Cuba in War Time

by Richard Harding Davis

So the order failed to distress those against whom it was aimed, but brought swift and terrible suffering to those who were and are absolutely innocent of any intent against the government, as well as to the adherents of the government.

It is easy to imagine what happened when hundreds of people, in some towns thousands, were herded together on the bare ground, with no food, with no knowledge of sanitation, with no covering for their heads but palm leaves, with no privacy for the women and young girls, with no thought but as to how they could live until to-morrow.

It is true that in the country, also, these people had no covering for their huts but palm leaves, but those huts were made stoutly to endure. When a man built one of them he was building his home, not a shelter tent, and they were placed well apart from one another, with the free air of the plain or mountain blowing about them, with room for the sun to beat down and drink up the impurities, and with patches of green things growing in rows over the few acres. I have seen them like that all over Cuba, and I am sure that no disease could have sprung from houses built so admirably to admit the sun and the air.

I have also seen them, I might add in parenthesis, rising in sluggish columns of black smoke against the sky, hundreds of them, while those who had lived in them for years stood huddled together at a distance, watching the flames run over the dry rafters of their homes, roaring and crackling with delight, like something human or inhuman, and marring the beautiful sunlit landscape with great blotches of red flames.

The huts in which these people live at present lean one against the other, and there are no broad roads nor green tobacco patches to separate one from another. There are, on the contrary, only narrow paths, two feet wide, where dogs and cattle and human beings tramp over daily growing heaps of refuse and garbage and filth, and where malaria rises at night in a white winding sheet of poisonous mist.

The condition of these people differs in degree; some are living the life of gypsies, others are as destitute as so many shipwrecked emigrants, and still others find it difficult to hold up their heads and breathe.

[Illustration: A Spanish Guerrilla]

In Jaruco, in the Havana province, a town of only two thousand inhabitants, the deaths from small-pox averaged seven a day for the month of December, and while Frederic Remington and I were there, six victims of small-pox were carried past us up the hill to the burying ground in the space of twelve hours. There were Spanish soldiers as well as pacificos among these, for the Spanish officers either know or care nothing about the health of their men.

There is no attempt made to police these military camps, and in Jaruco the filth covered the streets and the plaza ankle-deep, and even filled the corners of the church which had been turned into a fort, and had hammocks swung from the altars. The huts of the pacíficos, with from four to six people in each, were jammed together in rows a quarter of a mile long, within ten feet of the cavalry barracks, where sixty men and horses had lived for a month. Next to the stables were the barracks. No one was vaccinated, no one was clean, and all of them were living on half rations.

Jaruco was a little worse than the other towns, but I found that the condition of the people is about the same everywhere. Around every town and even around the forts outside of the towns, you will see from one hundred to five hundred of these palm huts, with the people crouched about them, covered with rags, starving, with no chance to obtain work.