Part 12 (2/2)
Here, too, men had been chained to iron rings at intervals along either side. With our lighted candle end, we scanned the ma.s.sive 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.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE ENTRANCE TO LA CABAnA]
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 Cabana 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 pa.s.sage 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 c.u.mbrous 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 pa.s.sage 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 Cabana 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 pa.s.sengers, 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 Cabana, set us ash.o.r.e 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 Cabana 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 ma.s.sive 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sage 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 gra.s.s before us, so luxuriant, has been drenched with the n.o.blest 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.
[Ill.u.s.tration: WHERE PATRIOTS WERE SHOT--LA CABAnA]
A great garrison of regular troops was always kept in military readiness in La Cabana; now a single company of Cuban infantry occupies the fortress. Cuba free and fifty Cuban soldiers in La Cabana; 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 Cabana, 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 Cabana, 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 Cabana, 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 G.o.d had guided the hearts and thews of my countrymen in rendering forever impossible the continuance of these iniquities.
From La Cabana we wandered across a stretch of gra.s.sy 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 sh.o.r.e of Havana Bay. Above it, as above La Cabana, floats the starry flag. Within it resides a st.u.r.dy, 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.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE WRECK OF THE MAINE]
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. _Senor_ 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 gla.s.sless 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 Ma.s.so, the candidate of the Ma.s.soista 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 Ma.s.soistas 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 a.s.sembled mult.i.tude filled the air with shouts of ”_Bravo! Viva Ma.s.so!_” With him was Senor Hernandez, candidate for the Vice-presidency of the Ma.s.soista Party, who had also stood on a pile of boxes and stirred the excited mult.i.tude with eloquence even more intemperate. And there was also _Senor_ 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 Ma.s.soistas, 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 Const.i.tutional 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 Ma.s.soistas 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 role 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 mult.i.tude to bid them good-bye, and Ma.s.so ”G.o.d 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, Ma.s.so, 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.
[Ill.u.s.tration: A SPANISH PARK--MATANZAS]
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