"Cuba," said a Spanish writer the other day, "is a sort of bottomless waste-paper basket. The women of Cadiz and its neighbourhood hold the very name of Cuba in execration, they have seen so many of their sons and sweethearts depart thither, never to return."
I am not one of those who see an angel in every Cuban rebel, and a devil in every Spaniard; I hold that in this, as in almost every other human concern, the case, to put it vulgarly, is "six to the one, and half a dozen to the other." There are grave faults, nay, crimes, on both sides, and the condition of the island in the present half of the century, and especially during the last five years, is a disgrace to civilization. When individual Spaniards have tried to do their best for the Cubans, their good intentions have not received much response from their superiors. Take, for instance, Martinez Campos, who was sent out to the island some years back as Commander-in-Chief; he was an honourable and humane man, desirous of doing the best he could to reduce bitterness and evolve peace. But his efforts were frequently baulked by the home Government, which was for ever pressing him to take active measures. He knew the island, having been there twenty years before, and under exceptional circumstances, but he was powerless to plant the olive branch he had brought with him from Spain, whence he had started amidst the most enthusiastic expectations, and to which he returned, not unlike the proverbial rocket that went up in a blaze of glory, to fall a flat, burnt stick. I cannot forbear thinking that the gravest mistake of the Spanish Government in the whole of this Cuban business was its peremptory recall of Martinez Campos, and, above all, the despatch of such a man as General Weyler, with the strictest orders to put the rebellion down at any cost.
Weyler, Marquis of Tenerife, is an extraordinary individual. He has been charged with appalling cruelty, and although, in a recent interview in the Daily Telegraph, he is described as bringing forward some justification for certain of his acts, still the fact remains, that since the dreadful days of Alva, the horrors he has perpetrated in Cuba have rarely been equalled in human history. Indeed, with his Belgian descent, he seems to have inherited something of the unrelenting nature of those cruel bigots who transformed the Sablon Square in Brussels into a sort of permanent furnace, for the roasting of human beings. He might be Caesar Borgia come to life again, in a modern Spanish uniform. He conceived it his duty to extinguish the civil war at any cost, and he used the self-same methods which made the fame (or shame) of Hernando Cortez and of Alva. I have waded through a mass of evidence against him, and must confess, even allowing for considerable exaggeration, that he stands out in unpleasant relief against an ugly background of massacre and starvation. His desperate struggle to stamp out the revolt seems to have driven him to frenzy, and the rebels were roused, on their side, to reprisals of an equally shocking character. But the rebellion was not to be quelled even by General Weyler's bloody methods. Like some gaunt skeleton, it rose up again, in its marshes and its forests, and defied him. The wretched reconcentrados were starved to death, or shot down by scores, but the undaunted resistance still waved its scarlet and white striped banner, with the solitary "star of hope" glittering in its corner. At last, and none too soon, in response to the indignant outcries of Europe and America, Weyler was recalled. Meanwhile the New York Junta availed itself of the excitement produced by the harrowing stories of Weyler's inhuman methods, to work up the easily excited Americans to the very verge of hysteria.
An incident occurred in Havana some little while back, which, although trivial enough when reduced to its true proportions, has had a vast influence in bringing about the present war. Miss Evangelina Cisneros, a daughter of that Marquis de Santa Lucia who was second President of the Cuban Republic, effected her escape from a Cuban prison under exceptional circumstances. We are assured that she is exceedingly lovely, and, judging by her numerous photographs, she certainly must be very pretty. Her aged father has been in a State prison at Havana for some years. His dutiful daughter, hearing that his health was breaking down under the prolonged confinement, went one day to the governor of the prison, Colonel Berriz, and throwing herself upon her knees before him, implored him to use his influence to obtain her parent's liberation. If we are to believe Miss Evangelina Cisneros' account of the affair, the colonel offered her the same vile conditions that the Count de Luna suggests to Leonora (in Il Trovatore), when that operatic heroine begs him to release Manrico. The fair Evangelina scorned the proposal, and, in a whirlwind of indignation, fled from her insulter's presence. According to the Colonel, there is not a word of truth in the whole story; he vows he is the victim of an hysterical girl, who had been caught carrying letters to the rebel army. Be this as it may, Señorita Cisneros was arrested and sent to prison, and to what seems to have been a very undesirable one, in which she was given scanty fare, and forced to associate with the very lowest females. Here she remained for many months, in the greatest agony of mind, until she managed, one fine day, to communicate with Mrs Lee, the wife of the United States Consul, by means of a few words scratched on a bit of paper with a pin, dipped in her own blood. Mrs Lee contrived to visit her, and does not seem, to tell the truth, to have had much difficulty in obtaining admission to her cell. The sad story was soon afterwards published broadcast all over the United States and England, thanks mainly to the arch-millionaire journalist, Mr W. E. Hearst, who, perceiving that Evangelina's adventures would make excellent copy for his paper, and considerably help the Cuban cause, commissioned Mr Deckar, a young gentleman connected with his staff, to go to Cuba and effect her release, which exploit was duly performed with splendid courage and skill. The fair Evangelina was enabled, thanks to Mr Deckar's intervention, to stupefy her companions with sweetmeats infused with laudanum, and, whilst they lay in a profound slumber, to squeeze herself through the bars of her cell window, to cross a ladder stretched from roof to roof, and finally, after many hairbreadth perils and dangers, to effect her escape from Cuba like another Rosalind, in the disguise of a boy—all of which tends to prove that the Cuban prisons are not particularly well guarded.
Meanwhile, a petition to the Queen of Spain, signed by hundreds of American ladies, headed by the President's mother, was sent from New York to Madrid, and yet another to the same purpose was forwarded from London, where two ladies, famed for their instinctive horror of anything approaching self-advertisement—Mrs Ormiston Chant and the fair author of The Sorrows of Satan—warmly espoused the fate of the hapless Evangelina, whose adventures, in spite of a monster reception in Madison Square, attended by not less than 250,000 persons, with appropriate banners, flowers, and bands of music, fell rather flat in New York. Her gallant rescuer being a married man, Evangelina remains to this day in "maiden meditation, fancy free."
But the sensation produced by this interesting case was immense. Portraits of Mlle. Cisneros were sold by the thousand, and from New York to San Francisco execration of the Spaniards rose to fever heat.
Soon afterwards occurred the terrible "Maine" disaster, which, coming on the top of the Cisneros business, drove the American masses, egged on by the clamours of the "yellow press," to force the reluctant President into a strangely sudden declaration of war,—a struggle, the fate of which, even as I write, yet hangs in the balance.
P.S.—Even as these pages go to press, a telegram announces the marriage of "Miss Evangelina Cisneros to one of her rescuers."
