Cuba: Its Past, Present, and Future

by A. D. Hall

"Not so! All Europe will join with our own government, now thoroughly aroused to the indignities put upon it, and voice the stern edict of humanity and civilization:

"Spain has now placed herself without the pale of the nations. Let her meet the retribution she so justly deserves."

Senor Estrado Palma, the representative of Cuba in the United States, has declared in a manifesto that the Cubans threw themselves into the struggle advisedly and deliberately, that they knew what they had to face and decided unflinchingly to persevere until they should free themselves from the Spanish government. Experience has taught them that they have nothing to envy in the Spaniards; that in fact, they feel themselves superior to them, and can expect from Spain no improvement, no better education.

Slavery is ended in Cuba, and the white and the colored live together in perfect harmony, fighting side by side, to obtain political liberty.

Senor Palma, by the way, asserts, with how much authority we are unable to state, that the colored population in Cuba is superior to that of the United States. He says that they are industrious, intelligent and lovers of learning; also, that, during the last fifteen years, they have attained remarkable intellectual development.

There are certain utterances of Senor Palma in this manifesto which deserve to be quoted in full, so pregnant are they with truth, and so full of food for thought to the average American citizen, whether he agrees with them or not. Senor Palma says:

"We Cubans have a thousandfold more reason in our endeavor to free ourselves from the Spanish yoke than had the people of the thirteen colonies, when, in 1775, they rose in arms against the British government. The people of these colonies were in full enjoyment of all the rights of man; they had liberty of conscience, freedom of speech, liberty of the press, the right of public meeting and the right of free locomotion. They elected those who governed them, they made their own laws, and, in fact, enjoyed the blessings of self-government. They were not under the sway of a captain-general with arbitrary powers, who, at his will could imprison them, deport them to penal colonies, or order their execution even without the semblance of a court-martial. They did not have to pay a permanent army and navy in order that they might be kept in subjection, nor to feed a swarm of hungry employees yearly sent over from the metropolis to prey upon the country. They were never subjected to a stupid and crushing customs tariff which compelled them to go to home markets for millions of merchandise annually which they could buy much cheaper elsewhere; they were never compelled to cover a budget of twenty-six or thirty millions a year without the consent of the taxpayers and for the purpose of defraying the expenses of the army and navy of the oppressor, to pay the salaries of thousands of worthless European employees, the whole interest on a debt not incurred by the colony, and other expenditures from which the island received no benefit whatever; for, out of all those millions, only the paltry sum of seven hundred thousand dollars was apparently applied for works of internal improvement, and one-half of which invariably went into the pockets of Spanish employees.

"If the right of the thirteen British colonies to rise in arms in order to acquire their independence has never been questioned because of the attempt of the mother country to tax them by a duty upon tea, or by the Stamp Act, will there be a single citizen in this great republic of the United States, whether he be a public or private man, who will doubt the justice, the necessity in which the Cuban people find themselves of fighting to-day and to-morrow and always, until they shall have overthrown Spanish oppression and tyranny in their country, and formed themselves into a free and independent republic?"

Now, honestly, all prejudice aside, this is not a bad brief for the plaintiff, is it?

There is one more document to which we desire to call your attention. And that is, a letter written to Professor Starr Jordan, of the Leland Stanford, Jr., University of San Francisco, by a Havanese gentleman of undoubted integrity and of Spanish origin.