Part 8 (1/2)
To ascertain the condition of slaves in Cuba, two things are to be considered: first, the laws, and secondly, the execution of the laws.
The written laws, there is no great difficulty in ascertaining. As to their execution, there is room for opinion. At this point, one general remark should be made, which I deem to be of considerable importance.
The laws relating to slavery do not emanate from the slave-holding mind; nor are they interpreted or executed by the slave-holding cla.s.s. The slave benefits by the division of power and property between the two rival and even hostile races of whites, the Creoles and the Spaniards.
Spain is not slave-holding, at home; and so long as the laws are made in Spain, and the civil offices are held by Spaniards only, the slave has at least the advantage of a conflict of interests and principles, between the two cla.s.ses that are concerned in his bondage.
The fact that one Negro in every four is free, indicates that the laws favor emanc.i.p.ation. They do both favor emanc.i.p.ation, and favor the free blacks after emanc.i.p.ation. The stranger visiting Havana will see a regiment of one thousand free black volunteers, parading with the troops of the line and the white volunteers, and keeping guard in the Obra Pia.
When it is remembered that the bearing arms and performing military duty as volunteers is esteemed an honor and privilege, and is not allowed to the whites of Creole birth, except to a few who are favored by the government, the significance of this fact may be appreciated. The Cuban slave-holders are more impatient under this favoring of the free blacks than under almost any other act of the government. They see in it an attempt, on the part of the authorities, to secure the sympathy and cooperation of the free blacks, in case of a revolutionary movement--to set race against race, and to make the free blacks familiar with military duty, while the whites are growing up in ignorance of it. In point of civil privileges, the free blacks are the equals of the whites.
In courts of law, as witnesses or parties, no difference is known; and they have the same rights as to the holding of lands and other property. As to their social position, I have not the means of speaking.
I should think it quite as good as it is in New England, if not better.
So far as to the position of the blacks, when free. The laws also directly favor emanc.i.p.ation. Every slave has a right to go to a magistrate and have himself valued, and on paying the valuation, to receive his free papers. The valuation is made by three a.s.sessors, of whom the master nominates one and the magistrate the other two. The slave is not obliged to pay the entire valuation at once; but may pay it in installments, of not less than fifty dollars each. These payments are not made as mere advances of money, on the security of the master's receipt, but are part purchases. Each payment makes the slave an owner of such a portion of himself, _pro parte indivisa_, or as the common law would say, in tenancy-in-common, with his master. If the valuation be one thousand dollars, and he pays one hundred dollars, he is owned, one-tenth by himself and nine-tenths by his master. It has been said, in nearly all the American books on Cuba, that, on paying a share, he becomes ent.i.tled to a corresponding share of his time and labor; but, from the best information I can get, I think this is a mistake. The payment affects the proprietary t.i.tle, but not the usufruct. Until all is paid, the master's dominion over the slave is not reduced, as respects either discipline, or labor, or right of transfer; but if the slave is sold, or goes by operation of law to heirs or legatees or creditors, they take only the interest not paid for, subject to the right of future payment under the valuation.
There is another provision, which, at first sight, may not appear very important, but which is, I am inclined to think, the best practical protection the slave has against ill-treatment by his master: that is, the right to a compulsory sale. A slave may, on the same process of valuation compel his master to transfer him to any person who will pay the money. For this purpose, he need establish no cause of complaint. It is enough if he desires to be transferred, and some one is willing to buy him. This operates as a check upon the master, and an inducement to him to remove special causes of dissatisfaction; and it enables the better cla.s.s of slave-holders in a neighborhood, if cases of ill-usage are known, to relieve the slave, without contention or pecuniary loss.
In making the valuation, whether for emanc.i.p.ation or compulsory transfer, the slave is to be estimated at his value as a common laborer, according to his strength, age, and health. If he knows an art or trade, however much that may add to his value, only one hundred dollars can be added to the estimate for this trade or art. Thus the skill, industry and character of the slave, do not furnish an obstacle to his emanc.i.p.ation or transfer. On the contrary, all that his trade or art adds to his value, above one hundred dollars, is, in fact, a capital for his benefit.
There are other provisions for the relief of the slave, which, although they may make even a better show on paper, are of less practical value.
On complaint and proof of cruel treatment, the law will dissolve the relation between master and slave. No slave can be flogged with more than twenty-five lashes, by the master's authority. If his offence is thought greater than that punishment will suffice for, the public authorities must be called in. A slave mother may buy the freedom of her infant, for twenty-five dollars. If slaves have been married by the Church, they cannot be separated against their will; and the mother has the right to keep her nursing child. Each slave is ent.i.tled to his time on Sundays and all other holidays, beyond two hours allowed for necessary labor, except on sugar estates during the grinding season.
Every slave born on the island is to be baptized and instructed in the Catholic faith, and to receive Christian burial. Formerly, there were provisions requiring religious services and instruction on each plantation, according to its size; but I believe these are either repealed, or become a dead letter. There are also provisions respecting the food, clothing and treatment of slaves in other respects, and the providing of a sick room and medicines, &c.; and the government has appointed magistrates, styled sindicos, numerous enough, and living in all localities, whose duty it is to attend to the pet.i.tions and complaints of slaves, and to the measures relating to their sale, transfer or emanc.i.p.ation.
As to the enforcement of these laws, I have little or no personal knowledge to offer; but some things, I think, I may treat as reasonably sure, from my own observation, and from the concurrent testimony of books, and of persons of all cla.s.ses with whom I have conversed.
The rule respecting religion is so far observed as this, that infants are baptized, and all receive Christian burial. But there is no enforcement of the obligation to give the slaves religious instruction, or to allow them to attend public religious service. Most of those in the rural districts see no church and no priest, from baptism to burial.
If they do receive religious instruction, or have religious services provided for them, it is the free gift of the master.
Marriage by the Church is seldom celebrated. As in the Roman Church marriage is a sacrament and indissoluble, it entails great inconvenience upon the master, as regards sales or mortgages, and is a restraint on the Negroes themselves, to which it is not always easy to reconcile them. Consequently, marriages are usually performed by the master only, and of course, carry with them no legal rights or duties. Even this imperfect and dissoluble connection has been but little attended to.
While the slave-trade was allowed, the planters supplied their stock with bozales (native Africans) and paid little attention, even on economic principles, to the improvement, or, speaking after the fas.h.i.+on of cattle-farms, to the increase of stock on the plantation. Now that importation is more difficult, and labor is in demand, their attention is more turned to their own stock, and they are beginning to learn, in the physiology of increase, that canon which the Everlasting has fixed against promiscuous intercourse.
The laws respecting valuation, the purchase of freedom at once or by instalments, and the compulsory transfer, I know to be in active operation in the towns, and on plantations affording easy access to towns or magistrates. I heard frequent complaints from slave-holders and those who sympathized with them, as to the operation of these provisions. A lady in Havana had a slave who was an excellent cook; and she had been offered $1700 for him, and refused it. He applied for valuation for the purpose of transfer, and was valued at $1000 as a laborer, which, with the $100 for his trade, made a loss to the owner of $600, and, as no slave can be subsequently sold for a larger sum than his valuation, this provision gave the slave a capital of $600. Another instance was of a planter near Matanzas, who had a slave taught as a carpenter; but after learning his trade, the slave got himself transferred to a master in the city, for the opportunity of working out his freedom, on holidays and in extra hours. So general is the enforcement of these provisions that it is said to have resulted in a refusal of many masters to teach their slaves any art or trade, and in the hiring of the labor of artisans of all sorts, and the confining of the slaves to mere manual labor. I heard of complaints of the conduct of individuals who were charged with attempting to influence the credulous and too ready slaves to agree to be transferred to them, either to gratify some ill-will against the owner, or for some supposed selfish interest. From the frequency of this tone of complaint and anecdote, as well as from positive a.s.sertions on good authority, I believe these provisions to have considerable efficacy.
As to the practical advantage the slaves can get from these provisions in remote places; and as to the amount of protection they get anywhere from the special provisions respecting punishment, food, clothing, and treatment generally, almost everything lies in the region of opinion.
There is no end to statement and anecdote on each side. If one cannot get a full and lengthened personal experience, not only as the guest of the slave-holder, but as the companion of the local magistrates, of the lower officers on the plantation, of slave-dealers and slave-hunters, and of the emanc.i.p.ated slaves, I advise him to shut his ears to mere anecdotes and general statements, and to trust to reasonable deductions from established facts. The established facts are, that one race, having all power in its hands, holds an inferior race in slavery; that this bondage exists in cities, in populous neighborhoods, and in remote districts; that the owners are human beings, of tropical races, and the slaves are human beings just emerging from barbarism, and that no small part of this power is exercised by a low-lived and low-minded cla.s.s of intermediate agents. What is likely to be the effect on all the parties to this system, judging from all we know of human nature?
If persons coming from the North are credulous enough to suppose that they will see chains and stripes and tracks of blood; and if, taking letters to the best cla.s.s of slave-holders, seeing their way of life, and hearing their dinner-table anecdotes, and the breakfast-table talk of the ladies, they find no outward signs of violence or corruption, they will probably, also, be credulous enough to suppose they have seen the whole of slavery. They do not know that that large plantation, with its smoking chimneys, about which they hear nothing, and which their host does not visit, has pa.s.sed to the creditors of the late owner, who is a bankrupt, and is in charge of a manager, who is to get all he can from it in the shortest time, and to sell off the slaves as he can, having no interest, moral or pecuniary, in their future. They do not know that that other plantation, belonging to the young man who spends half his time in Havana, is an abode of licentiousness and cruelty.
Neither do they know that the tall hounds chained at the kennel of the house they are visiting are Cuban bloodhounds, trained to track and to seize. They do not know that the barking last night was a pursuit and capture, in which all the white men on the place took part; and that, for the week past, the men of the plantation have been a committee of detective and protective police. They do not know that the ill-looking man who was there yesterday, and whom the ladies did not like, and all treated with ill-disguised aversion, is a professed hunter of slaves.
They have never seen or heard of the Sierra del Cristal, the mountain-range at the eastern end of Cuba, inhabited by runaways, where white men hardly dare to go. Nor do they know that those young ladies, when little children, were taken to the city in the time of the insurrection in the Vuelta de Arriba. They have not heard the story of that downcast-looking girl, the now incorrigibly malignant Negro, and the lying mayoral. In the cities, they are amused by the flashy dresses, indolence and good-humor of the slaves, and pleased with the respectfulness of their manners, and hear anecdotes of their attachment to their masters, and how they so dote upon slavery that nothing but bad advice can entice them into freedom; and are told, too, of the worse condition of the free blacks. They have not visited the slave-jails, or the whipping-posts in the house outside the walls, where low whites do the flogging of the city house-servants, men and women, at so many reals a head.
But the reflecting mind soon tires of the anecdotes of injustice, cruelty and licentiousness on the one hand, and of justice, kindness and mutual attachment, on the other. You know that all coexist; but in what proportion you can only conjecture. You know what slavery must be, in its effect on both the parties to it. You seek to grapple with the problem itself. And, stating it fairly, it is this--Shall the industry of Cuba go on, or shall the island be abandoned to a state of nature? If the former, and if the whites cannot do the hard labor in that climate, and the blacks can, will the seven hundred thousand whites, who own all the land and improvements, surrender them to the blacks and leave the island, or will they remain? If they must be expected to remain, what is to be the relation of the two races? The blacks must do the hard work, or it will not be done. Shall it be the enforced labor of slavery, or shall the experiment of free labor be tried? Will the government try the experiment, and if so, on what terms and in what manner? If something is not done by the government, slavery will continue; for a successful insurrection of slaves in Cuba is impossible, and manumissions do not gain upon the births and importations.
MATERIAL RESOURCES AND EDUCATION
Cuba contains more good harbors than does any part of the United States south of Norfolk. Its soil is very rich, and there are no large wastes of sand, either by the sea or in the interior. The coral rocks bound the sea, and the gra.s.s and trees come down to the coral rocks. The surface of the country is diversified by mountains, hills and undulating lands, and is very well wooded, and tolerably well watered. It is interesting and picturesque to the eye, and abounds in flowers, trees of all varieties, and birds of rich plumage, though not of rich notes. It has mines of copper, and probably of iron, and is not cursed with gold or silver ore. There is no anthracite, but probably a large amount of a very soft, bituminous coal, which can be used for manufactures. It has also marble, and other kinds of stone; and the hard woods, as mahogany, cedar, ebony, iron-wood, lignum vitae, &c., are in abundance. Mineral salt is to be found, and probably in sufficient quant.i.ties for the use of the island. It is the boast of the Cubans that the island has no wild beasts or venomous reptiles. This has been so often repeated by tourists and historians that I suppose it must be admitted to be true, with the qualification that they have the scorpion, and tarantula, and nigua; but they say that the bite of the scorpion and tarantula, though painful, is not dangerous to life. The nigua, (sometimes called chigua, and by the English corrupted into jigger,) is troublesome. With these exceptions, the claim to freedom from wild or venomous animals may be admitted.