Four important branches of the government of the Republic of Cuba are the territorial guard, the coast inspection, the postal service, and the workshop system. Each prefectura has under its supervision ten armed territorial guards, who serve also as police. These guards scout the Spanish columns when they venture from their blockhouses.
Every district with a seacoast has a civil coast inspector, who ranks as a captain in the army. He is assisted by a sub-inspector, who acts as his secretary. The inspectors have established along the coast line and in every bay and inlet watch posts, commanded each by a vigilant, who has under him eight or ten coast-guards. In this way, when a Spanish man-of-war sets out from a port, the news is signalled along the coast, and the Cubans, if she be in sight of the land, watch every movement of the ship. The coast-guards have captured many small Spanish sailing vessels.
Saltmaking is carried on under the direction of an inspector. All the salt consumed by the Cubans is made from distilled sea water. A hundred men are continually boiling sea water in Santiago de Cuba province. These saltmakers are ready at all times to take up arms.
The postal system is under the direct care of the Governor of each State. Along the rough roads at intervals of ten or fifteen miles are established the Cuban postmasters, each supplied with from four to eight couriers. In this way official as well as private communications are carried to any part of the island. Each post office is supplied with a registering stamp, so that the time of the coming or going of every parcel is registered upon it. There is a dead-letter office, and the lists are published monthly at the presses of El Cubano Libre.
The workshops are under charge of foremen. These shops turn out all kinds of roughly made but substantial leather goods, such as shoes, boots, bags, saddles, straps, and belts. Gun shops, powder factories, and cartridge factories are said to exist on the island, but I never saw them. The making of other metal articles, such as cooking utensils, is in its infancy.
The Cubans are struggling hard to form some sort of a school system. The “little press in the woods” was just printing a little primer, written on the fields, to be distributed among families for the tutoring of children when I left the printing establishment last January.
The medical posts and stations are under military order, and are purely provisional. The post of El Mate, in Jiguani, I found in charge of Dr. Farrel, a graduate of a medical institute in Spain, and Dr. Rafael de Lorie of New York. This post is tolerably well stocked. It contains about one hundred pounds of antiseptic plasters, tablets and gauzes, 10,000 quinine pills and powders, thirty pounds of drugs, ten pounds of narcotics, and fifty quarts of tonics.
Like the whole military system of the Cubans, this post has an objectionable management, subject only to the orders of a few officials, so that it does little practical good, and many persons are dying for want of proper medical attention.
I have told in this article what I have seen during four months of constant travel among the insurgents.
When it is remembered that the Cubans have spread the rebellion over more than two-thirds of the area of the island, and have carried into effect, for their purposes, a provisional form of government successfully in the time of war, it is reasonable to suppose that they are capable of rearranging their government and maintaining it in time of peace.