CHAPTER XXVIII.
WEYLER'S RECONCENTRATION POLICY AND ITS HORRORS.
The Object of the Plan—Slaves of Spain—The Massacre of the
Innocents—Deserted Fields and Farms—A Fearful Mortality—The
Cubans the Oldest Americans of Caucasian Blood—Women and Children
Doomed to Die—An Appeal for Help—Our Manifest Duty.
When General Weyler promulgated his policy of reconcentration he hypocritically claimed that it was intended to protect the non-combatant peasantry of the island, but his sole object was to compel them to put themselves wholly in the power of the Spanish officials. No one knew better than the "Butcher" that the Cuban peasant, no matter what he might publicly profess, was bound with all his heart to the cause of free Cuba, and that he never lost an opportunity to aid the insurgents by every means in his power. And when he formulated the plan compelling them to abandon their homes in the rural districts, and to herd like sheep in the cities and towns which were still under his rule, it was to prevent them from giving aid and information to the rebels. He must have known that the enforcement of this edict meant certain starvation to thousands of the inoffensive inhabitants, but no thought of the misery and injustice which he thus wrought upon them deterred him in his determination to crush the unhappy people, and keep them still the slaves of Spain.
The order found a very large proportion of the working classes absolutely destitute of money, and the men, knowing there was no work for them in the towns, hesitated about going with their families, while they did not dare to remain in their poor homes, where, at least, they could be sure of food. The consequence was that thousands of homes were deserted. The women and children were sent to the towns to look out for themselves as best they could, while the men joined the insurgent army. In a number of cases wives refused to be separated from their husbands, and followed them into the ranks of the revolutionists, where they fought like the Amazons of old. Some of them found a melancholy pleasure in nursing the sick and wounded, others fought side by side with the men, and the fear of death was not half as strong as the thoughts of the horrors which awaited them at their homes, or among the reconcentrados in the towns. Marriages have been solemnized, and children have been born upon the fields of battle. Spain is nursing a forlorn hope when she counts on subduing patriots like these.
WOMEN AND CHILDREN DOOMED TO DIE.
Hon. C. W. Russell, an attache of the Department of Justice of the United States, went to Cuba shortly after the order for reconcentration went into effect. It was his purpose to learn by personal observation how much or how little truth there was in the reports that had come to this country regarding the terrible suffering among the reconcentrados. He states the result of his investigations as follows:
"I spent just two weeks in Cuba, visited Havana, went south to Jaruco, southwest to Guines, northeast to Matanzas, eastwardly about two hundred miles through the middle of the country to San Domingo, Santa Clara and Sagua la Grande. I visited Marianao, a short distance west of Havana, and saw along the railroad thirty or forty towns or stations. In Havana I visited the Fossos, the hospital prison at Aldecoa, where I talked with the father of Evangelina Cisneros, and a place called the Jacoba. I found reconcentrados at all three places, and begging everywhere about the streets of Havana.
"The spectacle at the Fossos and Jacoba houses, of women and children emaciated to skeletons and suffering from diseases produced by starvation, was sickening. In Sagua I saw some sick and emaciated little girls in a children's hospital, started three days before by charitable Cubans, and saw a crowd of miserable looking reconcentrados with tin buckets and other receptacles getting small allowances of food doled out to them in a yard. In the same city, in an old sugar warehouse, I saw stationed around the inside walls the remnants of twenty or thirty Cuban families.
"In one case the remnant consisted of two children, seven or eight years old. In another case, where I talked to the people in broken Spanish, there were four individuals, a mother, a girl of fourteen, and two quite small girls. The smallest was then suffering from malarial fever. The next had the signs on her hands, with which I had become familiar, of having had that dreadful disease, the beri-beri. These four were all that order of concentration had left alive of eleven. At San Domingo, where two railroads join, the depot was crowded with women and children, one of the latter, as I remember, being swollen up with the beri-beri, begging in the most earnest way of the few passengers.