After the war sugar maintained a high price, but the Cubans hoarded their excellent crop and tried to hold up the world for a fortune. But ignorance of world prices, tendencies, and powers of recuperation misled the people. Even Americans failed to grasp the facts, and thought prices could be kept up. In 1919 came the crash, when Cuba was forced to sell her sugar at a peace-time price. The United States in control declared a moratorium (January, 1920), and the poverty-stricken country became blockaded by unsaleable American goods. Sixty million dollars of American merchandise poured into Cuba, but the consignees, not being able to meet the price, refused to accept delivery. That merchandise in large quantity still choked the warehouses of the chief ports in 1922. It has now been compulsorily evacuated and much of it is to be seen in shops offered at a price which suggests bankrupt stock. So at least in March, 1923, when I visited Habana again.
The planters and the middlemen were badly hit but, as ever, the chief weight of the blow fell upon the laboring masses. Hence the poverty and misery of Cuba enduring in 1923 despite a new rise in the price of sugar. As regards the political situation, it is controlled by an American General and a council of financial experts. Budget-estimates of Cuba have to be initialed by the United States before they may be passed. The United States government chooses who shall be president and then makes sure that he is elected.
"Anyhow, our coming has done them all a lot of good," says an American planter. "You should have seen the place before we came."
"Yes," said I. "That is what I am trying to see."
"But the Cuban," says a banker, "is a man you can do nothing with. He's as crooked as a dog's hind leg."
"Look at them!" says another. "Thugs; rolling necks, low and brutal brows, searing eyes that dry up any dew they pass over; vicious to the last degree, shady, underhand, corrupt. They can't govern their country. They murder one another on the least pretext. All of them carry guns and knives."
There lies the way to an understanding of the predicament of the Cubans and of the peoples of Latin America. Their ways are essentially distasteful to the Anglo-Saxon. The blond Northerner feels a genuine instinctive moral mandate to "clean up" these peoples. His conscience is invulnerable—for his spoliatory business self is cased in the chain mail of the moral mandate.
Though the Cuban is overtaxed and also smitten with the lottery plague, the Government is ever in financial distress. Why? Not only because of the failures of the markets but because the Treasury leaks in many directions, and the republic will not live on its income, and cannot find enough integrity to cover its activities. It is capable of buying for three quarter of a million dollars the Santa Clara convent which cost a quarter of a million a few months before governmental purchase. State thrift is unknown. Public offices are means of personal enrichment. The Government will constantly seek aid from America, mortgaging its liberty to get it, year by year ever necessitating the presence of American authority at Habana and upon occasion the persuasive gleam of the bayonet.
Cuba is a protectorate.