THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF THE CUBANS.
BY THOMAS W. STEEP.
When the recognition of belligerency was argued for the Cubans by the friends of Cuba in Congress, it became a question of pivotal importance as to whether the Cubans had a government to recognize as dual to that of Spain; whether the government, if any, was merely nominal or chimerical; whether, if existing and operating, it had the potency to receive recognition and thus justify such action by the United States.
The first thing that attracted my interest on arriving at the war field of Cuba, in the Province of Santiago, early one sunny morning in January, was the obsequious ceremony of the government prefecto who received me and gave me my first roasted boniato, upon which I afterwards so often appeased hunger. I had come out on the field by crawling beneath the barbed-wire military line around Santiago one night and marching by stealth in the early dawn to the mountains and over them to the interior. A body of Cubans escorted me. Fatigued and hungry, the prefecto’s attention in serving coffee and boniatos seemed over-due kindness. I offered to pay him, but he raised his hands and said, “No! No!” He was a government officer. From that time on my interest was enlisted in the study of the civil organization of the Cubans.
When ex-President Cleveland intimated that the civil government provisional of the Cuban insurgents was puerile and immature, and said it was, for the most part, a government on paper, he was more correct than otherwise. In the first place, however, let me say that the Cubans have a government, that it is not an impractical one, that the people are loyal to it. To this loyalty, which is so striking for its widespread prevalence, and so sympathy-eliciting because of the sacrifices which are made for it by the Cubans, I shall refer later.
The statement made by the ex-President, while for the most part correct, is superficial, because it does not substantiate its assertiveness. It is one that any intelligent observer of the anterior conditions of Cuba last December might have correctly though vaguely made.
The Cuban government is immature. To say that most of it exists on paper is not sinistrous to an ambitious civil organization which has been in existence but two years. Schemed exactly like that of the States, the unfavorable condition under which it labors makes many of its functions of mere nominal existence. For instance, the Secretary of State just at this time has no duty to perform other than, perhaps, to doff his figurative robes of state and get out and fight. The Secretary of War has no routine office, because the Cubans have no diplomatic corps and the rebellion is conducted by aggressive generals who have the munitions of war in their own hands.