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Another time we rode out to the attractive suburbs of Vendado, where are many fine houses and extensive gardens, the greater part of them built in the old Spanish style, but some of the newer buildings after the fashion of modern American architecture. These last are less attractive than those which the Spaniard has evolved from his centuries of living in the latitudes of the tropics.
XXI
Cuba – The Fortress of La Cabaña
Havana,December 2nd.
The candle end Captain MacIrvine held in his hand had burned so low that his fingers were scorching. My last match was burned up. We should have to grope our way out. Just at that moment a dim flicker of a distant light gleamed far down the low, narrow tunnelway. It came nearer, it grew larger; a man was there, – a soldier – yes, a Cuban officer, a lieutenant of infantry. With him were two ladies; one older than he, whose face, sweet, but oh, so sad! was furrowed with deep lines. Her hand trembled on her escort’s arm. The other woman was younger, quite as young as the lieutenant, and comely to look upon. “Si, Señor,” replied the lieutenant to a query, “I do have one box of the match. Take of them one half. Take of them all. I do know the way out.” He handed MacIrvine a box of small wax tapers. Tears were streaming down the elder woman’s face; the younger gave a sob. The three passed on and turned up the steep ascent to the left. We were in the pitch dark again.
“Who is he? Who are they?” I asked. “He is the officer now in command of this fortification; they are his mother and sister,” MacIrvine replied, half divining my question. “He is of a prominent Cuban family. They were people of wealth. The family were at dinner one evening. A Spanish guard called at the house, sent in a card to the father, who was an eminent judge. He left the table and went to the door. He was arrested and brought here, hatless and in his slippers. When the family went to ascertain why he did not come back to finish his coffee, they learned that he had been taken to La Cabaña. They never saw him again. The Spanish authorities reported that he had ‘escaped.’ In fact, he was brought down here into one of these dungeons, and was walled up alive. These loose rock walls you are now looking at, filling these low arches along this passageway, all tell the same tale. Behind every one of these walls, one or more Cubans have been immured alive. Their bones still rot there.”
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.
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.
A great garrison of regular troops was always kept in military readiness in La Cabaña; now a single company of Cuban infantry occupies the fortress. Cuba free and fifty Cuban soldiers in La Cabaña; Cuba a Spanish province and fifty thousand bayonets to garrison and hold Havana down, one single town!
Many ancient guns yet adorn the ramparts of La Cabaña, the newer artillery having been removed to Spain, or, some say, sunk in the sea. The old chapel now serves for a sleeping room for the Cuban guard. The bell which tolled so often for the lost souls of the condemned is now gone. The fount of holy water is a receptacle for junk. The well-worn flight of steps ascending to the roof, no longer responds to the tread of the thousands of feet that used to press them. Right over the chapel, near the place where swung the bell, stood the garrote where, it is said, more than sixty thousand throats have been clasped and crushed by the iron grips. Perhaps nowhere in the world have so many souls been shriven as in the chapel of La Cabaña, and nowhere have so many lives gone out as by this dread instrument of death. And yet, as we stood on this high platform, with the balmy air of now free Cuba filling our lungs, and watched the Cuban soldiery pacing their beat in the park below, it seemed, in the serene and restful humor of the day, almost incredible that only three short years ago, at most but four, here had been enacted a daily tragedy of cruelty and horror which no human pen will ever be adequate actually to portray.
Back in the year 1894, when I had bought a few Cuban bonds, and in 1896, when I had raised the Cuban flag on my McKinley pole at Coalburg, I had felt in a dim way that I was doing a thing entirely right; but it was not until I stood upon the ramparts of La Cabaña, and considered the monstrous pitilessness of Spanish rule, and saw within the focus of my vision the demonstrated proof of cruelty beyond all conception in the present age, – only then, did I fully realize how God had guided the hearts and thews of my countrymen in rendering forever impossible the continuance of these iniquities.
From La Cabaña we wandered across a stretch of grassy sward a quarter of a mile, to the parapets of El Moro. Builded upon a profound rock foundation it guards the angle of the land between the open sea and the far shore of Havana Bay. Above it, as above La Cabaña, floats the starry flag. Within it resides a sturdy, clean-cut, trim-built garrison of our own boys in blue. It did me good to see them. Vigorous and businesslike they looked. Young men, well-kept, clear-eyed, expressing in their look and gait the easy mastery of the youthful, giant power whose simple uniform they wear. El Moro was never a prison fortress, although there are said to be dungeons yet undiscovered, dug deep into the rock base on which it stands. Nor is it now a fort which could withstand an attack by modern guns. But in the ancient time it was an impregnable pile, and stands to-day, a fine example of what the military art taught men to build in centuries gone by.
Most of the guns are old and out of date, notably a dozen of immense size known among the soldier boys as the “Twelve Apostles,” while just one or two of modern make poke their noses toward the city and the sea.
From El Moro we descended to the water’s edge, and finding our boatman, were ferried across to the tranquil city. The sun was sinking behind the highlands in the west; the azure sky had grown to purple all barred with gold and red. The golden light of eventide illumined the city as with an aureole. It seemed to me a hallowing benison over Cuba now forever free.
XXII
Cuba – Her Fertile Sugar Lands – Matanzas by the Sea
Havana, Cuba,December 27th.
A cup of chocolate, a roll, a pat of guava paste, such was my desayuno, my breakfast. Señor G – , Superintendent of Civic Training in the Schools of Cuba, had also had his morning coffee, and was awaiting me at the broad portal of the hotel. We call a cocha, bade the cochero drive us to the ferry on the bay, and were soon rattling through Havana’s narrow, rough-paved streets. It was early, not yet six o’clock. But the people of the tropics rise betimes and the busy life of the day was well begun. We could look right into the courtyards, and even into the living rooms of the houses, so close did our cocha wheel to the open doorways and to the wide-lifted curtains of the glassless windows. A young mother looked curiously through the iron bars of a window front at the Americanos. She held her laughing baby daughter in her arms. A pair of slippered feet, a coral necklace, a friendly smile, and it was clothed for the day. A family sat at a long table, each sipping the clear black coffee. The mother was smoking a huge black cigar, the father a cigar of more moderate size, the children were all smoking cigarettes. Scantily clad peddlers were crying their goods, one his back piled high with tinware. Women were carrying on their heads big baskets of fruit. An ancient jet-black African woman trudged along with a squealing shoat, tied by the four legs and slung to her shoulder. A drove of she-donkeys were standing before an open doorway; their owner was milking one of them, the buyer was standing near so as to be sure that the morning’s milk should be the real thing. The shops, however, were not yet open. It was too early for buyers. But the awnings were being spread over the streets, so as to be ready for the sun when it should wax hot.
As we approached the neighborhood of the bay, the press of footfarers in the streets increased. The narrow sidewalks and even the street itself were filled with men and women moving toward the ferry. Our cochero cracked his whip and hallooed at the crowd, and they fled out of the way, quite good-naturedly. I was trying to light my cigar, but the motion of the vehicle blew out the match. I had just struck a third. A woman on the sidewalk saw my fix. She called to the cochero and pointed to me. He stopped his horse upon its haunches. He waited until my cigar was alight, then he drove on. Such is the custom in a city where every man and woman smokes and El Segaro is the King.
At the long, low-roofed ferry house there was a great crowd, an uncommon press. We paid our cochero a peseta (twenty cents), dismissed him and strode among the thick of the throng.
In its midst were a group of gentlemen in white panama hats and white linen clothes. One of them was short and stout with gray mustachios, pointed goatee and flowing gray hair. It was General Masso, the candidate of the Massoista Party for President. I had met him the night when he made his great speech to his cheering followers in front of the Hotel Pasaje, and told them all to refrain from voting when the day for elections should arrive, “for were not all the Palmaistas scoundrels and thieves and would-be usurpers of power, backed, too, by Yankee bayonets! What use was it to vote or try to vote against such combinations for wrong and ill? No! let the Massoistas remain at home, and by the smallness of the vote cast let the world see that the real strength of the Cuban people was not with Palma, the puppet of American power, but with the real people of Cuba, whose day would in the future surely come!” And had not the assembled multitude filled the air with shouts of “Bravo! Viva Masso!” With him was Señor Hernandez, candidate for the Vice-presidency of the Massoista Party, who had also stood on a pile of boxes and stirred the excited multitude with eloquence even more intemperate. And there was also Señor Gualberto Gomez, the greatest orator of Cuba, short, stout, gray-haired, with gold spectacles – a Spanish mulatto, the real leader of the great, turbulent, Afro-Spanish race; the powerful backer of the Massoistas, who it is said, had welded the third of Cuba’s Negro-Spanish population into a solid political machine, bounden together with the secret ties of occult brotherhood. His impetuous eloquence it was which swept the Constitutional Convention, and carried the plank for universal suffrage triumphantly to victory against predetermined plans of the Conservative leaders. He would now have his following hold the balance of power in Cuba, and so rule the Island as does his race in Hayti and San Domingo! For the present, he would use the Massoistas and their pro-Spanish propaganda, later he would throw aside the Spanish following and himself rule Cuba through the power of his organized blacks. Young Garcia was there, too, the son of the great leader, discontented with the minor rôle Palma and the Americans have permitted him to play, and anxious for a Cuba wholly free from the interference of the American as well as the Spaniard. Yes, these leaders were all there, and the great square before the ferry house was packed with a cheering multitude to bid them good-bye, and Masso “God speed” on his journey to his plantation home. When I met these gentlemen before, I enjoyed free and frank talk with them, and they had made no scruple in voicing to me their policies and demands: – their determination to rule or ruin; their policy to refrain from voting and then later rise in armed revolt. This morning they were all gathered here to take a last farewell of their really loved chief, Masso, a fine old patriot with a famous war record, whom many now think that men more cunning than himself are using for their own selfish ends.
The ferryboat was ancient in make and slow in movement. We were to cross the bay to the little suburb where we were to take the train which was to carry us through the rolling country and level plains of middle Cuba into the rich and fertile sugar-producing province of Matanzas.
Our track over the now clear waters of the bay led us close alongside the crushed and bended wreckage of the United States Steamship Maine, while not far beyond lay at easy anchor three modern warboats of the navy, the Kearsarge, the Kentucky and the Massachusetts, a proud trio for Spanish and Cuban eyes to look upon. The wreck still lies there, its lonely foremast a mournful monument to the tragedy it marks.
The railroad runs almost due east, from the low-lying suburbs, and passes close by the village of Guanabacoa, where were gathered so many of the reconcentrados, where Spanish cruelty developed its most wanton crimes, and where yellow fever played most deadly havoc with Spaniard and with Cuban alike. We sped between rolling grass-covered hills, passing great groves of that most graceful and stately of tropic trees, the royal palm, large plantings of luxuriant bananas, and many cocoanut palms as well. The country was more flat than toward the west, and soon we were moving through wide reaches of the feathery sugar cane. There were miles of it, leagues of it, and all taller and more robust than the cane I saw while traversing the sugar lands of Louisiana.
In the black, deep and wonderfully fertile soil, the cane grows without care or heed. Here the cane once planted need not be reset for full twenty years, and the stock may be cut at six months’ intervals through all that time. No wonder the sugar-growers of Louisiana cry aloud, for they must reset their roots every third year, and can only count on two sugar crops from that; while their cane does not yield nearly so much sugar to the ton as the crops from these Cuban lands. Nor can the sugar grower of the Florida Everglades compete with the fertility of Cuba. Seven years, at most, to a single root is there the limit, five years is more often the rule, and the stalk is but little sweeter than that of Louisiana growth. The American sugar men are now scouting the land in Cuba. I met them from Louisiana and from Texas and from Florida. They are bound to come in numbers greater yet.
For many miles we traversed these waving cane fields, passing many villages and smoking sugar mills at work, teams of fat oxen hauling in the cane, miniature railroads dragging in long train loads of cane to the factories, and thousands of men and many women working in the fields, these lifting their faces from toil to gaze momentarily at our train as it hurried by.
At one station a bridal company entered the train; the groom was clad in black broadcloth, the bride was gowned in soft white fabric, a graceful white mantilla of priceless lace falling over her thick black braids. Their friends were all there to see them off, and cheered with many vivas, showering them with rice as they entered the car, followed by the burly bulk of the cassock-clad padre who had made them one.
Matanzas, which claims to be the most healthful city of all Cuba, is situated some fifty miles almost due east of Havana facing a beautiful bay, and spans the mouths of two small rivers, whose verdant valleys stretch behind the town. The city is ancient, and is spread for the most part along a high, long, sloping hill, or several hills, stretching back and up from the arm of the sea on which it lies. Here has been wrought under the skillful supervision of General Wilson, the most successful of the sanitary regenerations of any Cuban town. The city has been sewered in modernwise and macadamized with care, and is supplied with abundance of purest water.
We alighted at the commodious railway station, a larger and better structure for its purpose than any I have yet seen in Cuba. We entrusted ourselves to the care of a tawney-hued cochero, who galloped us away toward the heart of the town. We followed a long, level, wide street, crossed a substantial iron bridge over the river San Juan, made a sharp turn, climbed a steep pitch of hill and stopped before the chief hotel. Here is a little courtyard, at the farther end of which hangs a life-size portrait of Jose Marte, the martyred patriot. We sat in the patio, where palms waved over us, and coffee and delicious fish were brought to us along with a basket of oranges such as even Florida cannot well surpass. Lighting our cigars, we now sauntered into the fine, old-fashioned, Spanish gardens of the Plaza, laid out with precise symmetry and guarded by low iron fences set on bases of carved stone, the flowering shrubs and many blooming plants being half hid by the iron and the rock.
We viewed the cathedral, a small square-towered edifice in ill repair, and then visited the elaborate and commodious building for the public school, now in vacation emptiness, and then we strolled to the market where fruits and fish were in especial abundance; and we noted everywhere the multitude of Cubans tan and black, for many negroes live in salubrious Matanzas.
Then we climbed the long hill, until, high behind the town, we came to a hedge of cactus, an open gate, an old and half-dismantled house. Voices of children rang out as we approached the wide piazza. A blue-eyed man with firm and kindly face, a little pinched and pale, but alight with high purpose, greeted us at the door. He had made here a home for motherless waifs, the riffraff and refuse of the reconcentrado camps, whom Spanish heartlessness and hunger had not utterly destroyed. The man came from Illinois, and with his own small means had gathered these few score children, all little boys here, a separate home for the little girls yonder across the hill; had drawn to him a company of kindly Cubans, and here set up and now successfully maintains, asking no outside aid or alms, these homes and schools for the saving of the little bodies and their souls. The youngsters are the picture of good health. Their fare is the simplest; their instruction kindly, their play hours long. They grow and thrive, and some day will be men and women who will help Cuba’s destiny for weal and not for woe. I grouped the little lads together and took them with my kodak, and cherish the picture, in sad contrast with the party of little Mexican boys who left our ship at Progresso, all unconscious of the brutal slavery and death awaiting them.
We also visited the beautiful and simple shrine and chapel of Monserrat, erected by the descendants of those who came to Cuba from the Balearic Isles. This shrine crowns the summit of a hill overlooking the city. We here tarried long, viewing the wide reach of landscape stretching as far as the eye could see in undulating plains toward the south, with everywhere vistas of ripening cane, while northward wound the fertile valley of Ymurri toward the famous caves of Bellmar.
“Veni aci, Charley Blue-eyes,” they called after us as we passed along the narrow streets. Some of the voices possessed the cadent melody of the Spanish maiden, but we did not deign to turn, for who would be so bold as to call us “Charley Blue-eyes,” we should like to know! Many children were playing along the curb, and few of them wore even a coral band around the neck. Quite as God made them they were, their tan and swart skins, showing soft as satin under the influence of sunlight and fresh air. We were loath to bid adieu to the delightful city, and I shall never forget the charm of its picturesque location, the perfection of its smooth macadam streets, the cleanliness of its white and blue and yellow houses. Yellow was the hue most used and loved by the Spaniards, blue is the color for the patriotic Cuban. Since Spanish oppression has left the shores of Cuba, the towns and cities have been going through a steady metamorphosis from the yellow to the blue.
We lingered upon the fine iron bridge spanning the river San Juan, watching the abundant traffic of the waters beneath us, composed chiefly of fishing and fruit boats, although some were laden with more bulky commerce. At a little shop just across the bridge, we tarried to fill our pockets with delicious cigars, cheaper than even our stogies at home; and we let the boy behind the counter take up a huge cocoanut in its green husk and with his big knife hack it open and pour out the liquor within. “Milk,” they call it, but more like nectar it is, and he filled two deep glasses whose contents we quaffed with great content.
The stars were out when we returned to the city of Havana. The American squadron was ablaze with electric lights, and only the gloomy mast of the Maine, thrusting above the placid waters, hinted at the final provocation to war which so short a time ago brought to Cuba peace with liberty.
