The natives, whom Columbus found in Cuba, were agreeable in feature, and so amiable in disposition that they welcomed the white man with open arms, and, besides contributing food, readily gave up their treasures to please the Spaniards. Unlike the warlike cannibal tribes of the Lesser Antilles, known as the Caribs, they lived in comparative peace with one another, and had a religion which recognized the Supreme Being. Columbus held several conferences with these simple natives, who numbered, according to his estimate, from 350,000 to half a million souls, and his associations and dealings with them on his first visit were always friendly and of a mutually pleasing nature. But when he returned to Spain he left soldiers, who brutally maltreated them, until the natives rose in revolt and exterminated every white man. Even Columbus himself, in 1494, had to fight the Indians at the landing-place.
A salubrious climate, a fertile soil, and simple wants rendered it unnecessary for the native to do hard work; and although it is well proven that he did mine copper and traded in it with the mound builders of Florida, yet the native was not accustomed to arduous toil, and rebelled against it. This, perhaps, was unfortunate, for the perpetuity of his race at that time depended upon this very quality. The Spanish "friend" who came to the island was incapable of work. He neither would nor could, under his ethics of self-respect, abase himself to labor, so he proceeded to enslave the native to labor for him. The Cuban rebelled, and fled before the superior Spanish weapons from the coasts to the mountain fastnesses of the interior.
EXTERMINATION OF THE NATIVES.
Then began that cruel and long-continued war of extermination, of which history has recorded the most shocking details. The conquest was begun under Diego Columbus, the son of the great discoverer. The merciless Velasquez was his general, and the frightful cruelties which he inaugurated upon the simple natives have been continued for nearly four hundred years by his successors in the island, though the annihilation of the aboriginal tribes themselves was a brief and bloody work. Velasquez rode them down and trampled them—regardless of age or sex—under the iron hoofs of his war-horses, slashed them with swords, devastated their villages, and bore them away into slavery. The Cuban had no weapons; the mountain fastnesses could not hide him from his relentless pursuer. African slaves, who were brought to the island in Spanish ships, were armed and forced by their masters to chase the natives, and not a forest or mountain top was a place of refuge for these doomed children of the soil. One historian declares: "There is little doubt that before 1560 the whole of this native population had disappeared from the island. They were so completely exterminated that it is doubtful if the blood of their race was even remotely preserved in the mixed classes who followed African and Chinese introduction."
MAGNIFICENT INDIAN STATUE IN THE PRADO, HAVANA, CUBA.
A PERIOD OF REST.
For nearly two hundred years after the extermination of the natives, Cuba rested without a struggle in the arms of Spain. The early settlers engaged almost wholly in pastoral pursuits. Tobacco was indigenous to the soil, and in 1580 the Cuban planters began its culture. Later, sugar-cane was imported from the Canaries, and found to be a fruitful and profitable crop. The beginning of the culture of sugar demanded more laborers, and the importation of additional slaves was the result. In 1717, Spain attempted to make a monopoly of the tobacco culture, and the first Cuban revolt occurred. In 1723 a second uprising took place, because of an oppressive government; but these early revolts against tyranny were insignificant as compared with those of the last half-century.
In 1762, the city of Havana was captured by the English, with an expedition commanded by Lord Albemarle, but his fighting troops were principally Americans under the immediate command of Generals Phineas Lyman and Israel Putnam of Revolutionary fame. The story of Putnam's command in this war is thrilling and sad. After first suffering shipwreck and many hardships in reaching the island, they lay before Havana, where Spanish bullets and fever almost annihilated the whole command. Scarcely more than one in fifty lived to return to America. By the Treaty of Paris, 1763, Cuba was unfortunately restored to Spain, and it was afterward that her troubles with the "Mother Country," as Spain affectionately called herself to all her provinces, began. The hand of oppression for one and a quarter centuries relaxed not its grasp, and year by year grew heavier and more galling.