Latin America: Its Rise and Progress

by Francisco García Calderón

The work of Spain—The North American reforms—The future.

By turns Spanish and North American, and frequently disturbed by the conflict of these two Americanisms, the history of the "pearl of the Antilles" has been a long political experiment. Its result, the success of one method or the other, will prove the aptitude or the incapacity of the Latins of America in the art of organising a State or instituting a Republic.

The last colony, the final vestige of the vast Spanish Empire overseas, Cuba still betrayed, towards the end of the nineteenth century, the political and moral influence of the mother country. The exuberant and classic land of tobacco and sugar, its tropical opulence attracted pioneers and colonists. Spain therefore fought to retain this country, which she granted in recompense of the audacity of her adventurers and the rapacity of her officials.

Its geographical situation, its wealth, its traditions, are all exceptional. The race, imaginative and precocious, is fertile in poets, heroes, and orators. We see generals of thirty, poetical swordsmen, divided between their battles and their verses; irreducible guerillas, orators full of tropical eloquence, passionate pilgrims, who wander through America relating the miseries of the Spanish tyranny: a gloomy tale which has made the liberated democracies attentive to the fate of their captive sister. Thus Europe used to shudder at the fate of Poland or Ireland. Astonishingly audacious were these soldiers—Garcia, Maceo, Gomez—who defended the national liberty to the death; bitter were the battles, the hand-to-hand conflicts, the wars of skirmishes and outposts. Of the high lineage of Bolivar, San Martin, and Sucre, the last of the Liberators, at once poet, statesman, and warrior, a Gothic knight enamoured of an ideal Dulcinea—the autonomy of Cuba—Marti was the representative leader of the nation.

As in the other colonies, freed a century earlier, the action of Spain in Cuba was at once fertile and limited, useful and disastrous. What effort could be more paradoxical than that of loading with fetters, with prohibitions and monopolies, the very cities whose birth and development was the work of Spain? Authoritatively she sought to stamp out the longing for liberty, and in this island consumed by racial hatred—the old hatred of the conquerors and the Creoles—she responded to every revolutionary demand for independence by a terrible policy of repression. One of her governors left the bloody traces of an Alva, the pacificator of Flanders.

In Madrid a great minister, Canovas del Castillo, an uncompromising traditionalist, believed that Spain should possess a colonial empire "to preserve her position in the world." From that time only energetic action in the revolted islands could save the metropolis. Already, in 1865, at the beginning of his career, he wished to limit the representation of Cuba and Porto Rico; and in 1868, when the long war broke out, he supported the demands of the 9,000 Spaniards who demanded the rejection of all reform.[[1]] Once in power, in 1876, Canovas was still more emphatic; the Cuban problem was to be solved only by violence. The generosity of Martinez Campos was followed by the inflexible severity of governors who turned the island into a vast barracks. The timid liberties granted to Zanjon were soon suppressed; neither popular elections nor commercial liberties were allowed, but martial law, and a general to aid the Spaniards of the island in their war against the Creoles and mulattos.

In 1878 the first civil war was over, but in 1895 the revolt was so successful, so popular, so terrible, that Martinez Campos abandoned the government of the island, feeling himself incapable of "wholesale shootings and other feats of the same kind." Marti, tragic symbol of revolt, was killed. General Weyler installed a Reign of Terror; the island was exhausted. No one could dislodge the guerillas from the plantations of sugar-cane which served them as refuge. Weyler ordered a "concentration" of women, children, and the non-combatants in the fortified cities. Offences of opinion were punished by death, and absolute submission was demanded. The intervention of the United States forced Spain to grant a brittle autonomy in 1896. The assassination of Canovas by an anarchist permitted a reaction against his uncompromising ideals, and an offer was made of a constitution, and of elective chambers, without, however, authority over the governor sent by the metropolis, and a Council of Administration, to which the Cubans would have access; but economic interests were ignored and sugar and tobacco were not set free.

Cuba was awaiting her crusader, her Lohengrin. The United States filled the rôle. Attentive to the affairs of the island, they negotiated, arranged for intervention with non-official agents, and New York began to fit out filibustering expeditions. The incidents of the Yankee campaign against Spain are well known, from the sinking of the Maine by an explosion in Havana roadstead to the Treaty of Paris. Once their rival was vanquished would the States give Cuba her longed-for liberty? Porto Rico was conquered and Cuba obtained only a mediocre autonomy.

Here is a difficult question: what was it that impelled the Americans to undertake the adventure: imperialistic ambition or chivalrous impulse, as many Cubans still believe? The opinion of their politicians was always clear; annexation of the island or preservation of the status quo. They feared that Spain might cede the colony to a power better armed than herself, and Cuba, since the time of Jefferson, had been reckoned among those countries which a "law of political gravitation" should eventually give them. An eminent Brazilian historian and diplomatist, Oliveira Lima, has even demonstrated that when Bolivar, after convoking the Congress of Panama in 1826, had thereupon proposed, as the last stage of his vast epic, to give liberty to Cuba, it was the United States that prevented him. For they knew that independence would also mean the enfranchisement of subject races, and they needed slaves for the proud and wealthy feudal State of Virginia. These tropical countries, Cuba and Porto Rico, were the promised prey of a future Federal imperialism, and Spain might remain their guardian until the States could demand their cession or undertake their conquest.

Thus the very interest which in 1826 vetoed the independence of Cuba was later to give the choice between autonomy or war; a dilemma from which the haughty metropolis could not escape. Between the commercial brutality of old and this recent Quixotism there is only an apparent contrast: a hidden logic has guided American policy. If we consider the end in view—to assure the incontestable control of the Caribbean Sea, by purchase or annexation of its islands—the former attitude of a country which had not yet peopled its own territory, and that provoked to-day by a plethora of wealth and men, no longer appear irreconcilable.