Cuba in War Time | Page 4

are forts
there are pacificos.
In a word, the situation in Cuba is something like this: The Spaniards
hold the towns, from which their troops daily make predatory raids,
invariably returning in time for dinner at night. Around each town is a
circle of pacificos doing no work, and for the most part starving and
diseased, and outside, in the plains and mountains, are the insurgents.
No one knows just where any one band of them is to-day or where it
may be to-morrow. Sometimes they come up to the very walls of the
fort, lasso a bunch of cattle and ride off again, and the next morning
their presence may be detected ten miles away, where they are setting

fire to a cane field or a sugar plantation.
[Illustration: Guerrillas With Captured Pacíficos]
This is the situation, so far as the inhabitants are concerned. The
physical appearance of the country since the war began has changed
greatly. In the days of peace Cuba was one of the most beautiful islands
in the tropics, perhaps in the world. Its skies hang low and are
brilliantly beautiful, with great expanses of blue, and in the early
morning and before sunset, they are lighted with wonderful clouds of
pink and saffron, as brilliant and as unreal as the fairy's grotto in a
pantomime. There are great wind-swept prairies of high grass or tall
sugar cane, and on the sea coast mountains of a light green, like the
green of corroded copper, changing to a darker shade near the base,
where they are covered with forests of palms.
Throughout the extent of the island run many little streams, sometimes
between high banks of rock, covered with moss and magnificent fern,
with great pools of clear, deep water at the base of high waterfalls, and
in those places where the stream cuts its way through the level plains
double rows of the royal palm mark its course. The royal palm is the
characteristic feature of the landscape in Cuba. It is the most beautiful
of all palms, and possibly the most beautiful of all trees. The cocoanut
palm, as one sees it in Egypt, picturesque as it is, has a pathetic
resemblance to a shabby feather duster, and its trunk bends and twists
as though it had not the strength to push its way through the air, and to
hold itself erect. But the royal palm shoots up boldly from the earth
with the grace and symmetry of a marble pillar or the white mast of a
great ship. Its trunk swells in the centre and grows smaller again at the
top, where it is hidden by great bunches of green plumes, like
monstrous ostrich feathers that wave and bow and bend in the breeze as
do the plumes on the head of a beautiful woman. Standing isolated in
an open plain or in ranks in a forest of palms, this tree is always
beautiful, noble and full of meaning. It makes you forget the ugly iron
chimneys of the centrals, and it is the first and the last feature that
appeals to the visitor in Cuba.
But since the revolution came to Cuba the beauty of the landscape is

blotted with the grim and pitiable signs of war. The sugar cane has
turned to a dirty brown where the fire has passed through it, the
centrals are black ruins, and the adobe houses and the railroad stations
are roofless, and their broken windows stare pathetically at you like
blind eyes. War cannot alter the sunshine, but the smoke from the
burning huts and the blazing corn fields seems all the more sad and
terrible when it rises into such an atmosphere, and against so soft and
beautiful a sky.
People frequently ask how far the destruction of property in Cuba is
apparent. It is so far apparent that the smoke of burning buildings is
seldom absent from the landscape. If you stand on an elevation it is
possible to see from ten to twenty blazing houses, and the smoke from
the cane fields creeping across the plain or rising slowly to meet the
sky. Sometimes the train passes for hours through burning districts, and
the heat from the fields along the track is so intense that it is impossible
to keep the windows up, and whenever the door is opened sparks and
cinders sweep into the car. One morning, just this side of Jovellanos, all
the sugar cane on the right side of the track was wrapped in white
smoke for miles so that nothing could be distinguished from that side of
the car, and we seemed to be moving through the white steam of a
Russian bath.
The Spaniards are no more to blame for this than are the insurgents;
each destroy property and