The History of Cuba, vol. 4

by Willis Fletcher Johnson

Hall of sessions, June twelfth, nineteen hundred and one.[{240}]

CHAPTER XIII

After the Constitution, the Government. On October 14, 1901, General Wood as Military Governor of Cuba issued an order for the holding of a general election throughout the island on December 31, that day to be a legal holiday. At that election there were to be chosen Presidential and Senatorial Electors, Members of the House of Representatives, Governors of Provinces or Departments, and members of Provincial Assemblies or Councils. At the same time it was announced that the election of President, Vice-President and Senators, by the electoral colleges, would take place on February 24, 1902. A provisional election law was also promulgated at that time.

This order brought acutely to the fore the question of Presidential candidates. There were several of them, but none of them could be regarded as a party candidate for the reason that there were then practically no parties. The three which had existed had gradually dissolved, merged into each other, and left the Cuban people free to follow purely individual leaders again.

Maximo Gomez was naturally looked to as the foremost candidate for the Presidency, and despite the bitterness of some politicians against him there is little doubt that if he had consented to be a candidate he would have stood alone and been elected practically without opposition. No man deserved the honor more than he. But it was more than an honor. It was a tremendously serious responsibility. Now Gomez was not the man to[{241}] shirk responsibility. But he was not a man, either, to accept it rashly. He knew his own limitations. He knew, too, the requirements of the place. There was needed a scholar and statesman, rather than a "rough and ready" bushwhacking soldier. So he would not even consider the offer of the nomination. "I was never intended," he said, "to become the President of any country. I think too much of Cuba to become her President."

Calixto Garcia, who after the death of Antonio Maceo stood second to Gomez as a commander, and who was General-in-Chief of the eastern half of the island, had won a splendid reputation for efficient work in Oriente and Camaguey, and was a man of great force and ability, and of much popularity among the Cuban people. But he died at Washington of pneumonia soon after the close of the war.

With these two great chieftains of Cuba's wars thus out of the running, the choice by common consent fell upon Tomas Estrada Palma; and a better choice could not have been made. We have already seen something of his work as the head of the Cuban Junta in New York. He was now past the prime of life, having been born at Bayamo in 1837, but he was in full mastery of his ripe intellectual and physical powers. The son of a rich and distinguished family, he was sent in his youth to Seville to study law, and for a time practised it with much success in Cuba. But he was a patriot, and when the Ten Years' War began he entered the Cuban ranks and had a distinguished career in the field, as also in the councils of the Republic in the field. Unfortunately he was captured by the enemy and was sent to Spain, where he was a prisoner until the end of the war. Then he went to Honduras, became Postmaster-General of that country, and married the accomplished daughter of President Guardiola.[{242}] Thence he went to the United States and for some years was the head of an admirable private school for boys at Central Valley, New York; most of his pupils being from Cuba and other Latin-American countries.

At the outbreak of the War of Independence in 1895 the veteran patriot promptly offered himself for any service that he could perform. Though nearing the age of three score, he would gladly have taken up his rifle again and gone into the field. But there was more important and more profitable work for Cuba to be done than that would have been, and he entered upon it with zeal, as the head of the Cuban Junta in New York. Especially after the death of Marti, he was the guiding spirit of that organization, and as such, at least in the eyes of America and of the world at large, he was the actual head of the Cuban revolution, even more than the President of the Provisional Government in the patriot stronghold in the mountains of Cubitas. He was not merely the very active head of the working organization of the Junta, which supplied the Cuban army with the sinews of war, but he was the diplomatic representative of Cuba, though only informally recognized, at Washington. He was at this time still in the United States, and was making no effort whatever to secure the Presidential nomination. Doubtless he would have been quite content not to receive it, and would have given his heartiest and most efficient support to any other man who might have been chosen. But there was a spontaneous turning of all Cuban eyes and minds and hearts toward him as the man of all best fitted to inaugurate the independent republican sovereignty of the insular state as its first President. He was the choice of no party—parties were yet inchoate—but of the Cuban people.

In similar fashion General Bartolome Maso was put[{243}] forward for Vice-President. Of him we have already heard much in these pages; a stern old warrior patriot of Oriente, who had done inestimable service in the field in the two wars, and who had been President of the Revolutionary Government—its last President, in the mountains of Cubitas, at the time of the American intervention. A man of fine education, of unblemished integrity, of sterling patriotism, he commanded the respect and affection of all who knew him; though it must be confessed that he was personally little known at the capital or in the western half of the island.

For a time there seemed every prospect that these two men, so admirably chosen, would be elected without contest. But at the end of October there was a schism. Estrada Palma was favorably inclined toward the Platt Amendment, while Bartolome Maso remained outspoken against it. The sequel was that all the politicians of whatever factions who were opposed to that instrument joined in putting Maso forward as a candidate not for the Vice-Presidency but for the Presidency, in opposition to Palma. On October 31 Maso issued an address announcing his candidacy, which, he said, he had been induced to accept "in order to preserve the nationalism and patriotism of the country"; and he added that the American intervention had been "perverted into a military occupation approaching a conquest." This was exaggeration, though entirely sincere; Maso lacking the broad international vision necessary to appreciate the relationships with the United States and the rest of the world upon which Cuba was about to enter. But it made a strong appeal to a number of diverse and incongruous elements, including some of the former Autonomists, many of the Spaniards, and a number of Negroes who were inclined to form a race party of their own.[{244}]