CHAPTER I✦

CUBA--POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC

A nation, like an individual, must be gauged by its endowments, its environment, its opportunities, and the various causes which from time to time accelerate or retard its progress.

Cuba is richly endowed with natural resources, it is within a short distance of the best and most profitable market in the world, and its opportunities, under favourable conditions of trade, should have made its population contented and prosperous. Had it not been for the numerous causes which have retarded all progress in this Island, what would have been its industrial, commercial, and social conditions at the close of the present century?

Numbering over a million population fifty years ago, the Island of Cuba, at the rate of growth common to the more prosperous countries of the western hemisphere, ought to number at the present time between four and a half and five millions of inhabitants. With this population, and a government giving everyone the right to the fruits of his own labour, Cuba's sugar crop alone would have been more than double the high-water mark of the last prosperous year, exceeding two millions of tons, with a value of one hundred millions of dollars.

Tobacco, coffee, tropical fruits, iron ore, other minerals of various kinds, lumber, cattle, and innumerable other products which form the commercial wealth of this marvellous Island, would have increased the annual value of its products to figures ranging between two hundred and two hundred and fifty millions of dollars, and thus more than doubled, perhaps trebled, its commercial importance. Laws favourable to trade, and a government interested in development of home industry would have retained for Cuba a large proportion of this wealth, and there would have sprung up an industrial system giving actual employment to as many people in the gainful occupations as will be found in all Cuba when the last Spanish soldier departs from the desolate and prostrate Island.

Cuba should have developed some diversified industries, if only those branches of manufacture which are necessary to supply the requirements of its own population. In its mineral resources it has the basis for the manufacture of iron and steel and for the establishment of machine-shops to supply home demands. In its untouched forests of excellent hardwood, Cuba possesses the chief raw material for the manufacture of furniture and other articles for which the Spanish race are justly famous. With steel and wood for the first quality in abundance, and a water tonnage of considerable magnitude, there should have sprung up, in many of the unequalled harbours of the coast of Cuba, shipyards of no mean dimensions. Without becoming a manufacturing country, except in sugar and tobacco and a few other products in which Cuba excels, it might, under favourable conditions, at this period of its industrial history have been producing many articles of home consumption which, by reason of the unhappy management of its affairs, it has been compelled to purchase abroad. Not abroad in the open markets of the world, for that is another story; but of Spain, because the most infamous discriminating duties have shut Cuba out of the cheaper markets; and while thus gagged and bound, the Island has been plundered and despoiled by the mother country. In this manner have resources and revenue alike been drained away and nothing left, either for home enterprise or improvement, nor for reserve capital with which to do business.

Cuba should have established a central railway system running the length of the Island from east to west, with branches extending on all sides, like its rivers, to the many good towns and harbours on both north and south coasts. Instead of this it has a little less than a thousand miles of line, operated by seven timid companies, extending in various directions, but leaving the two ends of the Island farther apart in actual days of travel than are New York and San Francisco. The capital city of Cuba, Havana, has within it the possibilities of a great and beautiful city; the commercial and industrial city of a prosperous country of five millions of people, and the winter health-resort for the rich and fashionable families of all North America. Its public buildings should have been of the best, its tropical parks and gardens the most fascinating in the world, its streets and pavements the most substantial, its healthfulness unquestioned, and its harbours and docks thronged with shipping and resonant with commercial activity. The merchants of Havana should rank among the richest and most prosperous in the world, and the business, manufacturing, and social interests of the place be equal to those of Boston or Baltimore or San Francisco. What applies to Havana applies only in a lesser degree to the other cities of Cuba, many of which are excellently located and should be important industrial and commercial centres, with numerous fields for the modern municipal enterprise which has done so much to improve the condition of the urban population of Europe and of the United States. Last, though not least, the Island should have been dotted over with the trinity of civilisation--the home, the schoolhouse, and the church. It is the lack of these three great elements of national strength and progress, underlying Cuba's ills, that is the cause of much of its misfortune.

The building of the home, the establishment of the school, and the tolerance of religious worship in half a century changed Texas from a wilderness to a great and prosperous State, with the possibilities of an empire. These same forces, had full play been given them in Cuba during the same period, would have transformed that Island into all that has herein been depicted. Its resources are abundant to maintain five and even ten millions of persons, for only a small proportion of its area is populated. The climate is healthful and the dangers to those unacclimated which lurk in its seaport towns may all be controlled by sanitary and engineering science. That these possibilities have not been realised does not lie with Cuba itself, but is due to the numerous causes which have retarded and stopped its development, and which have finally, after years of strife and war, left the Island with population depleted, agriculture prostrate, industry destroyed, and commerce devastated.

It may be necessary for a clear view of the subject in hand to review briefly the causes which have led to this unhappy end; but, happily, a work dealing with the rehabilitation or industrial reconstruction of Cuba does not require the author either to dwell long upon nor to emphasise the gloomy side of the picture. The results of Spanish robbery and misrule speak too plainly. The reader has seen what Cuba might have been under an honest, stable government, or under the protecting ægis of the United States. The picture presented is not exaggerated, but is coloured by a moderate brush. What Cuba is, alas! is too well known to American and English readers to call for more than a brief summary of conditions as they existed when the author was requested by the President of the United States to visit the Island, report upon its industrial condition, and suggest plans for the relief of the population and for the commercial and industrial reconstruction of the country.

Visiting the Island immediately after the signing of the protocol of the cessation of hostilities between the United States and Spain, August 12, 1898, and again returning to Santiago in December after that province had been in charge of the United States military authorities for nearly six months, he had ample and satisfactory opportunity for the study of conditions and future needs of the people. Surely the horrors and the desolating hand of war were never laid more heavily upon a once prosperous country. Nearly a third of the population wiped out by battle, wholesale slaughter, starvation, exposure, or disease, and a large proportion of those left enfeebled by deprivation and too weak to take up their occupations; the cane-fields and tobacco plantations, which formed the basis of prosperity, burned, and whole sections of country swept of every vestige of civilisation; sugar-centrals, houses, and structures of all kinds destroyed, and inhabitants either dead or huddled half starved in miserable huts near the towns and cities; not a living creature to be seen where once browsed innumerable cattle, and death, destruction, and desolation spread throughout this land that should, and under ordinary circumstances would, be as full of life and prosperity as the richest agricultural section of our own country.

Nor were the cities and towns exempted. Trade and commerce at a standstill; the few sickly manufacturing industries which at the best struggled under the most adverse conditions closed, the ruined buildings emphasising the scene of desolation. In Havana, the wharves and numerous large warehouses were empty, or converted into rendezvous and hospitals for Spanish troops. Hungry and discouraged, the native population stood listlessly on the streets and in the public places. At each station the railroad trains were boarded by half-starving women or children begging for bread or coppers. The principal signs of life were exhibited by the Spanish soldiers, who, with their blue cotton uniforms and Mauser rifles, seemed to form the greater part of the population of the cities and towns, while at the small country railroad stations the squads of woe-begone soldiers alongside the blockhouses comprised the only living relief to miles of waste. The Cuban railways, like all other implements of industry in the unfortunate Island, show evidences of the conflict. Stations burned, bridges destroyed, tracks torn up, freight-cars made into portable blockhouses, locomotives blown to pieces, and passenger-cars dilapidated and dingy. In short, a country more systematically pillaged, more infamously deprived of its resources, more wantonly plundered of its revenues, and a population more completely deprived of its rights by those who had every reason to foster and protect a valuable possession cannot be found recorded in ancient or modern history. Cuba, as it was left at the close of this year by the Spanish, who to the last moment seemed loth to leave the emaciated body which their inordinate greed had thus reduced, presents a picture so sad and sorrowful that, for the sake of our common humanity, it is better to draw a curtain over the past and direct attention to the happier omens which point to the possibilities of the future.