Chapter IV
a Political Experiment: Cuba
The work of Spain—The North American reforms—The future.
By turns Spanish and North American, and frequently disturbed by the conflict of these two Americanisms, the history of the "pearl of the Antilles" has been a long political experiment. Its result, the success of one method or the other, will prove the aptitude or the incapacity of the Latins of America in the art of organising a State or instituting a Republic.
The last colony, the final vestige of the vast Spanish Empire overseas, Cuba still betrayed, towards the end of the nineteenth century, the political and moral influence of the mother country. The exuberant and classic land of tobacco and sugar, its tropical opulence attracted pioneers and colonists. Spain therefore fought to retain this country, which she granted in recompense of the audacity of her adventurers and the rapacity of her officials.
Its geographical situation, its wealth, its traditions, are all exceptional. The race, imaginative and precocious, is fertile in poets, heroes, and orators. We see generals of thirty, poetical swordsmen, divided between their battles and their verses; irreducible guerillas, orators full of tropical eloquence, passionate pilgrims, who wander through America relating the miseries of the Spanish tyranny: a gloomy tale which has made the liberated democracies attentive to the fate of their captive sister. Thus Europe used to shudder at the fate of Poland or Ireland. Astonishingly audacious were these soldiers—Garcia, Maceo, Gomez—who defended the national liberty to the death; bitter were the battles, the hand-to-hand conflicts, the wars of skirmishes and outposts. Of the high lineage of Bolivar, San Martin, and Sucre, the last of the Liberators, at once poet, statesman, and warrior, a Gothic knight enamoured of an ideal Dulcinea—the autonomy of Cuba—Marti was the representative leader of the nation.
As in the other colonies, freed a century earlier, the action of Spain in Cuba was at once fertile and limited, useful and disastrous. What effort could be more paradoxical than that of loading with fetters, with prohibitions and monopolies, the very cities whose birth and development was the work of Spain? Authoritatively she sought to stamp out the longing for liberty, and in this island consumed by racial hatred—the old hatred of the conquerors and the Creoles—she responded to every revolutionary demand for independence by a terrible policy of repression. One of her governors left the bloody traces of an Alva, the pacificator of Flanders.
In Madrid a great minister, Canovas del Castillo, an uncompromising traditionalist, believed that Spain should possess a colonial empire "to preserve her position in the world." From that time only energetic action in the revolted islands could save the metropolis. Already, in 1865, at the beginning of his career, he wished to limit the representation of Cuba and Porto Rico; and in 1868, when the long war broke out, he supported the demands of the 9,000 Spaniards who demanded the rejection of all reform.[1] Once in power, in 1876, Canovas was still more emphatic; the Cuban problem was to be solved only by violence. The generosity of Martinez Campos was followed by the inflexible severity of governors who turned the island into a vast barracks. The timid liberties granted to Zanjon were soon suppressed; neither popular elections nor commercial liberties were allowed, but martial law, and a general to aid the Spaniards of the island in their war against the Creoles and mulattos.
In 1878 the first civil war was over, but in 1895 the revolt was so successful, so popular, so terrible, that Martinez Campos abandoned the government of the island, feeling himself incapable of "wholesale shootings and other feats of the same kind." Marti, tragic symbol of revolt, was killed. General Weyler installed a Reign of Terror; the island was exhausted. No one could dislodge the guerillas from the plantations of sugar-cane which served them as refuge. Weyler ordered a "concentration" of women, children, and the non-combatants in the fortified cities. Offences of opinion were punished by death, and absolute submission was demanded. The intervention of the United States forced Spain to grant a brittle autonomy in 1896. The assassination of Canovas by an anarchist permitted a reaction against his uncompromising ideals, and an offer was made of a constitution, and of elective chambers, without, however, authority over the governor sent by the metropolis, and a Council of Administration, to which the Cubans would have access; but economic interests were ignored and sugar and tobacco were not set free.
Cuba was awaiting her crusader, her Lohengrin. The United States filled the rôle. Attentive to the affairs of the island, they negotiated, arranged for intervention with non-official agents, and New York began to fit out filibustering expeditions. The incidents of the Yankee campaign against Spain are well known, from the sinking of the Maine by an explosion in Havana roadstead to the Treaty of Paris. Once their rival was vanquished would the States give Cuba her longed-for liberty? Porto Rico was conquered and Cuba obtained only a mediocre autonomy.
Here is a difficult question: what was it that impelled the Americans to undertake the adventure: imperialistic ambition or chivalrous impulse, as many Cubans still believe? The opinion of their politicians was always clear; annexation of the island or preservation of the status quo. They feared that Spain might cede the colony to a power better armed than herself, and Cuba, since the time of Jefferson, had been reckoned among those countries which a "law of political gravitation" should eventually give them. An eminent Brazilian historian and diplomatist, Oliveira Lima, has even demonstrated that when Bolivar, after convoking the Congress of Panama in 1826, had thereupon proposed, as the last stage of his vast epic, to give liberty to Cuba, it was the United States that prevented him. For they knew that independence would also mean the enfranchisement of subject races, and they needed slaves for the proud and wealthy feudal State of Virginia. These tropical countries, Cuba and Porto Rico, were the promised prey of a future Federal imperialism, and Spain might remain their guardian until the States could demand their cession or undertake their conquest.
Thus the very interest which in 1826 vetoed the independence of Cuba was later to give the choice between autonomy or war; a dilemma from which the haughty metropolis could not escape. Between the commercial brutality of old and this recent Quixotism there is only an apparent contrast: a hidden logic has guided American policy. If we consider the end in view—to assure the incontestable control of the Caribbean Sea, by purchase or annexation of its islands—the former attitude of a country which had not yet peopled its own territory, and that provoked to-day by a plethora of wealth and men, no longer appear irreconcilable.
As early as 1845 the purchase of Cuba was discussed in Washington. The famous "Ostend manifesto" (1854) issued by the American diplomatists, expounded their right to seize the island in case Spain should refuse to sell it. This resolution to give independence to a country they despaired of buying was therefore only the end of a long campaign.
Certainly in 1898, once peace was signed and Porto Rico conquered, they respected this independence. But their detachment was incomplete; they occupied the island, sent governors thither, and generously reformed the finances, education, and hygiene of the country. A provisional tutelage, soon followed by the proclamation of the Republic. Was this the independence of which Marti had dreamed? The treaty which proclaimed it also limited it; the Platt amendment found its way into the margin of a liberal text, reserving to the United States the right of intervention to remedy any possible anarchy. A strange severity, to demand of an untried tropical republic, where the hostility of castes was extreme, a serene and untroubled existence! Eventual military occupation for the purpose of suppressing revolts would be a dangerous snare to independence. Intervention in the public affairs of the old Spanish colony, twice repeated, was both times followed by a campaign of annexation in the Yellow Press. It is difficult to guess whether Yankee imperialism, with its ever-increasing appetite, will respect the autonomy of the island in the face of periodic occupations. It will probably prefer a protectorate or a final conquest when wearied of the turbulence of a democracy incapable of self-government.
Will this beautiful island one day become a State of the Anglo-Saxon or Federal Union? The accession of the Cubans to this democracy would cause a disturbance in the political and social world as profound as that created by Japanese immigration in the Far West. The plutocrats of the States have too much contempt for half-breeds and negroes willingly to accept deputies from a country where the profound admixture of races contains an important African element; a society which despises the negro cannot wholly agree with one ruled largely by Spanish half-castes of Indian and African ancestry. The protectorate would be a step toward the control of the Tropics which Mr. Benjamin Kidd and other English sociologists imagine to be the appanage of their race.
The civilising work of the United States has been admirable. Once Spain was defeated and her colony conquered, they transformed the education, finance, and hygiene of the island to prepare the people for the liberty they ignored. It was four years before they gave it; four years of pedagogy, of which Brigadier-General Wood, military and civil chief, was in charge, until on the 20th of May, 1902, "thanks to the goodwill of President Roosevelt, we were recognised as having attained our majority."[2]
Four years of extraordinary activity transformed the exhausted island into a prosperous country, a reform which we may follow in the memoirs of General Wood. Two years of endeavour extirpated the yellow fever, which had prevailed in Havana since 1762. The Yankees fought the mosquitos, the vehicles of the disease, and their sanitary works and measures decreased the death-rate from 91.3 per 1,000 in 1898 to 20.63 in 1902. In the same period the deaths among the American troops fell from 91.03 to 20.68. They also attacked malaria and tuberculosis, until Havana, as one of them proudly writes, became one of the healthiest cities of America.
Pavements, gutters, sewers, the demolition of old buildings and the construction of new; asylums, hospitals, and prisons, gave the island an aspect at once modern and sanitary. The fiscal revenues, formerly badly employed by an unskilful bureaucracy, found useful employment; dilapidations were noted and a railway statute was passed. The Yankees opened up new roads, knowing how far the prosperity of the island depended on them; in 1906, the second year of the occupation, there were only 610 kilometres of carriage-roads in Cuba, while Jamaica, with one-fifth the area, had 10,113.[3]
Communications being thus improved, the sugar industry, on which the prosperity of the island depends, developed rapidly. The visitors did not forget to attract immigrants and to reconstruct the ports.
The government of General Wood installed modern schools in the old Spanish school-houses, while it built special schools, kindergartens, and technical colleges in the large towns.
Under the Spaniards education was obligatory, no doubt, but it was the Americans who brought a lapsed law into force. Fines punished parental neglect. A thousand teachers went to Harvard, in the year 1900 alone, sent thither by General Wood to improve their methods of teaching; new pedagogic methods and a wider culture strongly modified social and political life. The Americans left ten times as many schools as they found, and an education adequate to the race and the Cuban child, who is "impressionable, nervous, and furiously imaginative."
Governor Wood requested his country to reduce by one-half the customs rates upon the coffee, fruits, and sugar which the island produced, as the basis of a Zollverein profitable to both countries. He complained, in his memoir, of the indifference of the wealthy towards the communal and political life, which he wished to render more active. A law passed by him regulated the elections in the new Republic.
The Cubans willingly recognise that the Americans have performed an excellent work in education and finance, but accuse them of having provoked in political life a corruption analogous to that of the leaders or bosses of Tammany Hall, which replaces violence by fraud. It is difficult to speak of such a matter, but perhaps the reaction against these dangerous methods was insufficient. In 1906, after four years of independent life, President Estrada Palma demanded intervention. It must be recognised that the Americans did not respond without some uneasiness. Mr. Roosevelt, in a letter to the Cuban diplomatist Gonzalo de Quesada, gave some admirable advice: "I solemnly exhort the Cuban patriots," he said, "to form a close union, to forget their personal differences and ambitions, and to remember that they have one means of safeguarding the independence of the Republic: to evade, at all costs, the necessity of foreign intervention, intended to deliver them from civil war and anarchy."
Heedless of the voice of the shepherd of the American people, they asked him to put an end to the long quarrel between the liberals and the moderates. The Americans occupied the island for a year; Mr. Taft, the new President, was one of the pacificators. It is difficult to judge whether the anarchical inhabitants of the island have gained ground since the departure of the Americans. One of their most remarkable politicians, Señor Mendez Capote, believes that in Cuba—and more generally in any very young country where the government has need of an unfailing authority in order to check discord—representatives of one or both parties ought to belong to the Cabinet in order to render political life less changeable and to decrease its contrasts.[4] This organisation is impossible in a democracy which passes alternately from revolt to dictatorship.
Some Cubans, satisfied with the material progress effected, would prefer annexation. Others, and among them one of the most remarkable writers of the country, Señor Jesus Castellanos, are never tired, remembering their happy intervention, of calling the United States, "the great sister Republic." Certainly the States have given Cuba autonomy, but was it not a treacherous gift? Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. The historic interest of Cuba for the Americans is to-day increased by imperialistic ambitions. A Harvard professor, Mr. Coolidge, writes in a book already cited: "A glance at the map is enough to show us how important the island is to the United States. Of great value by virtue of its natural resources and its temperate climate, it is strategically the key to the Gulf of Mexico, where the Mississippi Valley terminates facing the Caribbean Sea and the future Panama Canal. Its situation is comparable to that of Crete in the Eastern Mediterranean."
The danger is therefore serious; the island is already in the lion's mouth. Only a skilful policy can keep the hope of deliverance alive. The servitude offered by the modern Cyclops is only a gilded pill; and to swallow it the merchants of the island would willingly forget their national pride. Analysing Rodo's book, Señor Castellanos has denounced the excessive utilitarianism of these men, without idealism, and full of a cupidity and gross materialism, which makes any collective effort towards national unity impossible. Poets and dreamers, the Cubans would need to undergo some prodigious change before one could interest them in action, before they could understand in the medley of political conflict what is really in the interests of the country; before they could establish political solidarity in the place of anarchy, and temper their easy confidence in the Yankee by a necessary and self-preserving scepticism. Could they ever transform their intellectual gifts into a less showy but more efficacious capacity for conflict and discipline? Will they acquire a sense of reality? Cuba should serve the rest of Latin America as a kind of experimental object-lesson. She suffers from the characteristic malady of the race, the divorce between intelligence and will.
She opposes the Anglo-Saxon invasion, being still thoroughly Spanish, her deliverance being a matter of yesterday, but American also by the mixture of the two races, the conquerors and the vanquished, by the usual Latin virtues and defects. The loss of her independence would be a painful lesson to the republics of Central America, and to Mexico even, where anarchy is paving the way for servitude. The United States offer peace at the cost of liberty. The alternatives are independence or wealth, material progress or tradition. The choice between dignity and a future is a painful one. Only an abundant immigration under benevolent tyrants strong enough to enforce a lasting peace, only a new orientation of the national life, setting business and industry and rural life before politics, could save the country from the painful fate which seems to be hers.
A fresh intervention, followed doubtless by annexation, would demonstrate the racial incapacity for self-government—a mournful experience. The successive rule of Anglo-Saxons and Creoles would render obvious the superiority of the former in the matter of administration, economics, and politics.
[1] See Como acabó la dominación, de España en America, E. Piñeyro, Paris.
[2] Enrique Collazo, Cuba intervenida, Havana, 1910, p. 93.
[3] Informe del Gobernador Charles E. Magoon, Havana, 1909, pp. 26, 39.
[4] Cited in Cuban Pacification, Washington, 1907, p. 506.