A FRENCH VIEW OF CUBA AND THE INSURREC'fION,

THE appearance of a book on Cuba is welcome and opportune. The echoes that reach us of the events which are passing in "the Queen of the Ahtilles" are very faint and few. Save for a brief telegram at long intervals in the daily papers, announcing some insignificant skirmish, or some act of more than ordinary atrocity on one side or on the other, the struggle for independence which has been raging for nearly eight years is carried on almost in the dark. It is well, in the interests of humanity, that we should be

from time to time reminded of the existence of a "Cuban question," though there is but little chance now of our adopting any definite line of policy in a matter which concerns us so nearly. The book before us, though not of great permanent value, is at all events popularly written ; it contains many little-known facts, it gives a sketch of the physical features of that portion of the island which was the cradle of the insur- rection, and of the character of the inhabitants, beside a useful summary of the origin and progress of the struggle which it would be difficult to find in so concise a form elsewhere. The author is a shrewd, if a somewhat superficial observer, and the little romances of Cuban life with which he relieves the didactic portions of his book will entice even a languid reader to follow him contentedly to the end. In the remarks we are about to make, it must, of course, be understood that M. Piron, and not ourselves, is responsible for the facts. Most of them we are compelled to take upon trust, as authorities by which to test them are not readily accessible.

The Cuban towns are poor, architecturally, and they do not abound in historical associations. We are first introduced to Santiago di Cuba, commonly called Cuba, a town of some 40,000 inhabitants, and the capital of the Eastern Department of the island. After the strange and discordant clang of the church- bells, which it has been forbidden by Papal authority to ring in the usual way in all Spanish countries since the Sicilian Vespers, the author seems to have been most strongly impressed by the

marvellous powers of the fan in the hands of the Cuban ladies,—

powers which, if we may believe our Essayists, were familiar to the ladies of England in the days of Queen Anne. "In the hands of coquettes," he tells us, " this elegant little instru- ment serves less for the purpose of fanning, than for that of expressing one's sentiments. It has a regular language, more varied than that of flowers, more eloquent than that of the

eyes. The different modes of opening and closing it more or less noisily and quickly have a thousand meanings." The chapters on

the various classes into which Cuban society is divided are more instructive. First, there is the all-important distinction between Spaniards from the mother-country and the natives of Cuba.

The Spaniards consist partly of nobles, in whose veins flows the blue-blood of Castile, and who hold all the offices of honour and emolument in the island ; and partly of adventurers of the lower class, who come out to seek their fortune, and who are so gene- rally natives of one province that a grocer is commonly known as a Catalan. The natives of Cuba are divided into many castes.

"In the United States," according to M. Piron, "there are but three castes,—whites, mulattos, and negroes. In Cuba there are

whites, those who may pass for such, quadroons, mulattos, lee griffes [the offspring of a mulatto and a negro parent], and finally, negroes," each class despising those below it, and all alike de- * L' Ile de Cuba; Santiago, Puerto Principe, Matanzas, La Hamm Par Hippolyte Piron. Paris: E. Pion et Cie.

spised by the Spaniards. All people of colour are looked upon with extreme disfavour by the Government, and are outside the pale of ordinary justice, civil and political. As in the mother- country, foundlings are regarded as legitimate, and many parents of negro extraction have their children baptised as foundlings, in order to lift them out of their own class, and to obtain for them the privileges of whites. The author's estimate of the Cubans is, on the whole, favourable. Sociable and prone to hos- pitality, and generous to the utmost of their power, they have many of the distinctive virtues of the Spanish character, without some of its incurable vices ; its chivalry and self-respect, without its punctilious and sombre pride, and its vindictive and insatiable thirst for revenge. They love a gorgeous ceremonial, and their very orgies are under the sanction of religion ; while their creed shows a truly Spanish intolerance, manifested particularly in their detestation of the Jews. Their velorio is almost identical with the Irish wake. They are passionate gamblers at cards, and their favourite sport is cock-fighting, not bull-baiting, which the Spaniards have never yet succeeded in acclimatising in Cuba.

The greatest defect of the Cubans is, in M. Piron's opinion, their fickleness, levity, and pretentiousness, which, however, they are slowly and surely correcting, under the stern discipline of civil war. Next below the Cubanos are the Creoles, a class in which physical beauty is rather the rule than the exception, and whose soft manners and outward gentleness often serve as a mask to conceal tempests of passion. Their -heart is better than their head, and their strange and weird superstitions are an unmistake- able indication of their negro blood. We scarcely know whether we are intended to take altogether au pied de la lettre a very highly-coloured account of a seance of sorceresses, at which the author was secretly present, in the house of a Creole lady of good position. The prevalent form of sorcery was, he tells us, originally imported from Haiti, and has assumed very serious proportions in Cuba. We are forcibly reminded, in reading his strange story, of some of the hideous incantations and unhallowed rites which were imported from abroad, and became so sore a plague-spot in the civilisation of Imperial Rome.

Far below the rest of the population are the slaves. It is curious that M. Piron has nothing to tell us of the coolies, who form the subject of a Report addressed to the Chinese Government by its special Commissioners, an abstract of which has appeared in some of the daily papers (e.g., Daily News of June 26), and of which we shall hear more hereafter. Since the abolition of the slave-traffic, the slaves have considerably diminished in number, and their price rose in proportion from 400 piastres each in 1855 to 1,000 in 1868. Many have been emancipated and armed by the insurgents, but the Spanish Cortes, while abolishing slavery in Porto Rico in 1872, left it untouched in Cuba. Various rights and privileges are secured to the slave by law, but these naturally remain in almost all cases a dead-letter. The slaves in the towns, indeed, have an almost endurable lot ; but the slave in the country is entirely at the mercy of his master, or still worse, of the overseer. Here is the daily tale of work exacted from the slave:—

" Aussitot quo parait Is jour,- us scat tenns d'être sur pied ; leur travail commence peu d'instants aprtts ; a midi, on leur donne une demi- heure pour dejeuner ; us dl rant a la unit. On serait tentd de croire qu'enfin ii lour oat permis de se reposer do la grande fatigue de la journde ; point : ii hint encore gulls aillent chercher la pature des ahevaux, l'herbe de Guinea, at s'ils n'en apportent pas un gros paquet shacun, ils sent encore punis. Apres cola senlement, si le temps eat sombre, us penvont se livrer an repos. Si la lune brine, une veillée de plusieure heures lour est imposee, comma an pdnible suppldment. Durant la unit, des gardes (choisis entre eux) sent apostes, pour qua des ddsordres ne as produisent pas, et qu'ils mettent it profit les quelques instants de sommeil qui leur tont octroyds. Dana quelques haciendas, pour plus de precaution, on les enferme."

Many of the overseers are Frenchmen, who perform their cruel task, according to M. Piron, with singular brutality, exceeding even that of the Spaniards, Cubanos, and Creoles. "The French nation, with few exceptions, là sadly represented in Cuba ; the general opinion there formed of them is equally false and dis- honourable."

After a stay of several months at Santiago, during which he visited many places in the neighbourhood, and enjoyed such sport as it afforded, from partridges to caimans, M. Piron started by steamer for Nuevitas, the port of Puerto Principe, on the north of the island, where he arrived after a fortnight's (?) voyage. In this district traces of the insurrection were but too visible, in the heaps of ashes which occupied the sites of once rich planta- tions, though the extensive plains which form the most prominent feature of the landscape in the centre of Cuba do not offer such facilities for guerrilla warfare as the hilly country of the east. Puerto Principe proved to be a typical Cuban town. The streets are narrow and tortuous, unpaved and muddy ; the houses are seldom more than a storey high, without any architectural preten- tions, and are daubed with glaring colours in the Spanish taste.

The Carnagueyanos, as the townspeople are called, are physically the finest of all the natives of Cuba, and among them the cause

of independence has found some of its most active and valiant partisans. After spending some weeks here, M. Piron passed on to Matanzas, the second commercial town of Cuba, situated in

the most fertile district of the island, and comparatively exempt from the ravages of war. Thence he travelled by rail—for Cuba possesses several railways—to Havana, of which he has necessarily but little that is new to tell us. As we are compelled to pass so hurriedly over this part of the book, it is only fair to add that it is enlivened by several descriptions of the author's excursions into the interior, with its varied scenery, its rich tropical flora and fauna, and its glimpses of many aspects of nature which are unknown in our colder climate. Nor is he always so rude to the fair sex as he is to our countrymen. A propos of the birds of the island, he remarks :—

" Parmi eux, aucun n'est plus bean qua celui qua lee Ordoles appellant dame anglaise, je ne sais pourquoi. La Me et is jabot sent pourpres, lea silos blenes, le corps gris at jaune, la queue d'un bleu sombre ; Is forme aussi eat admirable, le bee court at gracieux. Ce magnifique oiseau a un chant detestable, qui ressemble an coassement des crapauds ; c'est peut-etre cela qui hi a vain son nom."

Perhaps, however, his knowledge of Englishwomen is not more exhaustive than his knowledge of our language. In a list of the newspapers of Havana, he twice mentions complacently a certain Havana Weckley Report, the repetition seeming to indicate that the error is to be attributed to the author rather than the printer.

Of the hiatory of the insurrection M. Piron gives us many de- tails, and this the reader will doubtless find, as we have found it, the most interesting part of the volume. The loyalty of the Cubans to Spain, when all her South-American colonies were as- sertingltheir independence, had won for the island the flattering title of "ever-faithful." Yet widely-spread disaffection was smouldering for a long period before it burst into a flame. So long ago as 1837, the Cubans were unjustly deprived of repre- sentation in the Spanish Cortes, a right which they had hitherto enjoyed. The filibustering expeditions of Lopez in 1850-51 had many sympathisers among them, and the severity with which all who were in any way connected with them were punished left a wound which was never healed. Rather on vague suspicion than because of any actual complicity in the rash enterprise, many scores of Cubans of good family were confined in the Morro, banished to Ceuta, or put to death by the garrotte. Spaniards absorbed every official post, and the people were heavily taxed, often under pretence of public improvements, roads, &c., which it was never intended to carry out, except on paper. At length, in 1865, the exactions of the ruling caste were found intolerable, while they, in their own selfish interests, were bitterly opposed to any attempt at reform. In that year the Cubans in despair petitioned Queen Isabella for redress, and a Commission was ap- pointed, which, as if in mockery, while pretending to carry out the wishes of the islanders in the matter of financial reform, virtually doubled the amount previously wrung from them in taxation. Thenceforward the insurrection was merely a matter of time. Towards the middle of October, 1868, it at last broke out at Bayamo, under the leadership of Cespedes, a little prematurely, through the treachery of the guardian of the insurgents' chest. When Cespedes was asked by some whose hearts were fainter than his own with what arms they were to fight, he answered in the very spirit of an ancient Spartan, "With those of our enemies !" And so with cheers for Prim, seizing arms wherever they could find them, the Cubans advanced to within a short distance of Santiago, where they remained for a time, till compelled to retreat into the interior by the arrival of Spanish reinforcements. It is clear that the serious character of the movement was not at first understood, and that the Spaniards, in spite of the large sums raised in taxation, had not sufficient forces to maintain order in the island. They have since made gigantic efforts to repair their error. In the first two years of the insurrection, we are assured, 70,000 men, including regular troops and volunteers, were sent out from Spain, and from 25,000 to 30,000 have followed in every subsequent year, only to be decimated by yellow fever, by the change of climate, and by harassing skirmishes.

The struggle was waged without mercy. The Spanish volun- teers, consisting in great part of the scum of Havana and of recruits of the same stamp from Spain, acted with savage ferocity, shooting striplings and women by wholesale, and torturing the unfortunate prisoners who fell into their hands, even to the unoffending planters, who were caught between two fires. Thenceforward it became war to the knife. Nor were the insurgents behind - hand in re-

ducing to ashes the hacienda of any proprietor who was luke-

warm in his sympathies, or in ruthlessly destroying whatever might, under any circumstances, be of use to the enemy. Soon after the first outbreak, the insurgents numbered about 45,000 armed men. They hastened to establish the semblance of a regular Government, and on April 10, 1869, "the Chamber of Representatives of the Free People of Cuba" met at Gila-in-taro, a

little town in the centre of the island, proclaimed a Federal Re- public, and drew up a formal constitution, with a legislature, judi-

cature, and executive. Cespedes was chosen their lust President. The Cubans have made many attempts to obtain recognition from the United States, but the revolution which for a time established a Republican Government in Spain told against them at Washing- ton, and the prompt and conciliatory action of Castelar in the affair of the Virginius ' disappointed them, when the armed inter- vention of the United States was all but assured. The story of the ill-fated ship is related at length by M. Piron. And even after this lapse of time, it is difficult to read or to write of it as a mere matter of history.

In March, 1874, Cespedes, when about to cross over to Jamaica, was betrayed by a negro servant, and after a desperate struggle, finding himself mortally wounded, shot himself with his revolver, to avoid falling alive into the hands of the Spaniards, and still breathing, threw himself over a precipice. He had already resigned his powers to Betancourt, who has since been replaced by Francisco Aguilera. There are as yet few signs of the termina- tion of the struggle, although the United States' Government has . intimated that its patience is well-nigh exhausted, and though the collapse of the cause of Don Carlos has placed a large number of veteran troops at the disposal of the authorities at Madrid. How is it to end ?

There are three possible alternatives. First, Spain may recon- quer the island ; but the insurrection has already lasted for eight years, and there is no apparent reason why it should not last as many more. Secondly, Cuba may be annexed by the United States,—a solution, however, to which the people of the United States themselves seem but little inclined to show any favour, and which would probably be less acceptable to England, and in the long-run to the Cubans themselves. Or finally, the Cubans may succeed in establishing their independence, according to M. Piron's suggestion, partly by purchasi

"Los Cubaine," he writes, " desireux d'obtenir leur incldpendance, offrent d'acheter File; pourquoi n'accepterait-on pas le marche? Ile sont tons prets I s'imposer lea plus grands sacrifices pour devenir ldgalement lea mule maitres de lour (there patrie. A force do courage et dAinergie, He parviendraient I s'acquitter integralement, quelque forte quo pules° etre l'indemnitd stipulde. On pourrait prendre contra eux de serest garantiee. No serait-ce pas II une bonne affaire pour l'Espagne et use bowie action de ea part, en menu, temps qu'un heureux evenement pour la malheureuse Ile ravagee ?"

There can be little doubt which of these alternatives would

commend itself to an enlightened foreign policy on the part of this country. As things are, we cannot be said to have advanced one whit the solution of a question of such moment for British interests. Even supposing Spain to have not yet completed her cycle of revolutions, can we reasonably expect that if she succeed in reducing the insurgents for a while, they will not seize the opportunity of her first internal difficulties to renew the struggle ? We see no prospect of a permanent solution in any other direction

than that indicated in the book before us, and we must add that that solution enlists all our sympathies both as Englishmen and as citizens of the world.