Cuba Part 12

The deaths have occurred in ghastly numbers. More than two hundred thousand have perished from starvation and starvation alone, with no hand from the government stretched out to aid them. The record made by the butcher and the butcher's emissaries is without parallel in all history. No wonder that the United States held its breath in horror, before raising its mailed hand to strike forever the chains from this suffering people.

General Weyler did not care how deeply he should wade in blood, nor to what age or s.e.x this blood belonged, so long as he should attain his ends.

Talk as you please about the atrocities of the Turks, but they pale before those of the Spaniards in Cuba; acts committed, too, not in secret, but openly and by public proclamation.

Read what Stephen Bonsal, who was an eye-witness, says in his book: "The Real Condition of Cuba To-day."

"In the western provinces, we find between three and four hundred thousand people penned up in starvation stations and a prey to all kinds of epidemic diseases. They are without means and without food, and with only the shelter that the dried palm-leaves of their hastily erected bohios afford, and in the rainy season that is now upon them, there is no shelter at all. They have less clothing than the Patagonian savages, and, half naked, they sleep upon the ground, exposed to the noxious vapors which these low-lying swamp-lands emit. They have no prospect before them but to die, or, what is more cruel, to see those of their own flesh and blood dying about them, and to be powerless to succor and to save. About these starvation stations the savage sentries pace up and down with ready rifle and bared machete, to shoot down and to cut up any one who dares to cross the line. And yet, who are these men who are shot down in the night like midnight marauders? And why is it they seek, with all the desperate courage of despair, to cross that line where death is always awaiting their coming, and almost invariably overtakes them? They are attempting nothing that history will preserve upon its imperishable tablets, or even this pa.s.sing generation remember. No, they are simply attempting to get beyond the starvation lines, to dig their potatoes and yams, to bring home again to the hovel in which their families are housed with death and hunger all about them. And they do their simple duty, not blinded as to the danger, or without warning as to their probable fate, for hardly an hour of their interminable day pa.s.ses without their hearing the sharp click of the trigger and the hoa.r.s.e cry of the sentry which precede the murderous volley; and every morning, through the narrow, filthy lanes upon which the huts have been erected the guerillas, drive along the pack-mules bearing the mutilated bodies of those who have been punished cruelly for the crime of seeking food to keep their children from starvation. This colossal crime, with all the refinement of slow torture, is so barbarous, so bloodthirsty and yet so exquisite, that the human mind refuses to believe it, and revolts at the suggestion that it was conceived, planned and plotted by a man. And yet this crime, this murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children, is now being daily committed in Cuba, at our very doors and well-nigh in sight of our sh.o.r.es, and we are paying very little heed to the spectacle."

These words were written before the United States came to the rescue, and the criticism in the last sentence is, thank Heaven, no longer applicable. We are slow to act perhaps, but when we do act, our work is effective, and we never rest until our aim is accomplished.

CHAPTER X.

THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY.

To enlarge upon the sufferings of the Cubans is a painful task, but it is a task that must be accomplished, in the interests of justice and humanity, and also that the reader may clearly understand why it was the bounden duty of the United States to interfere.

Let us therefore proceed with the evidence.

Julian Hawthorne gives his testimony as follows:

"These people have starved in a land capable of supplying tens of millions of people with abundant food. The very ground on which they lie down to breathe their last might be planted with produce that would feed them to repletion. But so far from any effort to save them having been made by Spain, she has wilfully and designedly compa.s.sed their destruction. She has driven them in from their fields and plantations and forbidden them to help themselves; the plantations themselves have been laid waste, and should the miserable reconcentrados attempt under the pretended kindly dispensation of Blanco to return to their properties they would find the Spanish guerillas lying in wait to ma.s.sacre them. No agony of either mind or body has been wanting. The wife has lost her husband, the mother, her children; the child its parents, the husband, his family. They have seen them die. Often they have seen them slaughtered wantonly as they lay helpless, waiting a slower end. The active as well as the pa.s.sive cruelties of the Spaniards toward these people have been well-nigh unimaginable."

Call Richard Harding Davis to the stand!

"In other wars men have fought with men, and women have suffered indirectly because the men were killed, but in this war it is the women herded together in the towns like cattle who are going to die, while the men camped in the fields and mountains will live."

General Fitz Hugh Lee says:

"General Weyler believes that everything is fair in war and every means justifiable that will ultimately write success on his standards. He did not purpose to make war with velvet paws, but to achieve his purpose of putting down the insurrection, if he had to wade through, up to the visor of his helmet, the blood of every Cuban, man, women and child, on the island."

Now hear General Lee relate the following incident, an incident which created much discussion and feeling in the United States:

"Dr. Ruiz, an American dentist, who was practicing his profession in a town called Guanabacoa, some four miles from Havana, was arrested. A railroad train between Havana and this town had been captured by the insurgents, and the next day the Spanish authorities arrested a large number of persons in Guanabacoa, charging them with giving information which enabled the troops, under their enterprising young leader, Aranguren, to make the capture; and among these persons arrested was this American. He was a strongly built, athletic man, who confined himself strictly to the practice of his profession and let politics alone. He had nothing to do with the train being captured, but that night was visiting a neighbor opposite, until nine or ten o'clock, when he returned to his house and went to bed. He was arrested by the police the next morning; thrown into an incommunicado cell; kept there some fifty or sixty hours, and was finally (when half crazed by his horrible imprisonment and calling for his wife and children) struck over the head with a 'billy' in the hands of a brutal jailer and died from the effects. Ruiz went into the cell an unusually healthy and vigorous man, and came out a corpse."

James Creelman, a brilliant newspaper correspondent, gives his testimony:

"Everywhere the breadwinners of Cuba are fleeing in terror before the Spanish columns, and the ranks of life are being turned into the ranks of death, for the Cuban who has seen his honest and harmless neighbors tied up and shot before his eyes, in order that some officer may get credit for a battle, takes his family to the nearest town or city for safety, and then goes out to strike a manly blow for his country."

Senator Thurston, who was sent to Cuba to investigate and report the condition of affairs, in a pa.s.sionate address to the United States Senate testifies:

"For myself I went to Cuba firmly believing the condition of affairs there had been greatly exaggerated by the press, and my own efforts were directed in the first instance to the attempted exposure of these supposed exaggerations. Mr. President, there has undoubtedly been much sensationalism in the journalism of the time, but as to the condition of affairs in Cuba, there has been no exaggeration, because exaggeration has been impossible. The pictures in the American newspapers of the starving reconcentrados are true. They can all be duplicated by the thousands. I never saw, and please G.o.d I may never see again, so deplorable a sight as the reconcentrados in the suburbs of Mantanzas. I can never forget to my dying day the hopeless anguish in their despairing eyes. Huddled about their little bark huts, they raised no voice of appeal to us for alms as we went among them. The government of Spain has not and will not appropriate one dollar to save these people.

They are now being attended and nursed and administered to by the charity of the United States. Think of the spectacle! We are feeding these citizens of Spain; we are nursing their sick; we are saving such as can be saved, and yet there are those who still say: 'It is right for us to send food, but we must keep our hands off.' I say that the time has come when muskets ought to go with the food."

Finally, Senor Enrique Jose Verona, who was at one time a deputy to the Spanish Cortes, sums up the situation as follows:

"Spain denies to the Cubans all effective powers in their own county.

Spain condemns the Cubans to a political inferiority in the land where they were born. Spain confiscates the product of the Cubans' labor without giving them in return either safety, prosperity or education.

Spain has shown itself utterly incapable of governing Cuba. Spain exploits, impoverishes and demoralizes Cuba."

This is only a very small portion of the testimony which might be offered, but can the opinions of men of undoubted honor and veracity be impeached?

Not a t.i.the of the horrors which has existed in the island of Cuba has been told, and probably never will be told. Because a large proportion of the sufferers did not, like Du Barri, shriek upon the scaffold, but, like De Rohan, died mute.

But still something further can be said as to "The Butcher's" methods, and, worse still, as to the putting into practice of those methods. The insurgents have invariably been treated as if they were pirates. The tigerish nature of Weyler spared no one. Refugees, that is those who did not obey his barbarous proclamation, were shot down in cold blood.

Starvation was his policy, and starvation too of those, whatever their sympathies might have been, had never raised a finger against the existing government. The reconcentrados, hara.s.sed beyond all measure, saw nothing before them but death, and the happiest among them were those who died first.

How would you, reader, like to be shut off, with no means of subsistence, for yourself, your wife and your children, within military lines, to cross which meant instant death?

The Butcher could not conquer this valiant people in honorable warfare, and therefore, worthy scion of his blood, he, without one qualm of conscience, determined to exterminate them. Young boys, not more than fifteen or sixteen years of age, were charged with the crime of "rebellion and incendiarism" (that was the favorite charge of Weyler), and sometimes with the pretence of a trial, sometimes with no trial at all, were shot down in cold blood by the score. Poor little starving babies clung to their mothers' b.r.e.a.s.t.s from which no substance was to be obtained. Weyler knew all this, and in his palace in Havana simply laughed, content so long as each day the death rate of the Cubans increased, and he himself was gaining favor with his government, and meanwhile had all that he wanted to eat and drink.

The merciless wretch, by the way, was ever careful not to expose his own precious person to bullet or machete.

But what could be expected of him? He was a Spaniard, a man after Spain's own heart, and one whom it was her delight to honor.

This picture is not over-painted. The colors if anything are laid on too thin.

Although the so-called rebels were not conquered and never could be conquered, Weyler was constantly sending reports home of the "pacification" of first this and then that portion of the island. This he probably supposed was necessary to placate the Spaniards, who are divided amongst themselves and ever ready to rise against the existing government whatever it may be.

In spite of all this, brute Weyler has been and still is the idol of a certain cla.s.s of Spaniards. In spite of all? No, we should have said, because of all.

One of his adherents, among other things, said to Stephen Bonsal, and this is the sort of utterance that the majority of Spain applauds:

"The only way to end this Cuban question is the way General Weyler is going about it. The only way for Spain to retain her sovereignty over these islands is to exterminate--butcher if you like--every man, woman and child upon it who is infected with the contagion and dreams of Cuba Libre. These people must be exterminated and we consider no measure too ruthless to be adopted to secure this end.

"I read in an American paper the other day that General Weyler was poisoning the streams from which the insurgents drink in Matanzas province. It was not true, but I only wish it had been.

"General Weyler is our man. We feel sure of him. He will not be satisfied until every insurgent lies in the ditch with his throat cut, and that is all we want."

Stop a moment and think! These words were spoken at the end of the nineteenth century by the representative of a professed Christian country. How have the teachings of Christ, who always and primarily advocated charity, been forgotten or perverted!

The whole matter of Cuba under Spanish rule is a disgrace to the age we live in.

But (call it spread-eagleism if you like) the United States now has the affair in hand. It can and will right this wrong, and so effectively that there will be no possibility of its recurrence.

CHAPTER XI.

TWO METHODS OF WARFARE: THE SPANISH AND THE CUBAN.

Now let us turn to the one crime, so-called, that has been alleged against the Cubans.