On the Mexican Highlands, with a Passing Glimpse of Cuba

by William Seymour Edwards

When a man was walled in, no record was kept of the dungeon; the guards were subsequently changed and often sent to another fortress. No one might know the victim’s burial place, where he was immured with only a jug of water, a loaf of bread; and the rats robbed him of half of these. Oblivion in life, oblivion in death.

We were in the deepest, darkest dungeonway of the gigantic fortress, La Cabaña, which crowns the height across the bay from Havana. The passage was about four feet wide. Along one side were narrow, low arches, some three feet in span. Most of these arches were wholly filled with a wall of large loose rock. Air might pass through between the chinks, and the rats and lizards could crawl through; an empty rat, not one full-fattened on the dead within. A few of these walls had been torn down, and the scattered bones which sharp teeth had not destroyed had been utterly gathered together and buried in the beautiful cemetery of the city. But most of these walls were yet untouched, the story of their unknown dead forever lost. My foot hit something, I bent down and picked up the tibia of a human arm; the rats had dragged it through the wall. I laid it back gently on a projecting shelf of rock, my soul filled with horror, at the tale of Spanish cruelty it told.

We were a long way from daylight. We had crossed a moat within the giant fortress. We had passed many cave-like chambers built into the massive masonry—the casemates where soldiers and officers had lived in ease. We had entered a small room with stone seats on either hand. It was the outer guardroom of the series of dungeons behind. We had pushed open an immense iron grating which swung on rusty hinges like a door. We had come into a vast vaulted chamber, flagged with huge stones, the center of the floor being lower than the sides, making the drain. Along the walls on either hand, all the way, at a height of about seven feet, were heavy iron rings. To these rings the prisoners had been chained. Sometimes the chains were riveted to iron collars welded about the neck. A man might stand on tiptoe in comfort. When his toes gave out the collar pinched his neck; he sometimes died overnight before the jail guard discovered that his toes were weak. Into this great chamber hundreds of Cuban patriots had been crowded. No air could enter but through the narrow grated door,—no light could penetrate but the faint glimmering that drifted in through the small outer doorway. Those who might die were brought to the grating by any of their fellow-prisoners whose fetters enabled them to move. The great chamber still stank with the reek of blasted mortality. But this was not all. At the far end of the vast room was yet another grated door, now swung open upon rusting hinges. We passed into a second chamber, lower and longer than the first, obscure with perpetual gloom. The faintest gleam of God’s sweet day could be scarcely discerned through the distant door-grating of the first chamber. Here, too, men had been chained to iron rings at intervals along either side. With our lighted candle end, we scanned the massive walls and tried here and there to make out the faintly remaining legend, in faulty Spanish script, of the hapless creature who had graven here his dying word. In this remote dungeon, men were pent up to die of meagre food, of putrid water, of perpetual darkness, and of the foul hot air that crept in from the outer dungeon.

THE ENTRANCE TO LA CABAÑA

I thought surely we should have no further horrors yet to see. But Captain MacIrvine knew the way. He had been among the first American soldiers to enter La Cabaña and to discover the mysteries of these unknown and sometime forgotten dungeons. At the far end of the second chamber, he pushed open a heavy solid iron door. He entered a narrow passage barely three feet wide and so low that I had to stoop. “Mind where you set your foot. Take care of your head. Go slow,” he cried warningly; and we found ourselves going down a steep decline. The air was dank and fetid. My throbbing head was dull and heavy. Before our approach scurried a too venturesome rat. I stepped upon the slimy body of a lizard. My ear detected the retreat of hosts of scorpions as they clicked their cumbrous claws, but I heard the dismal winging of no bats; here was too deadly an atmosphere for even these to live. We came abruptly to a rock-wall, loose, but firmly set in a low arched depression. The passage widened and turned at right angles, both right and left. It was here we saw the approaching light and met the Cuban officer and the ladies.

When we found our way out to the clear, sweet sunshine again, and I looked into the blue sky arching over my head, and scented in my nostrils the fragrant breeze which swept up from the sea, and then looked up and beheld floating spotless and resplendent, above me and above La Cabaña and above Cuba, now free, my beloved flag, the flag of my own free land, the Stars and Stripes, my heart quickened. I choked a little, and I knew what Cuba and the world had gained through the blood and tears poured out by my country in order that Spanish tyranny should be forever expelled from its last stronghold this side the sea.

Captain MacIrvine and I had met that afternoon near the gateway of the customshouse in Havana, by the water side. We had taken one of the curious, blunt-ended, awning-covered rowboats, which will hold a dozen passengers, and which everywhere crowd along the quays. We had hired the old Cuban waterman for the afternoon, and bade him row us to the water stage of La Cabaña, set us ashore and then meet us at the water gate of El Moro, three hours later in the afternoon. He was brown and withered, with grim square jaw and fine dark eyes. He was a Cuban patriot. He had himself spent nigh two years in the gloomy dungeons of the fortress, his family having long given him up for dead; and all because in his secret heart he dared to love Cuba Libre.

La Cabaña is the largest Spanish fortification in the New World. It has been several centuries in growing to its immense dimensions. Crowning the heights across the bay from the city of Havana, its record of compulsory guests is a record of three centuries of the grief and agony of a race. Eighteen to twenty millions of dollars in gold have been spent upon its vast and massive walls and ramparts, its moats and fosses. Impregnable was it deemed to be by the Spanish engineers, and the United States did not have to try what its strength might be in fact. Up the narrow, slanting, rock-paved causeway from the water side to the stern stone portals of the single entrance have passed a long procession of Cuban patriots—men and women, mere boys and white-haired men; and few are they who ever came out again. They died in the dungeons by scores, and their bodies were buried in trenches, or, borne through the subterranean passage to the ramparts of El Moro, were there thrown to the sharks in the open sea. Those of lesser note who dared yet to live, were taken by platoons to a scarred and dented wall and shot to death. This spot is hallowed ground to the free man of to-day. We stood before it with uncovered heads. A little fence stakes it in, a bronze tablet is set against the bullet-battered wall of rock. The grass before us, so luxuriant, has been drenched with the noblest blood of Cuba’s patriots. The Cuban soldier guarding the gateway watched us lift our hats before the sacred and consecrated plot of martyred earth. He bowed to us respectfully as we re-entered, and it seemed to me that there was a deeper, kindlier glitter than casual greeting in his black eye.