raised no voice of appeal to us for alms as we went among them. The government of Spain has not and will not appropriate one dollar to save these people. They are now being attended and nursed and administered to by the charity of the United States. Think of the spectacle! We are feeding these citizens of Spain; we are nursing their sick; we are saving such as can be saved, and yet there are those who still say: 'It is right for us to send food, but we must keep our hands off.' I say that the time has come when muskets ought to go with the food."

Finally, Senor Enrique Jose Verona, who was at one time a deputy to the Spanish Cortes, sums up the situation as follows:

"Spain denies to the Cubans all effective powers in their own county. Spain condemns the Cubans to a political inferiority in the land where they were born. Spain confiscates the product of the Cubans' labor without giving them in return either safety, prosperity or education. Spain has shown itself utterly incapable of governing Cuba. Spain exploits, impoverishes and demoralizes Cuba."

This is only a very small portion of the testimony which might be offered, but can the opinions of men of undoubted honor and veracity be impeached?

Not a tithe of the horrors which has existed in the island of Cuba has been told, and probably never will be told. Because a large proportion of the sufferers did not, like Du Barri, shriek upon the scaffold, but, like De Rohan, died mute.

But still something further can be said as to "The Butcher's" methods, and, worse still, as to the putting into practice of those methods. The insurgents have invariably been treated as if they were pirates. The tigerish nature of Weyler spared no one. Refugees, that is those who did not obey his barbarous proclamation, were shot down in cold blood. Starvation was his policy, and starvation too of those, whatever their sympathies might have been, had never raised a finger against the existing government. The reconcentrados, harassed beyond all measure, saw nothing before them but death, and the happiest among them were those who died first.