To Cuba and Back

by Richard Henry Dana

MATERIAL RESOURCES AND EDUCATION

Cuba contains more good harbors than does any part of the United States south of Norfolk. Its soil is very rich, and there are no large wastes of sand, either by the sea or in the interior. The coral rocks bound the sea, and the grass and trees come down to the coral rocks. The surface of the country is diversified by mountains, hills and undulating lands, and is very well wooded, and tolerably well watered. It is interesting and picturesque to the eye, and abounds in flowers, trees of all varieties, and birds of rich plumage, though not of rich notes. It has mines of copper, and probably of iron, and is not cursed with gold or silver ore. There is no anthracite, but probably a large amount of a very soft, bituminous coal, which can be used for manufactures. It has also marble, and other kinds of stone; and the hard woods, as mahogany, cedar, ebony, iron-wood, lignum vitæ, &c., are in abundance. Mineral salt is to be found, and probably in sufficient quantities for the use of the island. It is the boast of the Cubans that the island has no wild beasts or venomous reptiles. This has been so often repeated by tourists and historians that I suppose it must be admitted to be true, with the qualification that they have the scorpion, and tarantula, and nigua; but they say that the bite of the scorpion and tarantula, though painful, is not dangerous to life. The nigua, (sometimes called chigua, and by the English corrupted into jigger,) is troublesome. With these exceptions, the claim to freedom from wild or venomous animals may be admitted. Their snakes are harmless, and the mosquitoes no worse than those of New England.

As to the climate, I have no doubt that in the interior, especially on the red earth, it is healthy and delightful, in summer as well as in winter; but on the river borders, in the low lands of black earth, and on the savannas, intermittent fever and fever-and-ague prevail. The cities have the scourge of yellow fever and, of late years, also the cholera. In the cities, I suppose, the year may be divided, as to sickness, into three equal portions: four months of winter, when they are safe; four of summer, when they are unsafe; and four of spring and autumn, when they are passing from one state to the other. There are, indeed, a few cases of vómito in the course of the winter, but they are little regarded, and must be the result of extreme imprudence. It is estimated that twenty-five per cent of the soldiers die of yellow fever the first years of their acclimation; and during the year of the cholera, sixty per cent of the newly-arrived soldiers died. The mean temperature in winter is 70 degrees, and in summer 83 degrees, Fahrenheit. The island has suffered severely from hurricanes, although they are not so frequent as in others of the West India islands. They have violent thunderstorms in summer, and have suffered from droughts in winter, though usually the heavy dews keep vegetation green through the dry season.

That which has been to me, personally, most unexpected, is the industry of the island. It seems to me that, allowing for the heat of noon and the debilitating effect of the climate, the industry in agriculture and trade is rather striking. The sugar crop is enormous. The annual exportation is about 400,000 tons, or about 2,000,000 boxes, and the amount consumed on the island is very great, not only in coffee and in daily cooking, but in the making of preserves and sweetmeats, which are a considerable part of the food of the people. There is also about half a million hogsheads of molasses exported annually. Add to this the coffee, tobacco and copper, and a general notion may be got of the industry and productions of the island. Its weak point is the want of variety. There are no manufactures of any consequence; the mineral exports are not great; and, in fact, sugar is the one staple. All Cuba has but one neck—the worst wish of the tyrant.

As to education, I have no doubt that a good education in medicine, and a respectable course of instruction in the Roman and Spanish law, and in the natural sciences, can be obtained at the University of Havana; and that a fair collegiate education, after the manner of the Latin races, can be obtained at the Jesuit College, the Seminario, and other institutions at Havana, and in the other large cities; and the Sisters of the Sacred Heart have a flourishing school for girls at Havana. But the general elementary education of the people is in a very low state. The scattered life of planters is unfavorable to public day-schools, nay, almost inconsistent with their existence. The richer inhabitants send their children abroad, or to Havana; but the middle and lower classes of whites cannot do this. The tables show that, of the free white children, not more than one in sixty-three attend any school, while in the British West India islands, the proportion is from one in ten to one in twenty. As to the state of education, culture and literary habits among the upper classes, my limited experience gives me no opportunity to judge. The concurrent testimony of tourists and other writers on Cuba is that the habits of the Cuban women of the upper and middle classes are unintellectual.

Education is substantially in the hands of the government. As an instance of their strictness, no man can take a degree at the University unless he makes oath that he does not belong to, has never belonged to, and will not belong to, any society not known to and permitted by the government.

REFLECTIONS

To return to the political state and prospects of Cuba. As for those persons whose political opinions and plans are not regulated by moral principle, it may be safely said that, whatever their plans, their object will not be the good of Cuba, but their own advantage. Of those who are governed by principle, each man's expectation or plan will depend upon the general opinion he entertains respecting the nature of men and of society. This is going back a good way for a test; but I am convinced it is only going to the source of opinion and action. If a man believes that human nature in an unrestrained course, is good, and self-governing, and that when it is not so, there is a temporary and local cause to be assigned for the deviation; if he believes that men, at least in civilized society, are independent beings, by right entitled to, and by nature capable of, the exercise of popular self-government, and that if they have not this power in exercise, it is because they have been deprived of it by somebody's fraud or violence, which ought to be detected and remedied, as we abate a public nuisance in the highway; if a man thinks that overturning a throne and erecting a constitution will answer the purpose;—if these are his opinions as to men and society, his plan for Cuba, and for every other part of the world, may be simple. No wonder such a one is impatient of the inactivity of the governed masses, and is in a constant state of surprise that the fraud and violence of a few should always prevail over the rights and merits of the many—when they themselves might end their thraldom by a blow, and put their oppressors to rest—by a bare bodkin!

But if the history of the world and the observation of his own times have led a man to the opinion that, of divine right and human necessity, government of some sort there must be, in which power must be vested somewhere, and exercised somehow; that popular self-government is rather of the nature of a faculty than of a right; that human nature is so constituted that the actual condition of civil society in any place and nation is, on the whole, the fair result of conflicting forces of good and evil—the power being in proportion to the need of power, and the franchises to the capacity for using franchises; that autocrats and oligarchs are the growth of the soil; and that every people has, in the main, and in the long run, a government as good as it deserves; if such is the substance of the belief to which he has been led or forced, he will look gravely upon the future of such people as the Cubans, and hesitate as to the invention and application of remedies. If he reflects that of all the nations of the southern races in North and South America, from Texas to Cape Horn, the Brazilians alone, who have a constitutional monarchy, are in a state of order and progress; and if he further reflects that Cuba, as a royal province, with all its evils, is in a better condition than nearly all the Spanish republican states, he may well be slow to believe that, with their complication of difficulties, and causes of disorder and weakness—with their half million or more of slaves and quarter million or less of free blacks, with their coolies, and their divided and hostile races of whites—their Spanish blood, and their utter want of experience in the discharge of any public duties, the Cubans will work out successfully the problem of self-government. You cannot reason from Massachusetts to Cuba. When Massachusetts entered into the Revolution, she had had one hundred and fifty years of experience in popular self-government under a system in which the exercise of this power was more generally diffused among the people, and extended over a larger class of subjects, and more decentralized, than had ever been known before in any part of the world, or at any period of the world's story. She had been, all along, for most purposes, an independent republic, with an obligation to the British Empire undefined and seldom attempted to be enforced. The thirteen colonies were ships fully armed and equipped, officered and manned, with long sea experience, sailing as a wing of a great fleet, under the Admiral's fleet signals. They had only to pass secret signals, fall out of line, haul their wind, and sail off as a squadron by themselves; and if the Admiral with the rest of the fleet made chase and gave battle, it was sailor to sailor and ship to ship. But Cuba has neither officers trained to the quarter-deck, nor sailors trained to the helm, the yard, or the gun. Nay, the ship is not built, nor the keel laid, nor is the timber grown, from which the keel is to be cut.

The natural process for Cuba is an amelioration of her institutions under Spanish auspices. If this is not to be had, or if the connection with Spain is dissolved in any way, she will probably be substantially under the protection of some other power, or a part of another empire. Whatever nation may enter upon such an undertaking as this, should take a bond of fate. Beside her internal danger and difficulties, Cuba is implicated externally with every cause of jealousy and conflict. She has been called the key to the Gulf of Mexico. But the Gulf of Mexico cannot be locked. Whoever takes her is more likely to find in her a key to Pandora's box. Close upon her is the great island of Jamaica, where the experiment of free Negro labor, in the same products, is on trial. Near to her is Haiti where the experiment of Negro self-government is on trial. And further off, separated, it is true, by the great Gulf Stream, and with the neighborhood of the almost uninhabited and uninhabitable sea coast of southern Florida, yet near enough to furnish some cause for uneasiness, are the slave-states of the Great Republic. She is an island, too; and as an island, whatever power holds or protects her, must maintain on the spot a sufficient army and navy, as it would not do to rely upon being able to throw in troops and munitions of war, after notice of need.