Next came the necessity for inculcating the idea of government of the people by the people. Six months after taking office General Wood had appointed a commission on a general election law, had adopted a plan much after our own electoral laws with the Australian ballot system and a limited suffrage, had prepared in his own office in Havana all the ballots, ballot boxes, circulars describing election rules and had successfully held throughout Cuba the first real election ever known on the island--ever known to the people. Municipal officials and local representatives were chosen everywhere by the people themselves for the first time in their lives.
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Whether such a thing would be successful and prove effective the Governor-General did not know. But he knew that it was the right thing to do if they were ever to govern themselves; he trusted them--and he took the risk.
Next--or rather at the same time with these two basic lines of constructive building--came the school system. When the United States took over the Island the school system was non-existent. There was not one single schoolhouse belonging to the State anywhere on the Island. There were no schools at all except private and church schools and very few of them. Children in the mass did not attend school. There was no foundation to build on. The whole school system had to be created new from the bottom to the top. That schools were another of the main beams of this new house is self-evident. Yet the action taken was much more far-seeing than would have been possible without a single autocrat to decree, and without a man who could see many years ahead.
"I knew," said the Governor-General in one of his reports, "that we were going to establish a {137} government of and by the people in Cuba and that it was going to be transferred to them at the earliest possible moment; and I believed that the success of the future government would depend as much upon the foundation and extension of its public schools as upon any other factor, that such a system must be entirely in the hands of the people of the island."
This was the situation when in the beginning of 1900 within a month after taking office Wood selected a young West Pointer who had been a teacher to draw up a school system and school laws. The result was an adaptation of the Ohio and Massachusetts School Systems; and when in 1902 the Island was turned over to the Cubans three thousand eight hundred schools were in operation in good schoolhouses, with native teachers well paid, with 256,000 pupils, and at an expenditure of $4,000,000 a year out of a total annual state revenue of $17,000,000. In other words nearly one-quarter of the Island's revenue had been spent on the education of children to make them good and self-respecting citizens where nothing whatever had been spent before.
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It was a very bold step. No other country on earth had ever spent so large a portion of its revenue on education. The appropriations in the United States to-day are pitiful in comparison--and yet our country is supposed to be doing pretty well by its future citizens. Again the step taken by the Governor-General was a piece of construction of the main essentials--of the things that make no show, but build, always build.
American teachers were not employed, in order that the Cubans filled with suspicion of what the invaders were going to do might not be led to believe that there was any attempt being made to "Americanize" the Island. But on the other hand in the summer of 1900 one thousand of these new Cuban teachers were invited with all their expenses paid to spend several months at Harvard University in Cambridge and learn something of American pedagogy. The preparations for transporting this large number and handling them during their stay in the United States involved a large amount of work, but the trip was carried through without mishap or accident of any kind, and the thousand teachers returned to {139} their homes in the Island not only with the great benefit resulting from this instruction, but with the immense stimulus of a visit to an organized and comparatively smoothly running civilization. What they saw was of even greater benefit to them in the long run than what they learned in their summer courses.
At this time the city of Havana was a fever-ridden, dangerous city. Yellow fever and other tropical diseases existed always and blazed up into epidemics at certain seasons of the year. Such systems of drainage as existed emptied into the harbor or into the street gutters. A beginning had been made to cleanse the city before Wood took charge, but little had been done in the smaller cities of the Island, all of which were in somewhat the same condition as Santiago in 1898 except for the added scourge in the latter city resulting from its siege.